Policy Analyst Offers Farm Bill Insight

Policy Analyst Offers Farm Bill Insight

I’m KayDee Gilkey with today’s Northwest Farm and Ranch Report.

Informa Economics Policy Analyst Roger Bernard says the 2012 Farm Bill debate was one of the ugliest in decades.

Bernard: “This has really been a matter of everyone for themselves and everybody has fought one another. What it has resulted in was we didn’t get a Farm Bill because there was so much division amongst the ranks. It really disintegrated what was going on. So that needs to change.”

With nutrition program spending accounting for more than three-quarters of the farm bill - there was some talk of putting nutrition programs into a separate piece of legislation. Bernard says agriculture should not want that to happen.

Bernard: “Not everyone has a farmer in their district but every single congressman has an eater so keeping that linkage there -- it may be an unfortunate linkage -- but its an important one because odds of getting something through Congress addressing only 2 percent of the U.S. population are pretty slim right now. So you need to keep the nutritional linkage there for now. ”

Perhaps the biggest question right now is - when will Congress get to work on the farm bill? Bernard says the markup timeline is murky because of the ongoing budget discussions. He says the Ag Committees need to know how much money they have to save over 10 years.

Bernard: “The House Farm Bill was at $35 billion, the Senate Farm Bill was at $23 billion -- its probably not going to be either one of those numbers. It may be somewhere between or it might be somewhere beyond. We don’t know. But until we get that it is going to be just a waiting game on a new Farm Bill.”