With farm income in a slump, the National Farmers Union asked Congress for more money for the 2018 farm bill in order to strengthen the farm safety net and offset the slump in commodity prices that began four years ago. Agricultural leaders in Congress aim for early passage of the farm bill, expected to cost around $90 billion a year, but they are off to a slower start than originally suggested.
The board of the NFU, the second-largest U.S. farm group, listed 14 recommendations for the new farm bill in a resolution that says: “Congress must pass a farm bill and necessary supplemental assistance as soon as possible.” The recommendations included “increased and robust” reference prices for Price Loss Coverage subsidies, a strong crop insurance program, “meaningful mechanisms to address over-supply of gain and dairy, a large Conservation Reserve that pays owners to idle fragile land, and a strong safety net against hunger.
“American farmers are not only suffering from price pressure that has reduced net farm income by half over the last four years, but devastating wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters continue to punish agricultural communities,” said the NFU resolution.
The largest farm group, the American Farm Bureau Federation, put a slightly different emphasis on farm policy at its annual meeting early this month. Its delegates voiced support for the Harvest Price Option on crop insurance policies, which compensates growers for losses based on the market prices at harvest time if it is higher than the price guaranteed when coverage was purchased in the spring. The lion’s share of revenue insurance polices include the option and it is the major farm-bill target of reformers and fiscal hawks.
Both groups say cotton needs a better support program and both say the insurance-like Agriculture Risk Coverage subsidy should be tweaked so it works better. The chief complaint from farm country is that ARC payment rates vary widely between counties without a clear reason.
Meanwhile, 170 wildlife, conservation, farm and landowner groups sent a letter to the House and Senate Agriculture committees in support of a nationwide “sod saver” provision for the farm bill to protect virgin grasslands. It would require farmers to pay sharply higher crop insurance premiums for cropland converted from native sod and would treat the new cropland separately when assigning likely yields. The letter says converted grasslands are likely to be lower-yielding than established cropland and may be subject to erosion or flooding. The 2014 farm law has a sod saver provision that applies to six states in the prairie pothold region of the northern Plains.
The National Wildlife Federation said the sod saver proposal would “protect essential habitat for monarch butterflies, ducks, pheasants, raptors, songbirds, and pollinators.”
To read the letter on sod saver, click here.