The House Ag Committee completed its markup of the bill yesterday
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
The 2018 Farm Bill is one step closer to being enacted.
Yesterday, the House Agriculture Committee voted 26-20 in favor of passing the Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 onto the House of Representatives for further debate.
Producers are pleased with the bill’s progress.
“This is great news for farmers and ranchers everywhere,” Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in a statement yesterday.
The Farm Bill “takes us one step closer to bringing certainty to families who face the toughest farm economy in more than a decade,” he added.
The farm bill includes a commitment to agricultural trade.
The Market Access Program, the Foreign Market Development Program, the Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops Program and the Emerging Markets Program will all fall under a new International Market Development Program. This program would receive about $255 million per year in federal funding.
The U.S. exported more than US$140 billion worth of ag products in 2017, the USDA said. As uncertainty looms with some U.S. trade partners, any attention on foreign trade is welcome, said John Heisdorffer, president of the American Soybean Association.
“It’s always a good thing when there’s a commitment to growing market access,” he told Farms.com today. “Farmers and government have invested to expand trade and I’d hate to see some of those efforts wasted if tariffs go on with some other trading countries.”
The farm bill also stresses the importance of crop insurance.
The legislation calls for the creation of new risk management products and “ensures farmers and ranchers who suffer natural disasters are not unnecessarily penalized in future years through effective double deductibles due to insurable yields being set artificially low.”
That commitment to crop insurance can go a long way in helping beginning farmers access the funding they need, Heisdorffer said.
“It makes it easier for farmers to get operating loans,” he said. “No farmer wants to have a loss but at least they can show the bank that they have protection should things go wrong.”
Rural broadband connectivity is also part of the Farm Bill.
The bill calls for a baseline download speed of 25 megabits per seconds and 3 megabits per second upload speed. The bill also requires the Rural Utilities Service to provide reports on ways to use loan programs to expand rural broadband access.
“Planters, tractors and lots of other technology can’t be operated without proper Internet access,” Heisdorffer said. “There’s many places in the country where you can’t get that access, so it’ll be good for farmers to be able to stay connected and make use of the technology available to them.”
Other Farm Bill highlights include:
- making the first 5 million pounds of milk production on a dairy farm eligible for higher insurance coverage levels at lower premiums
- maintaining the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Individual Development Accounts Pilot Program
- providing $85 million per year for Specialty Crop Block Grants
- providing the USDA with $450 million to identify, diagnose and respond to potential animal disease outbreaks