WASHINGTON, DC, October 18, 2007 (ENS) - The latest version of the Farm Bill is coming out of the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee and Chairman Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa says he is happy with it and thinks farmers will be pleased, too.

The legislation has taken many months to write and will support ethanol production, wind energy and an increasing independence from foreign oil, Harkin said.

It will provide $1.3 billion dollars over the next five years for investments in farm-based energy. It will offer resources for grants and loans for cellulosic bio-refineries.

"We'll have a forward-looking bill with critical new investments for the future of energy, conservation, nutrition, rural development and promoting better diets and health for all Americans," Harkin told Radio Iowa Thursday.

"America's farmers will have important new opportunities and reforms to create a better safety net, as well as support for programs that will help beginning farmers and those who wish to transition into organic farming," he said.

Harkin says the bill will be in the "mark-up" phase next week for fine-tuning and should go to the floor of the Senate the following week.

Meanwhile, Harkin and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a Democratic presidential hopeful, have introduced a bill to immediately update the Renewable Fuels Standard, RFS.

The new legislation would require the production of 18 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2016 including three billion gallons of advanced biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol.

The legislation will implement the RFS requirements that were included in the energy bill passed by the Senate in June. But negotiations between Senate and House on competing energy bills have stalled, and the new RFS has yet to take effect.

The Renewable Fuel Standard mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 took effect on September 1, 2007. Under this older version of the RFS, the volume of renewable fuel that must be blended into gasoline will reach 7.5 billion gallons by 2012.

Obama and Harkin's bill updates these renewable fuel requirements in an attempt to provide market certainty to small, local, and farmer-owned ethanol producers.

Despite a boom in production of ethanol by small plants across the country, most consumers around the country have been unable to fill up their cars and trucks with E85 gasoline because of "problems in the distribution of ethanol and obstacles to greater ethanol distribution by oil companies," the senators said, noting that the average spot market price for ethanol has dropped 30 percent over the past six months.

Without the market stability provided by an increased RFS, many small ethanol plants would face increasing financial danger that could cause them to fail.

This would not only jeopardize an important bridge to the next-generation of cellulosic fuels, but also hurt farmers, small ethanol producers, and the rural economy as a whole, the two senators said.

"Those family farmers and local ethanol producers have set an example for how to embrace new technologies to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, and they've in turn strengthened the rural economy," Senator Obama said.

"I've listened to local producers and heard first-hand how the dive in ethanol prices is having real, day to day effects on their livelihood," said Obama. "We need to ensure that Washington is giving them a fair shot to compete against the big oil companies that have dominated this industry, kept us dependent on foreign oil, and compromised our environment."

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2007. All rights reserved.