Lawmakers will return to Capitol Hill in two weeks, with little time left before the Farm Bill extension expires. Ag professors at Texas Tech say they are looking at several areas they hope stay in the new legislation.
You know, there are elements of that farm bill that obviously need to continue, you know, be strengthened a bit, crop insurance being one, and looking at some options on those crop insurance provisions. You know, there are some proposals about adjustments to average oil price calculations, and there are talks about sort of raising those reference prices that, you know, sort of triggered those payments a little bit earlier to try to reflect that higher cost production. All of those are sort of good elements, you know sort of the devil in the details as it as it were,” said Dr. Darren Hudson.
Senator John Thune is one of several lawmakers who believes another extension is necessary. He tells Parker James with Your Ag Network time is running out, and there needs to be something in place for producers.
“If it doesn’t get extended, that’s a bad outcome, because then you revert to farm policies that go back at, you know, a century in some cases or almost a century. So we need to at a minimum, do an extension of the current bill. We’re already on a one-year extension of the current bill, which was a 2018 bill, it expired September 30th of last year. I think the most likely outcome, and I don’t say this regretfully, because we need a multi-year reauthorization,” said Senator Thune.
Iowa Representative Randy Feenstra looks back to last year around this time, when the 2018 Farm Bill got a year-long extension. He says he thought it would have been plenty of time to craft a new bill, but explains some of the hold-ups along the way.
“But our problem is there’s still no movement in this in the U.S. Senate, and we’re just begging Senator Stabenow from Michigan, who heads the committee and the Senate, to start moving on some policy. We know we’ve got some top lines, but here’s the deal: we can’t negotiate with ourselves. We got to have something coming out of the Senate that we can work with. And that’s our concern right now,” said Senator Feenstra.
Lawmakers will return to Washington on September 9th but still have several appropriations bills that first need attention.
