Journalism school doesn’t make cynics out of people who pick up the pen for a living.

Committing journalism — using the pen to chronicle the escapades of crooks and crackpots you encounter as a journalist — often does, though.

A glaring example of this transformation arrived in the late July action of Speaker of the House John Boehner. No one, not even the most ink-covered, nicotine-stained journalist could have foreseen the Speaker’s cynical use of the worst drought in 50 years to paper over his colleagues’ failure to act on a needed farm bill.

Like the current drought, Boehner’s dilemma grew worse over the summer. After a year of dull talk and even duller hearings, both Congressional ag committees completed their 2012 farm bill work by mid-July.

Bipartisan effort

The full Senate, in a rare display of bipartisanship, even passed its bill June 21. But the House held any chance to get the two versions welded together before the 2008 act expires Oct. 1.

Boehner kept the House bill back because it contained too few spending cuts for the tea-drinking wing (nearly 90 votes) of his Republican majority.

Indeed, the Committee-passed bill pared just $35 billion from its 10-year spending plan of $969 billion and just $16.5 billion of that from what everyone still calls the food stamps, now SNAP, program.

That tissue-thin slice — 1.6 percent! howled tea party activists — from food stamps meant Boehner needed Democratic votes for the House to pass the committee bill.

Worse, he needed those votes before Congress went on its five-week August recess so staffers could “conference” the two versions to have any chance to meet the farm bill’s Oct. 1 deadline.

The Dems, however, were never going to pull Boehner’s bacon out of the tea kettle. Their party’s power is urban-based and those representatives want more food aid, not less.

In fact, this farm bill’s proposed farm-to-food-aid ratio — four out of every five farm bill dollars go to nutrition programs — is largely why for 50 years rural House members have delivered farm bills filled with food stamps and, for 50 years, their urban colleagues have delivered farm bills to farmers and ranchers.

Doomed to fail

No farm bill has ever or will ever move without that rural-urban coalition to fuel it. So Boehner, in a bind, took a page from today’s toxic playbook and devised a doomed-to-fail scheme to extend the current farm bill one year so that when it failed, and it would, he could place the blame anywhere but on himself and his divided Republican Party members.

The device designed to do just that was a 47-page bill that didn’t just extend the 2008 law through October 2013; it all but rewrote it.

For example, explained the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Boehner’s plan not only cut “farm conservation programs by $761 million,” it also “effectively terminate(d)… all farm-bill funded rural economic development, renewable energy, organic agriculture, local food and beginning and minority farmer programs…”

And, the NSAC went on, it did so with “no open deliberations, no hearings, no testimony, and no chance for amendments.”

The Speaker, of course, could have cared less. His job wasn’t for the House to pass his bill or any bill. His job was make it appear that failure — and failure was in the air before he ever uttered the words “farm bill” in late July — lay at the feet of Dems while giving his party’s tea drinkers something to chew on other than him.

Widespread opposition

But the jig was up even before it got to a vote. Almost every farm group canned the speaker’s plan from the start. The cynicism in it was so evident and so transparent that everyone with a scoop shovel or pitchfork in the farm bill fight saw through it in an instant.

So, now, several more months will pass without the House doing the simple job of passing its farm bill.

Which reminds me, when’s Election Day?

ROME TWP., Ohio — An Ashtabula County dairy farmer and activist was killed in a tragic farm accident Tuesday afternoon at his farm.

Bryan Wolfe, 55, was mowing hay between 1:30-2 p.m. when he apparently became entrapped inside the haybine, said his wife, Diana Wolfe.

She said her husband had some broken blades on the bine, but would have changed them sometime before he set out.

A passerby found Wolfe at 5 p.m., she said, and called for help, but it was too late.

Wolfe was well known for his work with Pro-Ag, The National Family Farm Coalition, ARMPA, and the Ohio Farmers Union.

Improving the industry

He had lobbied Congress and the dairy industry to correct what he felt were improper milk marketing policies and to strengthen the market for farmers.

“He was committed,” Diana Wolfe said. “He fought tooth and nail to keep dairy farmers alive.”

The family farm consists of 150 or so acres and about 45 Holstein and Guernsey milk cows. Wolfe estimates a couple dozen neighbors have showed up the past couple days, to help with milking and cleaning the barns.

“Everybody knew him and everybody in Washington, D.C. knew him,” she said.

Diana said her husband often described the farm as “a 4-H project that got out of hand,” and “he always said that he would go before his cows.”

Her husband’s biggest accomplishment for the industry, she said, was proving that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was manipulating dairy prices.

Bryan worked especially close with his local Congressman, U.S. Rep. Steven LaTourette.

