Farm Bureau: 5 Things We'll Miss Without a New Farm Bill

USAgNet - 07/30/2024

The farm bill is already a year late, the stakes are high and time is running out. Roger Cryan, Chief Economist and Betty Resnick, an American Farm Bureau Federation Economist, says the law from which USDA takes its marching orders is supposed to be revised and renewed every five years. The last five-year farm bill expired with September 2023, so American agriculture has been working under a one-year extension of a six-year-old law. Though it was a good farm bill at the time, there are a lot of pieces of this 2018 law that are badly in need of an update.

Six years of tumult - including the highest inflation in 40 years, geopolitical disruptions to markets for the things that farmers sell and the things they buy, and rising expectations for what farmers can and should do for the planet - have left key parts of the 2018 farm bill outdated. The world is undeniably different than when the last farm bill was written.

Here is a short list of things that farmers - and all of us - will miss out on if an update doesn't happen this year:

1. Farmer Safety Net: The safety net for farmers includes support when prices fall to unsustainable levels. This helps farmers get through the bad years so they can continue producing the food, fuel and fiber that America - and the world - relies on. There are many multi-generational farms and many rural communities that have thrived through the years thanks to an occasional assist from USDA.

One part of this safety net is the crop insurance program, which is a permanent program that wouldn't go away without a new farm bill, but which needs some improvements to make it more affordable to all farmers.

2. Help for Dairy Farmers: When markets turn against them, dairy farmers also rely on occasional help through the Dairy Margin Coverage program, which they help pay for. Anticipated improvements in this program include opportunities to buy coverage for a higher nominal milk-over-feed-cost margin that would cover some (but not all) of the inflation of the last six years.

In 2018, the average farm produced about 5 million pounds of milk, while today the average farm produces over 8 million. So dairy farmers are also hoping to increase the amount of a farm's annual production that gets extra risk coverage from 5 million to something closer to their average size today.

3. Agricultural Sustainability: Most farmers and ranchers live and raise their families on the land that they work, often for many generations, so they naturally care for the land. But expectations have risen, and farmers are increasingly being asked to make up for the environmental impacts of the rest of us.

4. Research: Even more critical to the sustainability of agriculture - and to its capacity to clean up the planet - is growing agricultural productivity. Farmers are being asked to do more with less, but this depends on having the technology to do that. A lot of good research is done in the private sector, but much critical work depends on publicly funded research by government agencies and universities. The most productive wheat varieties, for one example, were developed with public research funding and are freely available, because it has historically been difficult for seed companies to cash in on wheat improvement investments.

5. Food security is economic and national security: Let us count the ways that the farm bill contributes to our security, at home and around the world.

First, the investment in agricultural research is, as discussed above, absolutely critical to the growth of production on a limited amount of land. This is the arithmetic that reconciles the needs of a hungry world with the care of the planet.

Second, helping farmers get through bad years, with commodity programs and crop insurance, keeps agricultural production capacity in business and helps ensure supplies of food (and fiber and fuel) for the nation and the world. U.S. exports are expected to make up nearly 18% of world grain trade in the 2024/25 marketing year, and a well-fed world is a safer world for all of us.

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