Page 35 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

There appear to be no readily available sources of “new “money to fill the demands. That means
that funding the new farm bill could require trimming some existing programs – in other
words, robbing the proverbial Peter to pay Paul.

That’s a risky strategy that could intensify infighting among regions and commodities at a time
when the House and Senate Agriculture committees already face increased pressure from
conservative think tanks and the Freedom Caucus to cut spending. Urban Democrats may see
little reason to help.

“I don’t know where this goes. There’s
just no money there,” says Bob Young,
chief economist for the American Farm
Bureau Federation. “I don’t see this
Congress, this administration being
willing to say OK, let’s throw another
whatever at you.”

But then again, we have a new president,
a new Congress and a drastically different
farm economy compared to when the last
farm bill was written.
Past farm bill debates demonstrate AFBF Economist Bob Young
that politics and the state of the farm
economy will figure prominently in the approach that the Trump administration and
Republican-controlled Congress take toward any new farm bill.

For example, President George W. Bush signed the 2002 farm bill, which dramatically increased
farm bill spending in the wake of a devastating drop in commodity prices in the late 1990s.

The extra spending did nothing to hurt Republicans politically: The GOP won control of the
Senate in the fall of 2002.

President Reagan wasn’t above supporting increased farm spending, either, when the political
pressure outweighed his desire to downsize government.

With the farm economy reeling in the early 1980s, USDA spent $10 billion coaxing farmers to
take more than 15 million acres of cropland out of production through a payment-in-kind (PIK)
program.

Two years later, Reagan’s Secretary of Agriculture, John Block, lobbied for another land-idling
program to help boost prices. Block described the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) as an
“agricultural recovery program to put this industry back in the business of prosperity in the years
to come.”

CRP enrollment, aimed at retiring “highly erodible” lands for a decade or more, jumped from
under 5 million acres in 1986 to over 30 million acres in 1990, costing taxpayers billions of
dollars in an effort to boost farm income.

So there’s a strong precedent for asking for federal assistance when needed.
www.Agri-Pulse.com 33