On a farming kick the last day or so - this time: Soybeans

Nice to see political leverage in its raw state. Hat tip to Coyote Blog for this link to a story about Soybeans and Global Warming.

Soybean growers hold up University of Minnesota funds to protest biofuels paper
Call it a soybean spat. The University of Minnesota isn't going to receive any research funding from the state's soybean growers council until the two parties have a heart-to-heart talk next week.

The Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council voted to temporarily suspend its financial support after a study co-authored by U researchers in the journal Science said increased use of biofuel crops like corn and soybeans could worsen global warming, not lessen it.

The council typically picks up the tab for $1 million to $2 million a year for research on such things as how to increase soybean yields and how to improve marketing, said Jim Palmer, president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association.

The funding relationship has gone on for decades and was good until now, both the growers and the university said.

The study, published Feb. 7 by the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy, an environmental advocacy group, warned that converting prairie or peatland to cropland for corn and soybeans would release more carbon stored in plants and the ground as carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

But the soybean-farmers groups, corn growers and some other scientists say the study made faulty assumptions about the amount of land that would be converted to biofuel crops and used obsolete data, said Rob Hanks, chairman of the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council.

Despite the fact that the University report is biased towards AGW and that CO2 is not a major greenhouse gas (Water vapor is much worse), this is still a blatant case of political leverage by the Soybean Council and it should not have happened. Shame on both parties...