“Bryan was a tireless advocate for dairy farmers on a national level,” LaTourette said in an email to Farm and Dairy. “He was a valued adviser to our office on matters important to all farmers. My deepest sympathy goes out to his wife and family.”

Colleagues react

“All of us that have worked with Bryan for many years are deeply shocked by Bryan’s untimely death,” said Arden Tewksbury, manager of the Progressive Agriculture Organization, in a released statement.

Brenda Cochran, Pro-Ag member, and a strong dairy activist, said, she was in disbelief.

“Bryan was a dear friend of mine,” she said. “All of us will deeply miss him.”

Most recently, Wolfe had been lobbying for better dairy policy in the farm bill.

“It’s up to all of us now to work with Bryan’s associates in Ohio to help fulfill Bryan’s efforts to obtain a dairy bill that would allow dairy farmers to cover their cost of production plus a reasonable profit,” Pro-Ag officials said.

Somewhere along the line, the lazy dog days of August turned loud and bitter.

Three years ago, August was consumed by what was to be a debate on national health care, but quickly turned into a shouting match that found Grandma standing before government-led “death panels.”

The noise lessened that winter and the Affordable Care Act became law in early 2010.

Last August was to feature the Grand Bargain, a time when political leaders, after some friendly golf, were to strike a deal that delivered less federal spending, more tax reform and a clear route to budget sanity. The leaders, however, bogeyed, then handed the ball to a bipartisan Super Committee that was neither bipartisan nor super.

In the end, all agreed to not agree.

This August appears on the same, failing path as the nation’s key farm and ranch areas continue to be roasted by record-breaking heat and toasted by a near record-breaking drought.

Brown, not green, is the nation’s color as crop yields continue to evaporate and livestock feed, if available, is almost as precious as rain.

Bare cupboards

As bad as the farm and ranch picture appears, the nation’s food picture is almost certain to get worse.

As noted here two weeks ago, food and commodity stocks held by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corp., our national pantry, do not exist. CCC holds neither one pea nor one slice of bacon.

Moreover, as regional crop insurance experts debate — really just guess — how bad the drought and its impacts will be on rural America, few experts anywhere have examined how much the drought will cost all Americans, 85 out of 100 who still believe groceries grow in air conditioned grocery stores.

Sounds of silence

So what is being done to address the still-building consequences of the worst drought in more than a half-century? Not much.

In Washington, the Senate, which completed its 2012 farm bill in June, awaits the House to act on its Ag Committee’s recently-passed proposal. Until the House passes that bill, all work on any farm bill remains on hold and nothing can be done to marry the two plans together in time for September action.

In fact, House leaders spent most of July’s last week carefully avoiding any farm bill action because the GOP-led chamber couldn’t muster the necessary votes to muscle it through.

If a 2012 farm bill deal is out of reach, so too may be any disaster-based action.

No one in either party seems capable of bridging their deep divisions to stave off a massive market mess, on the farm and in the supermarket, come winter. Indeed, about the only thing any of the leaders now seem to agree on is the need to hightail it out of town for the traditional, month-long August recess.

And they need it; they haven’t had a vacation since the first week of July.

Posturing

On top of that, July has been a very taxing month for the House and its leaders because, for the 33rd time since the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010, the House voted to repeal it.

Like the 32 times before, however, the vote was meaningless posturing because actual repeal requires the Senate to repeal and a Presidential signature and neither of those actions had not and will not happen anytime soon.

So as replays of lost battles continue to consume our leaders’ time in Washington — the House has devoted 80 hours of floor debate to its 33 going-nowhere votes to repeal the health law and, as of July 25, not one minute to the 2012 farm bill — no one seems capable of focusing on our farm and food needs for the coming year.

But it’s a pretty sure bet that most of our political leaders will yipping, yapping and yakking everywhere in the coming weeks because it’s August and that’s what they do in August.

Talk, of course, is cheap. Doing nothing often isn’t.

(The Farm and Food File is published weekly in more than 70 newspapers in North America. Contact Alan Guebert at www.farmandfoodfile.com.)

WASHINGTON — Commissioner of Agriculture Gus R. Douglass is urging farmers to report any storm-related losses to their local Farm Service Agency offices, and to keep detailed records of any livestock or bee losses related to heat or storms.

“Although there’s no current FSA program for livestock or bees, there is a possibility that assistance may become available in the next farm bill, which is being debated in Congress right now,” said Douglass.

Records

West Virginia FSA Director Alfred Lewis said that records should include dates, numbers, cause of death and witnesses. He added that in past farm bills, livestock used for recreation, pleasure, hunting, shows, or as pets were not eligible for programs.

