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I recently had the pleasure of spending a day with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson as we toured rural Iowa seeing first-hand the ways farmers are helping protect our nation’s air and water resources.

Speaking before a capacity crowd this morning at the USDA Agricultural Outlook Forum, a distinguished panel representing three federal agencies and a member of the agricultural media discussed Federal renewable energy policy and its prospects to reduce consumption of imported oil, improve environmental quality and produce new jobs in rural America.

“YES! YES! YES!”

Larry Bagby was giddy as he lifted his 69-year old frame into an exuberant leap and repeated those words. Those words, he explained, were his initial response a few years ago when asked if he would support a neighborhood effort to hook up to a real wastewater system.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently awarded $40 million in Sustainable Community Challenge Grants to help support local planning designed to integrate affordable housing, good jobs and public transportation.  These grants are designed to foster reform and reduce barriers to achieving affordable, economically vital and sustainable communities. The funds will be used by communities, large and small, to address local challenges to integrating transportation and housing.

On November 3, 2010 a Biofuels Round Table Forum was held at El Yunque National Rain Forest Park in the municipality of Río Grande, Puerto Rico.

Cross-posted from the White House blog.

Our country needs a strong, vibrant rural economy.  Advanced biofuel production will help create it. Not only will biofuel production from non-food sources create new jobs and new streams of farm income, it will improve environmental quality and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel imported from foreign countries.

Three family farms in California’s Stemple Creek Watershed recently received much-needed conservation assistance from the Natural Resources Conservation Service through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act).

After visiting a cutting-edge biofuels facility in rural Iowa recently, a group of USDA Rural Development state directors are thinking about the tremendous global implications of that plant.

There is an excitement at USDA with respect to bioenergy and biofuels and much is going on – a BIOFRENZY if you will – not in a sense of chaos – but rather many challenges and much to do.  The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) provisions of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will be implemented July 1, 2010. The RFS2 calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels to be used in the US transportation fuel supply by 2022 - and the majority of this total must be advanced biofuels.

For more than two years the Yerington Paiute Tribe has been unable to drink the water from its taps due to arsenic and uranium contamination.  Furthermore, the tribe and its lessee, Rite of Passage training academy, were under pressure from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for being out of compliance with the Clean Water Act, and substantial fines were looming.