By Mary Vanac
Advantages in the 2012 farm bill have
teeter-tottered between big agriculture and small farms, and as of now, the
small farms are winning.
The Senate passed a $969 billion farm bill
last week 90-8, and the House could vote on the measure this week. The bill
cuts mandatory agricultural spending by $23.6 billion over 10 years.
The biggest cut — nearly $20 billion — comes
in the proposed elimination of decades-old subsidies and direct payments to
commodities farmers to help them manage poor weather and market conditions.
This cut promises to change the balance between farms that produce commodities,
such as corn, wheat and soybeans, and smaller vegetable and fruit farms.
The financial supports for commodities date
to the Great Depression and were designed to secure national defense and limit
the influence of powerful corporations in the market.
“At its core, the farm bill is a
national-defense bill,” writes Scott Marlow, executive director of Rural
Advancement Foundation International USA, a nonprofit organization in
Pittsboro, N.C., that promotes conservation and sustainable agriculture. “It is
about the ability of our country to feed our military in wartime.”
Replacing most of the Department of
Agriculture’s price- and income-support programs with a risk-based revenue-protection
program for crop and dairy farmers is expected to save $19.8 billion from
fiscal 2013 through 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The risk-based system “would end the era of
paying farmers for crops they do not grow and replace direct payments with a
program based on current crop-year data, market prices and actual yields,” said
Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, during a conference call with reporters
last week.
Rather than receiving direct payments,
farmers would have a safety net that would compensate them if they sell their
crops for less than the government expects them to.
The Ohio Soybean Association, the Ohio Corn
& Wheat Growers Association and the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation are urging
members to contact Brown and Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, to ask them
to vote yes on the Senate-proposed farm bill.
However, rice and peanut farmers say the farm
bill could hurt them. Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Republican, is concerned
that the bill redistributes resources from one region to another based on
program design rather than market forces or cropping decisions.
“Certain commodities receive more resources
than others, and crops such as peanuts and rice are left without any safety
net,” Chambliss said in a June 8 newsletter by the U.S. Rice Producers
Association.
Energy is a big winner in the bill, with
spending expected to more than double to $1.5 billion for biorefineries and
biomass facilities, renewable-energy systems and biofuels and bio-based
products.
The farm bill shaves $3.9 billion from
nutrition programs, but that’s a drop in a $768.2 billion bucket over the next
decade. And the legislation expands spending authority for the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program,according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance; Women,
Infants & Children; Fresh Fruit and Vegetable; and Senior Farmers Market
Nutrition programs have become increasingly important to Ohio vegetable and
fruit producers who sell their products directly to the public, said Lisa
Schacht, co-owner of the Schacht Family Farm and Market in Canal Winchester.
Schacht, president of the Ohio Produce
Growers & Marketers Association, said the Specialty Crop Block Grant
Program and the Specialty Crop Research Initiative “are truly the favored sons
of the farm bill to our growers.” Spending on horticulture — including fruit
and vegetable crops — is estimated to grow 35 percent to $1.4 billion under the
farm bill. Spending for research, extension and related activities is projected
to triple to $860 million.
“We hope the legislators recognize the value
of public dollars going to help farmers expand productivity through resources
or tools,” Schacht said, pointing to research at Ohio State University’s Ohio
Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster.
In one project, Jeff Lejeune, a professor of
veterinary preventive medicine at OSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine, is
studying adding beneficial bacteria to farm soil to inhibit the spread of E.
coli bacteria.
Schacht compared the government’s support of
agricultural research to its support of medical research for orphan diseases.
“You can’t get the attention of big companies to do farm research, but the
government can make it worth their while.”
@maryvanac
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