A list of West Virginia local FSA contact information is available at www.wvagriculture.org. For more information, visit www.fsa.usda.gov.

Many on Capitol Hill are quick to point out that “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

What they never add is that this little blinding glimpse of the obvious has never stopped legislative quackery in the past and it’s not stopping it now.

Drought impact

For example, as you read this, 2012 crop insurance payouts are likely growing by $1 billion or more per week because of the spreading drought in the corn-soybean Midwest. The disaster means short crops, tall commodity prices and certain-to-rise food prices.

It also means crop and revenue insurance payments of “ginormous proportions,” suggests Bruce Babcock, an economist at Iowa State University.

How big is ginormous?

“If the current drought in Illinois and Indiana spreads west to include Iowa and parts of Minnesota and Nebraska, which it appears to be doing,” Babcock explains in a telephone interview July 10, “we’re talking tens of billions — maybe $30 billion, $40 billion or more — in crop insurance payouts this year.”

And if it stays in just Illinois?

“Payouts in Illinois are going to be large, very large,” reckoned Gary Schnitkey, a University of Illinois extension economist, July 11.

Big payouts

In fact, writes Schnitkey on the U of I farmdocDaily website, if 2012 Illinois corn yields are similar to those of 1988, the last major drought, or about 105 bu. per acre, then 2012 “harvest price would $7.40 per bushel, resulting in a $318 per acre insurance payment.” (Link to all source documents at www.farmandfoodfile.com)

That means 2012 insurance payouts for Illinois corn alone could top $3.2 billion.

Toss in the state’s soybeans, then add the drought’s effect on corn and bean yields from Ohio to Kentucky and Nebraska to Minnesota and, quickly, Babcock’s “ginormous” estimate is more realistic than fantastic.

Insuring revenue. While most farmers buy crop insurance — it’s a terrific bargain: Taxpayers picked up $7.4 billion of last year’s $11.9 billion national cost — the program doesn’t insure crops; it insures crop revenue.

Higher food prices

That means insured farmers can recover a substantial portion of their lost income but consumers, the same folks that paid 62-cents of every dollar of crop insurance premium in 2011, aren’t insured against anything — especially not against higher, drought-driven food prices.

And food prices will climb

Central Illinois cash corn prices rose from $5.80 per bu. on June 1 to $7.73 July 9, an explosive 35 percent spike in five weeks. Cash soybean prices were up 23 percent over the same period.

Additionally, nothing in current crop, weather or government stocks reports show any evidence of retreat. Indeed, on July 11 the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s World Outlook Board dropped 2012 estimated U.S. corn yields 12 percent and cut soybean yields nearly 8 percent because of the “rapid decline in crop conditions.”

Bare cupboards

Even if the weather moderates, commodity and food prices likely won’t because on June 1, the Commodity Credit Corporation, USDA’s commodity warehouse manager, reported the government cupboard bare as Mother Hubbard’s.

Indeed, according to CCC, there is not one teaspoon of sugar, one pound of peanuts, one slice of butter, one wheel of cheese, one bushel of wheat or even one chickpea in USDA’s pantry. CCC has nothing — nada, zip, goose egg — to release into the marketplace to slow or moderate what’s certain to be fast-climbing food prices in the coming months.

Reform

Worse, all that bad news will soon be compounded by more Congressional quackery. Both the Senate and House versions of the not-yet-passed 2012 farm bill use crop insurance as their new tool to “reform” farm program spending.

That’s right; only Congress could come up with a core farm and food policy tool, crop insurance, that doesn’t insure crops and doesn’t ensure adequate food stocks and then sell this “reform” as a “cost saving” in the year when, in fact, crop insurance payouts will demolish any and every record.

Hey, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a farm bill.

Hello Again,

Farmers in our area have really embraced the new forms of electronic technology. A lot of farm families now have a computer and Internet service.

More and more of you are getting your grain or milk prices electronically, and the majority of you are able to check the weather forecasts on your smartphones.

Wow, things have changed since grandpa’s time! Keeping up with the times is now a little easier using the Farm Service Agency’s GovDelivery system. GovDelivery is the new email notification system that FSA is now using to deliver program information and news updates electronically.

GovDelivery is a one-stop shop for the most up-to-date USDA program information. Through FSA’s GovDelivery electronic news service, you have lots of options to choose exactly how you would like to receive federal farm program information.

Options include receiving updates by topic, by state, and/or by individual county. When you go online to subscribe to the email service, you can select as many subscriber options as you want.

