Page 90 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

increase populations. Early support included the Wildlife Management Institute and the
International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

The 1985 farm bill also included
conservation compliance requirements: To
be eligible for commodity payments and
crop insurance premium discounts, farmers
had to comply with “swampbuster”
provisions (designed to discourage cropping
of wetland areas), and “sodbuster” provision
(designed to discourage tilling grasslands
and native prairie) and were given 10 years
to develop conservation planning for any
farming on Highly Erodible Land
(HEL).The CRP was launched in the 1985
farm bill, and by 1986, five million acres
were enrolled in the program which
retired land under long-term (10-15
years) contracts. Enrollment rose to an
all-time high of 36.7 million acres by 2007.

But by the 1996 farm bill, dubbed “Freedom to Farm,” concerns were growing that farm policy
needed to be more market-oriented. Political and budget pressure focused lawmakers on
reducing farm program payments – moving away from historical systems based on target prices
and payments delivered when prices fell below those target levels – to a new system based on
what were supposed to be gradually declining direct payments. These direct payments were paid
regardless of planting or price.
As he was moving to a new form of farm program payments, Kansas Republican Pat Roberts,
then the House Agriculture Committee chairman, also hoped to offer producers more regulatory
relief. He was able to deliver on many fronts, but one was especially well-received by both
producers and the crop insurance industry: the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform
(FAIR) Act of 1996, which removed the link between crop insurance premium subsidies and
conservation compliance requirements.

Fast forward to 2014
As members of Congress started shaping a new farm bill in 2011, it became clear that direct
payments to farmers – which were paid regardless of whether or not a crop was planted – were
no longer politically sustainable.

So what could farm bill critics attack next? After the failure of the “Super Committee” in 2011,
the Environmental Working Group (EWG), started to focus on crop insurance. The group –
which has long published growers’ farm program payments – tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain
information on every growers’ crop insurance subsidy so they could also publish the information.
One of the group’s goals was to limit premium subsidies and trim participation in crop insurance
by capping the adjusted gross income (AGI) level for the nation’s largest growers. They also
pushed to relink crop insurance to cross-compliance provisions.
88 www.Agri-Pulse.com