GND policies destroy businesses- afraid of agriculture and manufacturing job loss

One of the hardest hit industries certainly would be agriculture and agriculture-related industries, which in 2017 employed 435,000 Wisconsinites, or 11.8 percent of employed people in the state. Using metrics devised by environmentalists, farmers would be liable for $230 per metric ton of carbon dioxide released. In other words, this carbon tax would cost Wisconsin farmers $2,000 per cow. Yikes!  The average-size dairy farm in Wisconsin has 150 cows, which would result in a $300,000 annual tax to those farmers. Wisconsin also is home to large dairy farms, known as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), which are made up of 700 cows or more. For a CAFO of 700 cows, the tax would amount to $1.4 million per year. Even mass production facilities don’t have the type of margins it would take to swallow a tax that big. As for crop farming, WILL looked at corn and soybean production in Wisconsin, since those are two of the biggest crops in the state. Crop farmers will be hard hit by a move toward organic farming methods the Green New Deal would require. According to our study, because organic farming methods don’t use herbicides or pesticides and don’t genetically modify crops, the net crop yields would be greatly reduced. For example, Dutch researchers found that organic crop yields are, on average, about 11 percent less than crop yields from conventional farming methods. Applying that rate to Wisconsin soybean and corn crop yields alone would result in more than $200 million in annual losses for the industry. The Green New Deal also would hurt manufacturing in Wisconsin. According to Scott Manley, executive vice president of government relations at Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, “Manufacturing is the number one sector of the Wisconsin economy. The Green New Deal would absolutely threaten the affordability and reliability of energy, and therefore the long-term success and viability of manufacturing and manufacturing jobs. From a macroeconomic level, it’s fundamentally a policy that will kill jobs and inflict significant harm and economic pain on middle-class families.”