There are just a little more than four months to go before this year’s Farm Bill is due, and Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska recently held a round table discussion alongside Senator Pete Ricketts and Ranking Member of the Senate Ag Committee John Boozman to hear from producers about what they want to see in it.
“Whether it’s the necessity to mitigate risk, and to do that through programs like crop insurance. Every farmer, every ag group association, that’s what we hear - the need to maintain that very strong crop insurance program across the state. We heard about the need for disaster aid and to be able to get that disaster aid out earlier to farmers and ranchers who have been affected by bad weather, who have been affected by hail storms or flooding, to get them the resources they need to continue to feed the world, to take care of their families, and also to take care of their communities as well,” said Senator Fischer.
Senator Boozman spoke about the changing landscape of the economy and how this is a much different Farm Bill than the one lawmakers crafted back in 2018.
“If this were 2017, where we were talking about the Farm Bill in 2018 when we got it passed, we would say, well, we’re going to tweak it. Things were so stable then compared to now. Now with interest rates doubling, input costs through the roof, the uncertainty out there that our farmers are facing, what we want to do is make sure that we come up with a Farm Bill that gets us back up to where we’re at now to give them the ability to have the risk management tools that they have. Two, all of the things that we learned today - making it so that it’s easier to acquire the technology they need to be efficient and more profitable. That’s really what it’s all about,” said Senator Boozman.
Those lawmakers also got a chance to check out ag research efforts by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and how students and staff there are working to discover new precision ag technologies. They also visited the Mead Cattle Company to talk with producers about their operation and what this year’s Farm Bill can do for them.
