Page 91 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

Just one day before the Senate Agriculture Committee held a hearing on farm bill conservation
issues in February 2012, EWG released a new paper to make the case for linking crop insurance
benefits to conservation cross-compliance and updating farmers’ conservation plans.

EWG was not alone. Senate Agriculture Committee leaders knew that
attacks on crop insurance could come from several different sources,
including conservative groups who wanted to dismantle the farm bill and
nutrition advocates who were upset about cuts that were made in the
SNAP program. (For a list of amendments offered to what became the
2014 farm bill, see below.) “Insurance programs have quietly turned into
the most expensive and far-reaching subsidy today,” Craig Cox, EWG’s
senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources, told Agri-Pulse.
At the same time, “we are concerned that the conservation compact is
eroding.”

During the Senate farm bill debate in 2012, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., offered an amendment
to re-establish the link between conservation compliance and crop insurance. It was widely
viewed as a way to push back against Pat Roberts, now a senator, for voting against Southern
interests on their desired commodity policies. The amendment narrowly passed the Senate by a
vote of 52 in favor and 47 opposed.

In the Senate, there was already strong support for “means testing” on crop insurance subsidies.
Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., partnered on an amendment that would
reduce premium support on crop insurance by 15 percent for farmers with an Adjusted Gross
Income (AGI) over $750,000. It passed as an amendment during the first Senate farm bill vote in
June 2012 by a large margin, 66-33.

If this amendment was included in the final farm bill, farm organizations feared that many of
their members would be forced out of crop insurance, making the rates much costlier for the
remaining farmers and ultimately, making the program unsustainable.

Ducks to the rescue?

It didn’t take long for American Farm Bureau
Federation’s Senior Director of Congressional
Relations Mary Kay Thatcher and former
Natural Resources Conservation Chief Bruce
Knight – now a principal at Strategic
Conservation Solutions – to launch a series of
conversations with Dan Wrinn, the director of
public policy for Ducks Unlimited (DU).

To address their goal, DU wanted farm
organizations to support re-linking
conservation compliance requirements to crop
insurance. But that “ask” made some farmer
leaders extremely nervous. They had a mutual goal: maximizing the amount of conservation
taking place on U.S. farmland. Wrinn recognized that market forces were working against

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