County-specific

This is a great feature for those of you who farm land in several counties or across state lines because it allows you to receive updates from each specific county in which you operate or have an interest.

Anyone can sign up for the GovDelivery system to receive free USDA information. The GovDelivery system allows farmers, bankers, crop insurance agents — practically anyone interested in receiving program updates and reminders within USDA agencies to sign up to receive information electronically.

FSA is utilizing GovDelivery to electronically provide agency news updates and program reminders directly to the customer’s inbox, smartphone and through text messaging.

Customers who do not wish to use the GovDelivery system will still receive some information in the mail; however, direct mailings will be severely reduced in this new electronic age. FSA will rely on newspaper media and local radio to get information out.

Follow legislation

With so much discussion about the farm bill this year, it will be important for FSA to communicate with our customers about new program announcements or if legislation has extended our current programs.

Signing up for email notifications from FSA is very easy. You can either visit or phone your local FSA office and register for free email updates or from your farm office, go online to www.fsa.usda.gov/subscribe and follow the online options.

You will be asked to provide your current email address and cell phone number.

That’s all for now, FSA Andy

Every week for 19 years this 170 square-foot, two-dog, one-person office has declared its complete devotion to numbers. For example, just last week we found it completely fascinating that in just three days this month 100 U.S. senators offered 302 amendments to an ag committee-approved 2012 farm bill that already ran more than 1,000 pages.

In comparison, the 3-by-5-inch booklet on my desk that contains the entire U.S. Constitution runs 38 pages.

Big numbers

More recently, two numbers — $210 million and $40 million — have bounced around this sunlit office. The first is the price Monsanto paid for Precision Planting, a Tremont, Ill. maker of after-market planting and harvesting equipment that it explains will “help farmers plant, harvest and analyze data from each field to improve yield and productivity.”

The latter number, $40 million, is “a performance-based payment” — presumably to Precision founder and seller Gregg Sauder — to continue to pump out ideas on “software, hardware and … production equipment” into what Monsanto calls a “rich pipeline (that includes) a system designed to help simplify variable rate planting and increase farmers’ yields through more accurate planting.”

At first glance the purchase price looks rich. Why would the world’s leading biotech seed company, a firm steeped in science and patent law, drop a quarter of a billion bucks on a tiny, albeit high-tech, farm equipment maker?

Explanation

Monsanto’s explanation, as far as it goes, is plausible. Precision will become a key element in its Integrated Farming System unit which will use “advanced agronomic practices, seed genetics and innovative on-farm technology” to, hopefully, grow more crops more “sustainably.”

Precision’s explanation, however, gets closer to why the deal was so rich for it and so important to Monsanto. According to the May 23 press release that announced the deal, Precision’s “new FieldView technology … offers an application designed to monitor all critical aspects of planter performance and crop data analysis …”

That means Monsanto bought the hardware and software it believes will accurately deliver “the optimum genetics to each square foot of soil.” It also means that at any point in the growing and harvest seasons Monsanto likely will know the dates, times, acreages, soil types, weather, seeding rates, yield, moisture content — in short, just about every hard number connected to any field — that uses its Precision technology anywhere in the world.

And that information won’t be limited to fields planted only to Monsanto-branded seed; it will be for any field planted with any seed, including any competitor’s, that uses Precision technology.

Value?

What would that information be worth to Monsanto? Maybe $250 million a year?

Before you noodle too hard for an answer consider that the USDA’s Farm Service Agency and Risk Management Agency will rely heavily on farm-gathered electronic data to manage USDA programs like crop insurance, CRP and, should Congress vote to continue, direct payments.

Already USDA is working to implement what it calls its Acreage Crop Reporting Streamlining Initiative that “allows producers to report common USDA program data” — planted acres, CRP acres, maybe crop insurance information — “just one time.”

Moreover, imagine some math wizard somewhere creating an algorithm that taps this trove of field-by-field information to extrapolate U.S. planted acreages before, say, the big USDA acreage report each June or get an angle on U.S. crop production before the big crop report each August.

What would that information be worth to him? Or, far more likely, what would that insight be worth to Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill? Just a tiny slice of that data pie — let alone the whole pie — might be worth far more than $250 million a year.

If so, then Monsanto acquired a golden goose for chickenfeed.

(This article is being updated as new information confirmed.)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate has approved the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012, S. 3240, also known as the farm bill, with a vote of 64 to 35.

The passage comes after a two-day consideration of more than 70 amendments, pared down from nearly 300 that were submitted. The vote was taken this afternoon, June 21.

Ohio’s two senators were divided on the bill, with Sen. Sherrod Brown voting for the farm bill proposal and Sen. Rob Portman voting against it. Likewise, in Pennsylvania, Sen. Robert Casey Jr. voted for the bill; Sen. Patrick Toomey did not.

