crop insurance

The Senate farm bill will clamp down on payments to so-called managers who live in town and exercise little control over farm operations, announced the leaders of the Agriculture Committee on Wednesday. Still to be resolved was a proposal to make the wealthiest farmers pay more for federally subsidized crop insurance.

Although Congress is weeks or even months away from sending the 2018 farm bill to President Trump for enactment, the end of the road is near for reformers, whose last chance lies in the Senate. The crop insurance industry, a popular target for fiscal hawks and other critics, is asking senators to vote against "amendments that would do significant harm" to the federally subsidized program during debate that could end with Senate passage of the bill this week.

The leaders of the Senate Agriculture Committee are treading a surprisingly tortuous path to a bipartisan farm bill that would make no major changes in food stamps, farm supports or crop insurance. They are expected to unveil their package this month, a major advance toward enacting a farm bill before the 2014 law expires on Sept. 30.

House Democrats stood solidly against the GOP-written farm bill in a test vote on Wednesday that gave Agriculture Committee chairman Michael Conaway little room to maneuver on the legislation, which would tighten work requirements for food stamps and loosen subsidy rules for farmers.

While ready to move on the farm bill, House Republican leaders are giving Agriculture Committee chairman Michael Conaway time to persuade "a lot of undecideds" to vote for tougher work requirements for SNAP recipients and looser subsidy rules for farmers. A sizable number of Republican lawmakers say Conaway wasn't tough enough on either group and want to tighten the access to federal support.

The Republican-written farm bill awaiting a vote in the House effectively eliminates the USDA’s weak limits on farm subsidy payments, said two economists on Thursday. Separately, two free-market groups said the bill was “rife with corporate welfare” and lacked “badly needed reforms.”

Just as President Trump expressed his campaign through the slogan "Make America Great Again," a bill filed by two members of the House Freedom Caucus can be summarized as "Make the farm bill Trump again." South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman intends to offer the legislation, which would enact crop insurance and farm subsidy reforms espoused by Trump, as an amendment during House debate of the farm bill, which could occur as early as mid-May.

As congressional debate on the next farm bill gathers steam, farmers in Minnesota are calling for changes to the crop insurance program. A new report from the Land Stewardship Project argues that the current version of the program favors bigger farms and places an undue burden on taxpayers.

The largest U.S. farm group and the crop insurance industry say President Trump's proposals to slash crop insurance funding and to deny farm payments to the wealthiest producers will have no lasting impact.

Five weeks after he told the largest U.S. farm group that he supports "a [farm] bill that includes crop insurance," President Trump asked Congress to slash the taxpayer-subsidized program by a third. The $26-billion cut over a decade was part of a fiscal 2019 budget package that called for the eradication of USDA's first green-payment program and for denial of crop subsidies and land stewardship payments to people with more than $500,000 in adjusted gross income.

The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee appealed for additional funding from Congress for cotton and dairy subsidies in the near term, a step that also would make more money available for those programs in the 2018 farm bill.