Farm Bill - RaboBank Pt 2
From the Ag Information Network, I’m Bob Larson. The last Farm Bill was passed in 2018 and is supposed to be rewritten and renewed every five years. Now, some are worried that we may have seen our last Farm Bill.
So, I asked Stephen Nicholson, Global Strategist at RaboBank, what if we don’t get a new Farm Bill? What then? …
NICHOLSON … “Yeah, and that’s a good question. My first reaction was, well then, we go through the budgetary process for USDA and that money and those programs reside in the industry anyway so they should go through the budget process. But as many of your listeners know, and I could be wrong, we haven’t passed a budget for 10 years. And you have over 50% of the members of Congress have never passed a budget let alone appropriated money.”
But Nicholson says there are so many uncertainties within agriculture that need to be taken care of …
NICHOLSON … “And so, it’s a really important bill for agriculture to have that certainty because there’s no other industry, and I say that understanding aircraft and airlines, but we’re all dependent upon the weather and we can’t control that. And it’s one of the few industries that has all these uncertainties every year, every day.”
Nicholson says without a lot of time, Republicans need to come together and find a solution.
