Farm Bill Or Not & Energy Tax Credit

Farm Bill Or Not & Energy Tax Credit plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Well Congress has been back for several days now and it has been strangely quiet on the subject of a farm bill. The big topic right now seems to be the “fiscal cliff.” Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley is betting on a one-year farm bill extension for the simple reason that the fight over resolving massive fiscal cliff budget cuts and tax hikes will get in the way of a five-year farm bill.

GRASSLEY: If there is a serious effort to do all of these taxes and fiscal cliff stuff before Christmas as opposed to pushing it into next year then that would give less time for consideration of a 5-year farm bill and maybe tend towards a 1-year extension.

The governors of Oregon, Iowa, Kansas and Colorado along with Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley are urging Congress to extend the production tax credit for energy. The credit is one of several tax incentives scheduled to expire at the end of the year. And according to Oregon Governor Kitzhaber, few policies offer a better return on investment for the country than the wind energy production tax credit. Nationally, he says the wind energy industry now drives 10 to 20-billion dollars per year in private sector capital investment and employs 75-thousand Americans. He notes these are jobs created here that cannot be outsourced.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

The expanded trading hours put into effect in May by CME Group in an effort to fend off a rival challenge from the Intercontinental Exchange seems to be backfiring. Interest in ICE’s grain contracts has been minimal to say the least, prompting more than six hundred traders, brokers, and farmers to recently sign a petition calling for CME to return to shorter hours, citing that twenty-one hour trading was just “too much”. Tim Andriesen, managing director of agricultural commodities for CME says, as with anything, there are pros and cons to having the longer hours, and that it’s too early yet to judge how expanded hours have impacted grain markets. Andriesen says that CME is continually monitoring and talking with its customers about the extended hours. In fact, CME is planning to formally survey users about the expanded trading hours in the very near future. Until the change in May, CBOT grains traded for seventeen hours a day, it’s now nonstop trading from 5 p.m. in the evening until 2 p.m. next day. Complaints about the extended hours aren’t just over long standing tradition, many of the markets worldly-wise participants say the expanded trading hours was a bad move.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.