Page 48 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

current fiscal year, but recent market changes mean it will be more expensive than it would
have been last year.

Regardless of what happens this spring, the House
Agriculture Committee chairman has assured
growers their plan will make it into the farm bill.
Conaway’s west Texas districts includes a portion
of the vast cotton-growing region around
Lubbock.

“Whatever I can do in the next two years to
make that happen I’m going to do that. …
Cotton will be the biggest change to the new
farm bill,” he told members of the National
Cotton Council.

Dairy farms. Milk producers say the Margin Protection Program created in the 2014 farm bill to
protect them against spikes in feed prices – like the one that slammed the industry in 2009 –
doesn’t provide the support they need. Most producers have opted for the minimum level of
protection, available for the annual fee of $100, instead of buying up to higher levels of margin
protection.
“We’re really good at producing milk but we need to have certainty in making sure that milk will
be bought and paid a fair price going forward,” said Christopher Noble, co-owner of Noblehurst
Farms in New York.

The problem dairy producers face heading into
the next farm bill is that they have a very small
baseline available because user fees were
designed to cover all or some of the program’s
cost. Expanding the program without raising
user fees will require finding money from other
commodity programs or other areas of the farm
bill.

“The net cost of that program is not zero but it’s
not far from zero. It’s tough to have a program
for an industry that size that only costs” a few
million dollars a year, said FAPRI director Westhoff. “How do you do something that farmers
are going to find exciting if you don’t have any money to spend?

“It’s not obvious to me how you’re going to be able to do a lot for dairy without spending
more taxpayer dollars than you are today.”

Some industry advocates want Congress to expand an insurance program available to dairy
producers, Livestock Gross Margin Insurance Plan for Dairy Cattle (LGM-Dairy). As with crop
insurance, the premiums are subsidized by taxpayers. However, the Federal Crop Insurance Act
limits funding for the program to $20 million a year. Expanding the program would likely

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