08/20/07 Senate Farm Bill

The Senate Farm Bill. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. The House has passed their version of the Farm Bill and just shortly the Senate will begin their process. Once that is done, it will be head to head, hammering out the final version to send to the President. American Farm Bureau president, Bob Stallman speculates on the forthcoming version of the Senate farm bill. STALLMAN: We would hope, given the broad base of support from American agriculture that the House bill has that the Senate bill would look very similar. However Senator Harkin particularly wants to increase funding for the conservation security program and there are other Senators who want to come back and propose some additional reforms that were frankly considered by the house and rejected. Stallman talks about areas of concern likely to be in the Senate version of the farm bill. STALLMAN: There have been a couple of Senators that have talked about proposing additional amendments for reform. One is to do something similar to the kind of amendment that was soundly defeated on the House floor which basically undid the commodity title as it exists now. There will also be further attempts to cap payment limits by Senator Grassley and so we'll have to deal with those in the Senate but hopefully at the end of the day we'll come out with a bill that is at least close enough to the House bill where the conference will not be too difficult. He says it is too early to worry about the White House threat to veto the farm bill. STALLMAN: The administration has issued a veto threat based on the provisions that are in the House bill. More than likely the bill that reaches the Presidents desk will not be identical to the House bill, there will be changes in the Senate side and then we'll just have to figure out at that point about how serious the White House is about vetoing the Farm Bill. I think producers around this country if a bill passed the House and Senate and had support of agriculture, we'd be disappointed if there was a veto at that point but that's a ways in the future. Last week Ag Secretary Mike Johanns was quite positive there would be a new bill signed this year and that it was necessary to move forward. Stallman talks about the importance of the House passage of the farm bill. STALLMAN: Farm Bills only come around about every 5 years so the passage of it in the House was a very important first step in moving forward in reauthorizing a new farm bill. This bill is important to all consumers in this country. It touched nutrition programs, conservation programs, specialty crop producers in addition to regular commodity producers and we have a long way to go to get it finished and get a signature by the President but it was an important first step. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.