By Jonathan Eisenthal
Many farm leaders still have hopes that a new Farm Bill will become law this year.
During a panel discussion at Farmfest, National Corn Growers Association President and Minnesota corn farmer Tom Haag described the kind of national farm policy corn producers would like to see.
“Crop insurance should stay the same,” Haag said. “Don’t start taking that away from our corn farmers, because in our own state of Minnesota alone, 96 percent of corn growers use crop insurance. You can see it works. They understand it.”
Corn growers also approve of current Farm Bill provisions that support U.S. farm exports, such as the Market Access (MAP) and Foreign Market Development (FMD) programs. MAP helps build markets for U.S. Haag said growers would like to see the continuation of these programs, which have been underfunded.
According to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), “MAP reaches virtually every corner of the globe, helping build markets for a wide variety U.S. farm and food products. FAS provides cost-share assistance to eligible U.S. organizations for activities such as consumer advertising, public relations, point-of-sale demonstrations, participation in trade fairs and exhibits, market research, and technical assistance. When MAP funds are used for generic marketing and promotion, participants must contribute a minimum 10-percent match. For promotion of branded products, a dollar-for-dollar match is required.”
FMD, also known as the Cooperator Program, offers funding to long-term overseas promotion efforts. Under the program, FAS partners with U.S. agricultural producers and processors, who are represented by nonprofit commodity or trade associations called “cooperators,” to promote U.S. commodities overseas.
FMD supports organizations that assist with overseas marketing of grain and value-added products that increase grain usage, such as ethanol, dairy, meat, poultry, and eggs. With the rapidly expanding foreign demand for these products, along with growing competition from other exporting countries, greater investment in these promotional activities would strengthen the U.S. farm economy.
Haag was one of six panelists on the Farm Bill panel at Farmfest. The other participants were Scott VanderWal, American Farm Bureau Vice President; Rob Larew, National Farmers Union President; Lori Stevermer, National Pork Producers Council President-Elect; Bob Worth, Minnesota Soybean Growers Association President; and Robert Bonnie, USDA undersecretary for farm production and conservation.
Bonnie stated that it is not the work of USDA to write the Farm Bill, but rather to support all the parties at work on it, “to get as good a Farm Bill as we can.”
Bonnie oversees three public-facing USDA agencies that impact the lives and livelihoods of farmers every day: Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Farm Service Agency, and the Risk Management Agency. He summed up the focus of these agencies: “Strengthening FSA programs around the safety net. Critically important. Looking for ways we can improve our farm loans, so that we can do a better job of financing agriculture through our loan and guaranteed loan programs, getting more young people into agriculture, … (and) a lot on the conservation work.”
The focus on climate change in the U.S. and around the globe will only intensify, according to Bonnie, but he promised that the USDA approach to working with farmers on the issue during the Biden administration will be voluntary and incentive based.
“It’s about collaboration,” Bonnie said. “It’s about building a model that will allow producers to do right by the environment, as they have done for decades, and at the same time to profit from that. We are going to make investments in data. We have got significant resources to make sure that we can measure the good things that agriculture has done and can do. We are investing in things like the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, where we are partnering with farmers to deploy climate smart practices at scale, to measure and monitor those things, to create markets that will reward producers for doing good stuff. We also have resources, thanks to Senator Klobuchar and others, in the Inflation Reduction Act that will allow us to invest more in agriculture through our conservation programs.”
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