Reflecting on Forward Farm Bill Movement

Jun 10, 2024

By Brooke S. Appleton

It’s summertime in the nation’s capital, and members of Congress appear to be solar-powered.
After a long impasse, there has finally been some movement to reauthorize the farm bill. The House Committee on Agriculture recently passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act by a vote of 33-21.
Getting to this point has been a long haul. Corn grower leaders testified in front of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees throughout 2022 and 2023, sharing the National Corn Growers Association’s position on the legislation. Grower advocates also took part in roundtables and listening sessions across the country.

While the farm bill was initially due for reauthorization last year, it has already been extended once as Congress debated and voted on government funding bills and sorted through House leadership issues.
But now, thanks to the hard work of House Agriculture Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson (R-Penn.), as well as committee members from both parties, we have moved into a different stage in the legislative process, though there is still much work to be done.

With the release of bill text, we are pleased to confirm that many of our recommendations are reflected in the legislation that passed the House Agriculture Committee. Our lobbying and messaging efforts have focused on making sure that the bill will protect federal crop insurance, bolster U.S. international market development efforts, strengthen the producer safety net and support voluntary conservation programs.

During the Committee markup, we were supportive of several amendments that were filed to improve the farm bill. For example, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) offered an amendment on sustainable aviation fuel that was adopted by the committee. And Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) offered an amendment requiring a mandatory base acre update that would better reflect corn growers’ priorities for commodity program eligibility.
Unfortunately, the House Ag Committee bill is not expected to make it to the House floor for a vote until at least September. In the meantime, we expect for Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), the ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee, to soon lay out a Senate Republican framework for the farm bill to spur bipartisan negotiations with Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich).

For the farm bill to be successfully reauthorized this year, there will ultimately need to be broad support from members of both parties in the House and Senate. To that end, corn grower leaders will spend the next several months not only advocating for our priorities but also for final legislative language that will garner more bipartisan support for the legislation.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”