Wall Street rules intended for publicly-traded companies shouldn’t extend to family farms.
That’s the message from the American Farm Bureau and six other agricultural groups to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC proposed a rule to require public companies to report on Scope 3 emissions, which are the result of activities not owned or controlled by a publicly-traded company but contribute to its value chain.
Public companies that produce goods from agricultural products would need to report emissions from the relevant agricultural operations. The farm groups’ concern is that the rule will burden family farmers and ranchers and drive further consolidation in agriculture, all for no real environmental benefit.
“The tracking will be extremely expensive, invasive, and burdensome for farmers and ranchers, at the cost of improved production practices that will generate actual environmental gains,” the groups say in the letter to the SEC. “Family farms will get hit hardest.”