House Farm Bill Draft & Honeybee Health
House Farm Bill Draft & Honeybee Health plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.
A discussion draft of the House Ag Committee’s version of the farm bill was released late Thursday. The bipartisan bill saves billions of taxpayer dollars, reduces the nation’s deficit and repeals outdated policies while reforming, streamlining and consolidating others. According to Ranking Member Collin Peterson - the commodity title will work for all parts of the country and includes a savings of more than 35-billion dollars in mandatory funding and repeal or consolidation of more than 100 programs. The elimination of direct payments and streamlined and reformed commodity policy saves more than 14-billion dollars. Improved integrity and accountability in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program saves more than 16-billion dollars. The consolidation of 23 conservation programs into 13 - improving program delivery to producers - saves more than six-billion dollars. It also provides regulatory relief - including H.R. 872 to mitigate the burdens faced by farmers, ranchers and rural communities.
Researchers are looking into the many factors linked to the health of honeybees and pollinators. Bart Smith of Agricultural Research Service explains.
SMITH: We’re looking at the nutrition levels and we think that possibly the loss of habitat of bees is affecting the nutrition of these bees. Maybe making them more prone to some of the pathogens that are affecting the bees.
Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s practice of using planes to monitor pollution of America’s farmlands has become political fodder. Democrats defend the flyovers as a “cost-effective necessary way to detect cases where runoff from livestock waste might be polluting sources of drinking water and other waterways that can impact public health.” Some Republicans have deemed it as “using military-style drone planes to secretly observe livestock operations.” The truth behind the practice probably lies somewhere in the middle. While it’s true that EPA flyovers make it possible for the agency to survey thousands of acres at a time to determine which operations are polluting waters and threatening public health, it is also true that it’s a duplication of effort on the part of the EPA, as most state Departments of Environmental Quality are already authorized to implement the Clean Water Act in their states. It would have gone a long way in strengthening relationships and allaying producers’ fears and suspicions if the EPA had met with producers across the country to explain their aerial surveillance program prior to implementing the flyovers.
Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
