Joining Forces for Farm Bill

Joining Forces for Farm Bill. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Thirty-two different agriculture, environmental and crop insurance groups have teamed up to create a solution to some controversial proposals for the new farm bill. Those proposals deal with crop insurance, which many expect to become the primary safety net for the nation’s farmers.

THATCHER: It’s a pretty big deal. I think it’s been at least 25 years since agriculture and the environmental/conservation community have come together on such a big issue. We came together because the provisions that had been put in the Senate bill last year were just awful and would’ve been really unworkable.

American Farm Bureau farm policy specialist Mary Kay Thatcher says the problem was with the idea of means testing and payment limits for the crop insurance program.

THATCHER:We’ve come up with what we think is a very workable alternative which would not limit eligibility and which would have crop insurance tied to making sure you weren’t breaking up highly erodible land or plowing up wetlands. But if you did have an accident and something happened you would have two years to mitigate that problem.

Thatcher says the proposal would not use any means testing for a good reason, because larger farmers are often more likely to withstand a disaster or a bad year.

THATCHER: In general if you means test and you lop off the larger farmers, often times they’re the least risky farmers. So if you take the least risky out of an insurance pool, you have more risky people remaining and those risky people who were remaining are going to pay a higher premium. We don’t want to do that. We want to keep as many people as possible eligible for crop insurance and make it as workable a risk management program as we can.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.