Farm Bill Conference

Farm Bill Conference

Farm Bill Conference. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

 

Oregon’s Congressman Kurt Schrader is one of the House conferee’s for the Farm Bill negotiation and is a member of the House Ag committee. He was a part of the first meeting of the Farm Bill Conference Committee and gives us his insights.

 

SCHRADER: Well everyone seems to be in a reconcilable mood. I was looking for some huge firebombs to be thrown and didn’t really see any. Most members confined themselves to discussing areas of interest to them and enumerating some of the difficulties that we’re going to face in a few of the areas. An hopefully - and I think express some confidence that we can get this done at the end of the day.

 

From the onset there appears to be a major disparity between the two versions but Schrader doesn’t really see it that way.

 

SCHRADER: I’m not sure there is a great disparity except maybe in the nutrition area and I eluded to the fact in my opening remarks the $40-billion dollar isn’t real. That’s just what they needed to be able to move the thing over to conference with just Republican votes. The real figure I think that came out of the actual House ag committee that was hard fought was $20-billion dollars.

 

He says that is still too high.

 

SCHRADER: So the real discussion will be where do we end up between $40 and $20-billion dollars and hopefully minimal reductions to our SNAP program. The crop insurance piece is the other big one and that’s mostly a battle between the corn growers and the rice growers if you will in other words the midwestern farmers and the southern farmers.

 

And we’ll have more with Congressman Kurt Schrader on Monday.

 

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

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