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June 21, 2012
Senate Passes the Farm Bill
For more information on Newsline, contact: Johnna Miller, Director of Media Development, American Farm Bureau Federation johnnam@fb.org
Many will agree the most important piece of legislation concerning farmers, ranchers and our food supply is the farm bill. One side of Congress has done their part. Now the question is whether the other side will do the same before that bill expires later this fall. American Farm Bureau Farm Policy Specialist Mary Kay Thatcher spells out the situation in this report from AFBF’s Johnna Miller.
| Miller: | Many thought the odds were against it, but the farm bill has made it over a major hurdle. Senators approved their version of the bill in a strong bipartisan vote of 64 to 35. |
| Thatcher: | We are really pleased that the Senate passed the farm bill this week. It’s been a long time coming. It’s something we’ve been working on for a good year and a half and we passed it today with a really good margin. |
| Miller: | American Farm Bureau Farm Policy Specialist Mary Kay Thatcher says the five-year, $500 billion legislation is a big change from farm bills of the past. |
| Thatcher: | This is a real reform farm bill. You’re talking about for the first time in many, many years actually reducing funding in the farm bill. We cut $23 billion out. We’re probably the only committee in Congress that has really gone in and done something about the deficit reduction while they’ve been reauthorizing a program. We also cut out a hundred programs out of the farm bill, things that weren’t very cost effective or hadn’t been used in a good number of years. And then certainly when you think of the commodity title, we made some major changes by eliminating direct payments, the target prices, the ACRE program, the disaster program. The focus now is far more on crop insurance as the safety net than it is the commodity programs. |
| Miller: | But the farm bill still has to get through the House of Representatives and get a signature from the president before the bill expires in October. If that doesn’t happen, more than farmers and ranchers will feel the repercussions. |
| Thatcher: | It’s important to know that when you talk about a bill that’s going to cost almost a trillion dollars over the next 10 years that 80 percent of that funding is in the nutrition programs, primarily food stamps. Only 20 percent is things like crop insurance, commodity programs, conservation, rural development, livestock, research, those kinds of things. So the vast majority of this spending is nutrition programs, but it’s a great partnership that we have in agriculture with the conservation community, the environmental community and the nutrition community for us all to come up with programs that are good for our sectors. |
| Miller: | Now they just need the House of Representatives to handle their part of the job, which has now been delayed until mid-July and October is creeping up fast. Johnna Miller, Washington. |
| Miller: | We have two extra actualities with AFBF Farm Policy Specialist Mary Kay Thatcher. In the first extra actuality she explains why farmers and ranchers need a safety net. The cut runs 33 seconds, in 3-2-1. |
| Thatcher: | Farmers are really at the whim of weather, of pests, of what’s happening elsewhere in the world and we need to make sure that our farmers have a safety net so that the bankers will indeed lend to them, so that hey can go out and use the marketplace. When you look at the facts and figures, we are way less than average in how we support our farmers versus how the rest of the developed world does. So if we don’t provide them some kind of safety net, we’re really putting our farmers out there and saying you compete not only against the guy down the road, in another state, across the ocean, but you compete against their government, too. |
| Miller: | In the second extra actuality Thatcher explains why the farm bill is running out of time.The cut runs 32 seconds, in 3-2-1. |
| Thatcher: | We thought that the House ag committee was going to mark up the bill next week and they decided just in the last few days to postpone that until the middle of July. We’re disappointed with that. There isn’t a lot of time once you get to mid-July to have House ag committee action. They go out for the whole month of August for recess. They won’t be back until mid-September because of the Democratic convention coming up after Labor Day and by the first of October we’re going to have lots of members who want to go home and campaign. So the number of days that we have left to have a bill considered on the House floor are pretty few and far between. |
| Miller: | Newsline is updated Mondays and Thursdays by 5pm Eastern time. Thank you for listening. |