The Back 40

The Farm Bill we had hoped Congress would act on last year is still pending. One of the conservation issues under discussion has been conservation compliance – the requirement that farmers receiving farm program payments maintain a conservation plan to limit damage to highly erodible land and wetlands. Some have argued that, with direct farm [...]

Unfortunately, it often takes a natural disaster or series of disasters, to make policymakers take notice. Such is the case with the agricultural industry, which has been struggling with severe drought amidst other hardships. On February 14, the Senate Agriculture Committee held a hearing called, “Drought, Fire, and Freeze: The Economics of Disaster for America’s [...]

U.S. Representative Martha Roby (R-Alabama) recently introduced a bill that aims to limit the types of farmland that would be eligible for the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). CRP, as we know it today, was officially established as part of the 1985 Farm Bill as a program in which the government provides financial assistance to farmers and ranchers [...]

U.S. House Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made an 11th hour inclusion of a 9-month extension of the 2008 Farm Bill into the “fiscal cliff bill.” This move gives Congress until the end of September 2013 to get a new bill in place, but many individuals and organizations are not pleased with this outcome. The extension continues the [...]

Now that the election is over we hope that Congress will get serious about the Farm Bill. The bill is a behemoth: 700+ pages with 15 spending categories totaling $100 billion annually. The 2008 Farm Bill was allowed to expire on September 30, creating major issues for agriculture, an industry that doesn’t need more challenges. [...]

The following press release, distributed by the Wisconsin Corn Promotion Board, details the negative impact the lack of a Farm Bill is having on grain exports from the United States. This serves as an illustration of the export issue U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack spoke about during his appearance at the World Dairy Expo in [...]