As advocates push for new Farm Bill, local experts not sure it’s ready

As advocates push Congress to pass an updated Farm Bill early next year, local experts aren’t certain the new law is even close to entering the floor for discussion.

Already, Congress has had to extend the existing Farm Bill, passed in 2018 under Former President Donald Trump, for an additional year. Now, grassroots organizations and governmental bodies have called for new legislation — and for it to be done quickly.

“Congress passing an extension of the Farm Bill will ensures that the Department of Agriculture can continue to implement existing programs, keeping important benefits flowing to farmers and forest landowners to improve habitat, access, and soil and water quality on private lands,” the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Farm and Forest Carbon Solutions Task Force and Food and Nutrition Security Task Force collective stated in a news release. “It also enables the administration of critical nutrition programs that help feed low-income Americans.

Co-chairs, respectively, include former U.S. Senators Heidi Heitkamp and Saxby Chambliss and former U.S. Secretaries of Agriculture Dan Glickman and Anne Veneman.

Darren Hudson, professor and Larry Combest Endowed Chair of Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech, expressed skepticism about the bill being ready by May as the nation approaches a new election cycle.

“Well, you never say never, right?” said Hudson, pointing out that serious discussions about the Farm Bill didn’t even begin until September, after the existing Farm Bill had already expired. “We don’t ever know what will happen.”

The Farm Bill, he said, consists of far more than agriculture and food — but dips into nearly every sector in the nation, including supplemental food assistance. For the most part, Hudson said he believes the new bill will look much the last but could have some modifications.

In 2018, Congress added more than 300 amendments, ranging from the prohibition of the “slaughter of dogs and cats for human consumption” and providing “additional assistance under the non-insured crop assistance program for certain producers” to ensuring the “Secretary of Agriculture enforces certain Buy American requirements with respect to fish harvested within United States waters” and improving the Rural Energy for America program.

“There’s really just not a lot of impetus to change things,” Hudson said. “We learn our lessons sometimes, but I think majority people don’t really have an issue with this bill.”

Earlier this year, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, hosted a roundtable with more than a dozen agriculture experts and industry stakeholders, discussing some of the priorities they’d expect to see on the upcoming legislation.

At that time, he underscored the pressing need for an updated bill, especially in Texas, which leads the nation in terms of both acreage and quantity of farmland and ranches but has unique requirements that differ from other regions across the nation.

Already, he had identified a range of priorities for Texans, including crop insurance, initiatives to eradicate feral swine and cattle fever ticks, the establishment of an animal disease bank, and the improvement of rural broadband and school nutrition programs.

“It’s Farm Bill time,” he told the audience on the FiberMax Discovery Center on July 18. “And it seems like, as long as I’ve been in the Senate, it’s either time to do a farm bill, or it’s time to think and plan for the next farm bill. It never seems to ever see an end.”

Like Cornyn, Hudson told the A-J he believes the current Farm Bill lacks a strong emphasis on hyperlocal experiences.

But a positive development in recent years, he said, has been the inclusion of opt-in programs that empower farmers to join incentives and assistance from the program that aligns best with their needs.

“Traditionally, the battles have always been between commodity groups. So, the cotton people were fighting the corn people,” Hudson said. “But all of a sudden, in the last couple of farm bills, it’s been geographic regions — and it’s the Midwest fighting the South, because there’s different needs for each region. But I think Congress did a good job of recognizing that in the last couple farm bills by creating the Agriculture Risk (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs. They’re not necessarily geographic-based, but they are geographic-specific enough that most people accepted that they were never going to get a perfect program but would accept something that works reasonably well for them.”

A complicated history

For several decades, the Farm Bill passed with relatively few feuds and woes.

In recent years, it’s become increasingly divisive, Hudson said, and he believes that political turmoil is the driving factor for the haste in pushing a new bill.

“The push to try to get it done is to try to avoid the election cycle,” Hudson said. “Because if they if they wait until the summer, it’s toast. Nobody’s gonna touch anything. Everybody is in full-on campaign mode; they don’t want to mess with it, and they certainly don’t want anything that can be used against them.”

According to Hudson, the Farm Bill was not always a controversial bill. In its earliest years, it was a two-day discussion and would often pass by a landslide.

That changed in the early 2000s when former President George W. Bush vetoed the updated legislation in 2002 and 2008.

“For a year and a half, I have consistently asked that the Congress pass a good farm bill that I can sign,” Bush wrote in a message to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008. “Regrettably, the Congress has failed to do so. At a time of high food prices and record farm income, this bill lacks program reform and fiscal discipline. It continues subsidies for the wealthy and increases farm bill spending by more than $20 billion, while using budget gimmicks to hide much of the increase. It is inconsistent with our objectives in international trade negotiations, which include securing greater market access for American farmers and ranchers. It would needlessly expand the size and scope of government. Americans sent us to Washington to achieve results and be good stewards of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars. This bill violates that fundamental commitment.”

Hudson pointed out that the shift in the Farm Bill’s politicization is likely because it now incorporates a multitude of facets that were not of concern, such as the dwindling water supply of the Ogallala Aquifer, or were nonexistent, such as WIC and SNAP programs, when the legislation was first introduced in the 1940s.

Now, the bill functions as the cornerstone for many of the nation’s programs and political ideologies, Hudson said.

“I think that’s really the concern is just trying to avoid getting deep into an election cycle, and then having to pass something that is potentially controversial,” Hudson said. “It shouldn’t be, but it’s potentially controversial, especially with sort of the very extremes of both political parties.”

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: As advocates push for new Farm Bill, local experts not sure it’s ready