Where Does Farm Policy Go From Here?

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Farm policy has historically focused on providing safety nets like crop insurance to help protect farmers. Johnathan Coppess, agricultural policy expert with the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, says the real opportunity for policy may instead be with conservation programs.

Coppess… “ What's amazing to me when you go back over the history is how little we as a society and Congress in particular has done for conservation. It has always been an afterthought. You know, it took a dust bowl in the thirties for them to even write something with conservation in it. It took this collapse in the eighties to get the Food Security Act of 1985, which the Conservation reserve program came back and the compliance provision. So, I don't have a good answer.”

Coppess says many of these conservation programs have been limited and small scale, leading to frustration from farmers.

Coppess… “ And again, this would be the case where you're like, wait, if all these farmers want this assistance, wouldn't Congress who wants to help farmers provide them more assistance? We tend to almost do the opposite. Then it really frustrates the farmers and so then their support for it dwindles even further. The future question I see here is—is there a functional way to combine the concepts of risk management, the concepts of the economic assistance for farmers with conservation so that we get a better policy set up that helps the farmer, but does so in a way that helps society with all these other challenges, and frankly also helps the farm?”

Once again, that’s Johnathan Coppess.