04/28/08 Maybe a farm bill this week

Farm and Ranch April 28, 2008 President Bush has agreed to another one week extension of the old farm bill until this Friday May 2nd. Late last week there were reports House-Senate leaders agreed to provide an extra ten billion dollars in funding from customs user fees. Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln confirmed the report and expressed optimism about getting a farm bill this week. Lincoln: "And some of the policy things we have come to agreement on. There are some outstanding that we will have to thrash. But I think all of us feel confident we can get there on some of those issues we have some disagreement on." National Association of Farm Broadcasting News Service Washington Correspondent Stewart Doan has been told there are still a lot of pieces of the funding framework still in play - some sources report that funding for the nutrition title could jump from 9.5-billion dollars to 10.3-billion - and additional cuts could be made in the commodity programs and the permanent disaster program. Some lawmakers indicated cuts to direct payments are still on the table as negotiators work to trim 730 million dollars from farm programs to reduce the size of the tax offsets needed to underwrite the whole bill. A controversial tax credit package has supposedly been pared down from 2.5 billion dollars to about 1.9 billion. Whether all this would get the President's signature is not clear. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.