Page 54 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

By Sara Wyant

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26, 2017 – When Sen. Debbie Stabenow sat at the helm of the Senate
Committee on Agriculture for the first time in 2011, there was a row of seats filled by ranking
member Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and other Republican senators on her left. Democrats lined up in
chairs on the right. Staff filled in all along the back walls of the relatively small, but cozy
committee room on the third floor of the Russell building.

When it came time to write a new commodity
title for the farm bill, her view could have been
described much differently. She was looking at
senators from three distinctly different regions:
the South, the Midwest, and the upper Great
Plains. Each had their own ideas about what
farmers in their respective states wanted for risk
management.

For example, in Kansas, farmers told Roberts
about the importance of protecting and enhancing crop insurance.

“If priorities must be declared, then a strong and viable crop insurance program will top our list,”
noted Kansas Farm Bureau President Steve Baccus in testimony at the 2011 farm bill field
hearing in Wichita. “Viable risk management tolls have become the most dependable resource
producers can access to ensure a revenue stream and minimize the inherent risk that weather
injects into a farming operation.”

It was a theme repeated often as other commodity group leaders testified.

“The thing you would be most concerned about losing would be crop insurance – is that a fair
statement? Anybody disagree with that?” Stabenow asked during the hearing.

No one disagreed and, frankly, no one was surprised.

Growers of over 100 different types of crops had increasingly purchased crop insurance as a risk
management tool – aided in part by an average 60 percent premium discount provided by the
federal government. Acreage insured climbed dramatically, from 99.6 million acres in 1994 to
over 246 million acres by 2011.

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