9-5 IAN Simpson Chat

A talk with Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson. Those of you who listen on a fairly regular basis to my agricultural reports know that I often report on Congressman Mike Simpson. He was brought up in Idaho, knows the day-to-day challenges of Idaho's agricultural community and acts upon it. I caught up with him in a Boise restaurant. "You have been very active with issues involved in grazing. The West has become a blazing inferno. What's going to happen? The first thing we need to do is finish the farm bill. There are several programs that would help these grazers in Elmore County that have lost both acreage and cattle but those programs expired in 2011. We were not able to do a farm bill last year and so far we have not got it done this year and we need to get it done but the indemnification program and a few other things that were in the last farm bill would have been beneficial. Those programs are in the house passed bill and in the Senate passed bill but we have not been able to get a conference yet and get them into law. John said today, Speaker John Boehner, that he expected maybe by October we would have a conference done and get a farm bill done which is going to be very important to these people. It seems like there are three problems that we have out there in these counties that were struck so damagingly by the wildfires. One is, how do you help farmers who actually lost cattle, what do you do to the infrastructure that was destroyed by these wildfires and what do you do to the restoration project so that these lands can be used for grazing in the future? It's going to take a few years and it is going to take some money to put the seed down and make sure that these lands become pasture lands again.