Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) says that the farm bill concepts the American Farm Bureau Federation supports are compatible with the committee’s current farm policy priorities and the fiscal challenges lawmakers face as they work on writing a new farm bill this year. Stabenow says that farm policy needs to head in the direction of prioritizing crop insurance and other risk management tools over fixed direct payments.
“The recent proposals from groups like the American Farm Bureau are largely focused on the same priorities as they’ve developed a plan that ends the direct payment program and replaces it with a county-based revenue protection plan,” Stabenow said in a recent question-and-answer exchange with FarmPolicy.com. “We will continue to look at the Farm Bureau proposal along with the other plans from commodity groups and the members of the committee.”
In other farm bill news, AFBF and dozens of other agricultural, environmental and rural associations today wrote House and Senate Agriculture Committee leaders that Congress needs to pass a farm bill this year, rather than pass an extension of current law. A temporary extension would create uncertainty, the groups said, while a new farm bill will provide farmers an effective safety net.
In addition, Dale Moore, AFBF deputy executive director of public policy, provided analysis of Farm Bureau’s farm bill proposal on last Thursday’s Agriculture Today—Red River Farm Network radio program. He said the proposal is designed to cover catastrophic losses, as opposed to other groups’ shallow-loss proposals.
“It’s based around a county-average-loss approach and it covers those deep losses at like a 75 percent loss level,” Moore explained. “Make no mistake, our concept is also critically tied to crop insurance and we think that this kind of approach will also allow producers to tailor individual crop insurance programs around this deep-loss program that the government provides.”
Agriculture Today radio report for Thursday, Feb. 9 (farm bill story begins at 7:13 min.)
