12/15/08 Taking A Look At The Farm Bill

Taking A Look At the Farm Bill. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Jim Fitzgerald is the new Executive Director of Far West Agribusiness Association. Most recently as Chief of Staff for the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Development in Washington, D.C., Fitzgerald was at ground zero as the new farm bill was taking shape. A lot of talk has been thrown around about how that bill is being instituted and in a lot of cases whether there will actually be enough dollars to fund some of the programs. FITZGERALD: That is a great question and I think the Devil is in the details so to speak. I know that, for instance in this particular area price support, direct payments; that's important. National training just took place probably within the last 30 days or so and people quite frankly understand the basics of the program but until the farmers can take a look at those specifics to their farm, in other words their yields and start to plug in the variables that's when they will rally determine whether to go with ACRE or what option and how it's changed, the entity rule and how all this stuff plays out. Once thing is for certain, as with all bureaucracy, there are many layers to the various programs. FITZGERALD: It's complicated. There's no question about it. There are a lot of considerations in it. I think the Farm Service Agency is just now started to have grower meetings and explain this. And until you can plug in the particulars, it's a learning curve. Specialty crops were included for the first time in this bill but Fitzgerald sees it as a double edged sword. FITZGERALD: I think it was wise that they wanted to be included. It's interesting though as you broaden the audience and you have budget concerns the pieces of the pie get that much smaller. I think most producers whether its vegetable producers, cereal grain producers, they're producers because they want to produce in simple terms. They want to farm for the market. And of course us in the fertilizer business, that's what we've always been poised to do. To maximize yields and to reduce weed competitions through the responsible use of pesticides and herbicides Eventually the details will be worked out and the programs will be in place and he says that is a good thing. FITZGERALD: It's too important, too vital, to the United States citizens to not have some sort of safety net in place. Nobody really wants to rely on a food supply like we do an oil supply. It has been a good lesson to us. But how to do that, that's the difficult part. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.