The Biden administration is broadening the U.S. agricultural economy through climate-smart and bioproduct initiatives while Congress is seemingly stymied over the new farm bill, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Monday. He warned against raiding conservation funding to pay for higher reference prices for corn, soybeans, and other row crops, a leading goal of farm groups.
Speaking to National Farmers Union’s annual fall fly-in, Vilsack said “the farm bill is not the only tool available to do the work that needs to be done to support farming across the United States,” despite the intense focus on it. The USDA has dozens of programs, funded through annual appropriations, aimed at various aspects of farm production and marketing, and it has a $30 billion reserve, to bolster commodity production and farm income.
“You don’t have to do everything in one of those boxes,” he said, referring to the farm bill. Vilsack used $3.1 billion from the USDA reserve, known as the Commodity Credit Corp., to launch the climate-smart initiative to mitigate climate change and develop markets for commodities produced using practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and capture carbon.
“The [higher] reference prices help few farmers,” he said but the $20 billion earmarked for USDA land stewardship programs in the 2022 climate, healthcare, and tax law “helps all farmers. You’ve got to ask yourself, do you want a bill that is for the few or for the many and the most?”
An increase in reference prices, which determine when crop subsides are triggered and how large the payments are, would cost $2 billion a year, said Vilsack. Lawmakers would be obliged to find a decade’s worth of offsets — $20 billion — to pay for the change under congressional budget rules because no new money is available for the farm bill.
Vilsack offered one of the first public estimates of the cost of higher reference prices. The CBO projects commodity supports would cost an average $6.2 billion annually over the next 10 years if the 2018 farm law remained in place. Last week, the Environmental Working Group estimated 6,000 farmers, mostly large cotton, rice, and peanut growers in the South, would benefit from higher reference prices.
The House and Senate Agriculture committees would have to employ a multi-step process to bring the $20 billion in conservation funding under farm bill jurisdiction. Such a move would interrupt USDA efforts on climate-smart farming and bioproducts such as sustainable aviation fuel, said Vilsack. “You get to create more value-added streams, more revenue streams. It diversifies income.”