The next farm bill, “an unwieldy pile of programs,” could be the vehicle to improve the Farm Belt’s response to climate change while exercising restraint in commodity subsidies, said an American Enterprise Institute publication on Monday. In essays modeled on Christmas wish lists, seven agricultural economists expressed hopes ranging from more money for agricultural research to splitting the farm bill in two.
Lawmakers were stymied at enacting a farm bill this year so they extended the life of the 2018 farm law by one year, to next Sept. 30. Leaders of the Senate and House Agriculture committees were at odds over suggestions to put more money into commodity supports by taking it out of a windfall $20 billion given to USDA conservation programs for climate mitigation.
USDA’s land stewardship programs “are arguably the main instruments used to address agriculture’s contributions to environmental problems,” such as air and water pollution, said Erik Lichtenberg of the University of Maryland. He suggested a reorientation of the programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve water quality. For example, the cost-sharing Environmental Quality Incentive Program should operate as a nationwide, competitive-entry program, akin to the Conservation Reserve, instead of its current formula of dividing money state by state and requiring half of the money to be spent on livestock projects. That way, EQIP funds could be directed to environmental improvements, including climate mitigation.
Lichtenberg also suggested giving more weight to climate mitigation and water quality when deciding which tracts would be admitted to the Conservation Reserve, which takes marginal land out of crop production. The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program would be limited to wetlands preservation and restoration under Lichtenberg’s outline.
“The farm bill is an unwieldy pile of programs with little connection to one another that are cobbled together in a single piece of legislation for no good reason,” wrote Dan Sumner of UC-Davis, who said public nutrition and agricultural supports should be separate pieces of legislation. Nutrition programs such as SNAP have little connection to crop prices or farm income “except for the tenuous claim that without the political link…farm subsidies would fade away, and that would be bad for farms.”
Congress should reject farm group calls for higher reference prices, which would make it easier to trigger commodity subsidy payments, said Barry Goodwin of North Carolina State University and Eric Belasco of Montana State University. “I wish the farm lobby would reach some satiation point when it comes to program payments and giveaways,” wrote Goodwin. “We continue to see calls for increases to reference prices even though farm revenues are at record levels.” Said Belasco, “While input costs have undoubtedly gone up, net cash farm incomes also have been well above average or at near-record levels.”
“The single highest policy priority today for all things food and agriculture related is to sustainably boost healthy food productivity growth,” said Christopher Barrett of Cornell University, who called for larger, and re-targeted, funding for agricultural research. State and federal funding for ag research and development “has fallen by one-third in 20 years and remains trapped in turn-of-the-millennium designs.”