Farm bill pushed to one-year extension

AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Sen­ate Agri­cul­ture Com­mit­tee mem­ber Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. walks past reporters on Capi­tol Hill in Wash­ing­ton, Mon­day, Dec. 31,2012.

By Ryan Carpe
rcarpe@dailyadvocate.com

DARKE COUNTY — The U.S. House and Sen­ate announced a short-term farm bill exten­sion on Dec. 29 which would con­tinue the active polices of the Food, Con­ser­va­tion and Energy Act of 2008 and halt the immi­nent threat of accel­er­ated dairy prices.
In a state­ment to CNN, Sen­ate Agri­cul­ture Com­mit­tee Chair­woman Deb­bie Stabenow said the short-term farm bill exten­sion “also pre­vents even­tual dam­age to our entire agri­cul­ture econ­omy.”
Despite the agree­ment, house lead­ers have not yet agreed to put the bill on the floor. In addi­tion to the one-year exten­sion, the House GOP is also con­sid­er­ing a one-month exten­sion bill and another that would extend exist­ing dairy pol­icy that expires Jan. 1.
The threat of milk nearly dou­bling in price at around $7 caused leg­is­la­tors from both sides of the aisle to resolve the sit­u­a­tion as quickly as pos­si­ble.
Ohio remains a chief man­u­fac­turer in the dairy indus­try, and farm­ers expect any changes to the bill could have a large impact on the state’s agri­cul­tural polices.
Accord­ing to sta­tis­tics pro­vided by the Ohio Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture for 2010, Ohio pro­duced 5,240,000 pounds of milk, rank­ing the state 11th in milk pro­duc­tion. And nearly 12 per­cent of all Ohio agri­cul­tural com­modi­ties con­sist of dairy prod­ucts.
In 2012, Darke County ranked 7th in the state for milk pro­duc­tion with an esti­mated 8,000 dairy cows in the area.
While the exten­sion came just in the nick of time, Sec­re­tary of Agri­cul­ture Tom Vil­sack said in an ear­lier inter­view with CNN that he was not pleased with the process.
“It is uncon­scionable that we don’t have a farm bill. This is just his­toric. You have every sin­gle major com­mod­ity group and farm group in the coun­try united in the mes­sage to get this work done, yet Con­gress doesn’t get it done,” he said. “You can’t point to a time when Con­gress has been this reluc­tant to pass farm leg­is­la­tion.”
The farm bill is the fed­eral government’s pri­mary agri­cul­tural pol­icy and leg­isla­tive tool, and Vil­sack high­lighted its impor­tance for rural com­mu­nity mem­bers.
“When you con­sider what rural Amer­ica does, it pro­vides most of the food, a lot of the water, almost all of the energy and fuel, as well as many, many jobs con­nected to what hap­pens in rural areas, there should be a greater appre­ci­ate for what takes place in rural Amer­ica and a greater con­cern on the part of all of us to make sure rural Amer­ica is healthy and pros­per­ous,” he said.
The 2008 farm bill has far-reaching con­se­quences for every agri­cul­tural state, as it deals with con­ser­va­tion, rural devel­op­ment, agri­cul­tural research, nutri­tion pro­grams and other aspects.
Vil­sack warned as early as Octo­ber that if there was not an exten­sion of the exist­ing bill or a new bill on Jan. 1 or shortly there­after, per­ma­nent 1949 agri­cul­tural law would go back into place, which would drive up the prices of dairy prod­ucts along with other farm­ing goods.
In the Octo­ber state­ment, Vil­sack said that let­ting the 2008 Farm Bill expire would leave the “USDA with far fewer tools to help strengthen Amer­i­can agri­cul­ture and grow a rural econ­omy that sup­ports 1 in 12 Amer­i­can jobs.”
Vil­sack con­tin­ued build­ing on the impor­tance of the bill by say­ing “With­out action by the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on a multi-year Food, Farm and Jobs bill, rural com­mu­ni­ties are today being asked to shoul­der addi­tional bur­dens and addi­tional uncer­tainty in a tough time.”
But the short-term exten­sion doesn’t come with­out a cost.
Accord­ing to the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office in a report issued on Dec. 28, a one-year exten­sion of the Food, Con­ser­va­tion, and Energy Act of 2008 could cause more than $1 bil­lion dol­lars in changes to direct spending.

Ryan Carpe is a staff writer at The Daily Advo­cate in Greenville.

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