01/08/07 Commodity prices and farm bills

Farm and Ranch January 8, 2007 Congress is back and one of the items on its agenda this year will be writing a new farm bill, or as producers would prefer to call it a food security bill. Who knows where program crop prices will be when lawmakers get down to working out the details of a new law, but prices for wheat at least, hit ten-year highs in late 2006. They have since backed off some. So is writing a farm bill when prices are strong a dangerous thing? Wayne Hurst, now the immediate past president of Idaho Grain Producers Association, says they have had a lot of discussion about that but he doesn't believe so. Hurst: "As I pointed out and others have pointed out over the last two years that we have been talking farm bill, quite often you have to look at a farm bill and what it did was address the environment that existed in the prior five years to that farm bill. And the five years after the farm bill was put into place quite often are very different from those years that preceded the farm bill. So we need to make sure that whatever is proposed and whatever is enacted not just looks back at the recent history but also for the long term is a sound policy. And I believe that's wheat NAWG has been doing to get in the proposal. I believe that is what we've got in front of us." The 2002 Farm Bill included a mechanism, the Counter Cyclical Payment, to help farmers when prices were low, something that had been eliminated in the Freedom to Farm legislation of the mid-90's, the last time grain prices were at high levels. That safety net hasn't worked for wheat growers though and they are trying to change that this time. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.