House Passes Farm Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a Farm Bill that makes investments in conservation, nutrition and renewable energy, but maintains a strong safety net for farmers and ranchers. The bill also provides substantial funding for the fruit and vegetable industry.

Chairman of the Committee, Rep. Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., said in a press release that this Farm Bill provides strong programs that will help American agriculture meet the 21st Century needs of the United Sates and the world with a safe, stable food supply, nutrition assistance, environmental benefits and renewable energy products.

“We have incorporated some new ideas and important reforms in this Farm Bill, focusing farm program benefits so they get to real farmers,” Peterson said. “This bill also boosts investment in programs that help those who haven’t received benefits through the Farm Bill before.”

The new bill was all the talk at the 2007 Southern Peanut Growers Conference, held in Florida, July 16 through 18.

Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., a 5th generation farmer, expressed his concern with the lack of funds to write the new Farm Bill.

“We spend $3 billion a week in taxpayer’s dollars to execute the War on Terror and this is preventing us from writing a good bill,” Boyd said.

According to Boyd, in 2000 the United States had a surplus and came out in great shape. In 2001 Pres. George W. Bush made his economic plan that included three main goals. The three goals were to cut taxes and pay off the federal debt of $5.6 trillion, set aside money for Social Security and Welfare and write a new farm bill.

“Bush put all that money into the tax cut and now we have a mess,” he said. “We need to find money for specialty crops. There is also a lot of pressure on the energy portion of the Farm Bill with ethanol and biofuels. We need to fix storage and handling on peanuts in the baseline of the Farm Bill for shellers, growers and manufacturers.”

Boyd added that there was a $74 million appropriation for peanut storage and handling fees for growers, and in December 2006 Bush vetoed the appropriations.

“It is a very difficult climb in Washington when the President opposes this appropriation,” he said. “We will keep working and pushing this whole peanut program issue in the Farm Bill. This is not just about rural economics; this is a national security issue. We may soon find ourselves in the same shape as the oil industry.”

Dana Brooks from the Florida Farm Bureau compared this year’s Farm Bill to the 2002 Farm Bill.

According to Brooks, in 2002 there was a budget surplus and there more than $70 billion to write the Farm Bill.

“We took $5 million that year and put it in disaster assistance,” Brooks said. “We had $73 billion over the baseline and the baseline is very important because it determines where we are in programs and what we’re going to get in funds each time.”

Brooks said in 2002 they had more money to spend, and they were able to put a safety net back in place and increase conservation by 80 percent.

“The budget was quickly changing and that’s why we wrote the Farm Bill one year prior to it’s expiration in 2002,” she said. “Everyone saw the momentum and saw the surplus moving to a deficit.”

According to Brooks, ethanol has driven up corn and grain prices, and those commodities haven’t received a lot of the safety net.

“With that, we have about $15 billion in savings in the Farm Bill because of the increase in market prices,” she said. “The safety net is there whenever the market prices are down, so when we lost those payments it brought down the baseline from around $20 billion to about $7 billion for program crops.”

Brooks said there are a lot more people and groups at the table with this Farm Bill. There are also a lot of education programs and about 70 percent of the budget goes into the nutrition programs.

There has been a decrease in the baseline for this Farm Bill and a decrease in the budget from a trillion dollar surplus to a trillion dollar deficit.

“You are not going into this Farm Bill with more money, you’re going into it with less,” Brooks said. “Everybody thinks energy and renewable fuels are a possible answer, but that title in the Farm Bill is just a sliver in the budget. You can increase it ten fold and it’s still not a lot of money.”

According to Brooks, Chairman Peterson has included about $650 million for fruits and vegetables, but it’s about a billion dollars short of what the fruit and vegetable farmers want.

“They are part of a coalition that has blocked the bill and they are still looking for more money to make them happy, but finding a billion dollars right now is like trying to squeeze blood our of a turnip,” she said.

Important highlights of the Farm Bill (H.R. 2419) that was passed in the House Ag Committee includes the following:

• Investing more than $1.6 billion in priorities to strengthen and support the fruit and vegetable industry. A new section of the bill for Horticulture and Organic Agriculture includes nutrition, research, pest management and trade promotion programs.

• Providing farmers participating in commodity programs with a choice between traditional price protection and new market-oriented revenue coverage payments.

• Strengthening payment limits to ensure that people making more than $1 million a year (adjusted gross income) can’t collect conservation and farm program payments and closing loopholes that allow people to avoid payment limits by receiving money through multiple business units.

• Rebalancing loan rates and target prices among commodities, achieving greater regional equity.

• Cutting federal payment rates to crop insurance companies that are making record profits because of higher crop prices.

• Expanding the USDA Snack Program, which helps schools provide healthy snacks to students during after-school activities to all 50 states and continuing the DOD Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, which provides a variety of fresh produce to schools.

• Strengthening and enhancing the food stamp program by reforming benefit rules to improve coverage of food costs and expand access to the program with additional funding support.

• Establishing a new National Agriculture Research Program Office to coordinate programs and activities of USDA’s research agencies to minimize duplication and maximize coordination at all levels.

• Protecting and sustaining our nation’s forest resources.

• Making important new investments in renewable energy research, development and production in rural America.

The committee approved language in the bill that will allow full implementation of Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling for meat. It includes three categories of labeling: one that indicates product was born, raised and slaughtered in the United States; one that indicates that the products was not exclusively born, raise and slaughtered in the United States; and one that includes products entirely from other countries.

Written by Tess Hollis, News and Public Affairs Assistant.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at July 30, 2007 11:37 AM