Farm Bill Update
Farm Bill Update. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture.
The Agricultural Act of 2014 more commonly known as the Farm Bill has been in effect now for about 6 months and Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack spent some time yesterday with reporters updating us on how the implementation was going.
VILSACK: I want to focus very briefly on ten significant steps that have been taken in this last six months and obviously there's a great deal more work yet to be done. But I'm very proud of the work that has been done by the team at USDA.
Since the Farm Bill was signed into law, USDA has made progress throughout all 12 titles of the 2014 Farm Bill.
VILSACK: Let me start with the Disaster Assistance payments we've made to date. As of close of business on July 31st we had processed and received over 165-thousand disaster assistance applications for which payment was made. $1.85-billion dollars in payments had been paid out by July 31st to those 165-thousand producers. There's still quite a few application that have to be reviewed but we are processing them very, very quickly and it is fairly clear that we will exceed the $2-billion dollar mark in terms of disaster assistance.
He says there has been a lot of interest in the Regional Conservation Partnership Program.
VILSACK: We received 586 initial proposals. We've asked 229 of those proposals to submit more detailed information so that we'd be in a position in September to begin making decisions about which of the Regional Conservation Partnership Program's will receive assistance and resources for 2014-2015.
More tomorrow on the implementation of the 2014 Farm Bill.
That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