On the House side

The House agriculture committee has yet to begin marking up their version of the bill, but is expected to take up the farm bill July 11.

U.S. House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., released a statement commending the Senate ag leaders, but added, “I’m not on board with everything they’ve done, but think that we’ll be able to work out our differences in conference committee.”

Peterson said it’s crucial that the House committee and the full House act quickly.

“Waiting until the mess that will occur during the lame duck session will not only make it more difficult, but could also result in several unintended consequences,” although he didn’t specify what those consequences are.
“If the House Ag Committee passes a bipartisan bill in early July, House leadership will then have little choice but to bring the farm bill to the floor before the August recess.”

Dairy reform

The nearly 1,000-page bill includes an amendment with the Dairy Security Act, supported by the National Milk Producers Federation.

Jerry Kozak, president and CEO of NMPF, said the dairy title contains a better safety net for farmers in the form of the Dairy Production Margin Protection Program, which offers a basic level of coverage against low margins, as well as a supplemental insurance plan offering higher levels of protection jointly funded by the government and participating farmers.

Those farmers choosing to enroll in the margin program will also be subject to a Market Stabilization Program that addresses the imbalance between supply and demand when farm-level margins are poor.

He hailed the bill’s passage as a “huge and historic step toward making a once-in-a-generation improvement in the safety net for America’s dairy farmers.”

Fighting for jobs

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., ranking member of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, in a prepared statement released after the bill’s passage, said crafting farm bills are never easy.

“Historically, we have had to overcome not only the usual partisan divide in Washington, but those along regional lines too. This is nothing new,” said Roberts, who is working on his seventh farm bill. But then he added a little party rhetoric.

“For this farm bill, however, we had the added difficulty of negotiating in a bad economy with out-of-control federal deficit spending.”

“I decided to fight for a farm bill because the people of Kansas elected me to do everything in my power to fight for policies that provide stability, job creation and economic growth for the nation and for rural areas in particular,” he added.

Amendments to the nutrition title of the bill to close loopholes, cut administrative costs and address fraud and abuse failed on a party line vote, Roberts said.

Solid bill

Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in a prepared statement, that “while no farm bill is perfect, this is a solid bill that was worthy of Senate approval.

Stallman said the Senate bill “protects and strengthens the federal crop insurance program and provides a commodity title that attempts to encourage producers to follow market signals rather than make planting decisions in anticipation of government payments.”

He also emphasized “having a new farm bill in place this year is overwhelmingly in the best interest of our members.”

In mid-June, the best guessers on Capitol Hill handicapped a probable 2012 Farm bill this way: either the Senate passes its version by the Fourth of July to push the House to act by late summer or no farm law will pass until after the November general election.

That either-or view takes in a lot of political, legislative and budgetary territory.

Lacking leadership

First, it suggests the House, the traditional birthplace of farm legislation, today lacks the leadership, bipartisanship and votes to steer the nation’s food and fiber policy without a roadmap from the Senate.

Second, the House’s failure ratchets up the pressure on the Senate’s chief aggies, Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow, the Ag Committee’s chair, and Kansan Pat Roberts, its ranking member, to get their crop-insurance heavy, no-direct-payments bill through that politically poisonous body.

It’s a tough row to hoe.

Disappointment

By June 7, the day before the Senate was to open its farm bill debate, many senators were sufficiently disappointed with the committee bill that they had filed 90 amendments to add to or alter it. By June 11, the day debate was to begin, the amendment list had ballooned to 188. A day later, when debate finally began, amendments numbered 230.

Paring that hog-choking number down to something manageable fell to Stabenow and Roberts. Roberts, however, carries a disadvantage; his boss, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, was one of five ag committee members to vote against the bill when it cleared the committee in late April.

Insurance program

Roberts also must deal with the cotton, rice and peanut gang from the solidly republican south. None are pleased that the pending bill leans heavily on new insurance programs at the expense of traditional payment schemes. And, oh, one of their champions, Saxby Chambliss, is a former Senate Ag chair.

Long-time Hill vote counters say it’s unlikely the Southerners can derail the Stabenow-Roberts’ insurance idea. “Count ‘em all and you still only have 20 or so votes,” says one. “That’s a long way from the 41 needed to kill the bill.”

If Roberts placates the grits gang, however, other Republicans threaten.

Welfare bill?

One, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., labeled the Senate bill “a welfare bill.”

Saving money?

Another, tea party heavyweight Jim DeMint, R-S.C., called the Senate farm bill “an affront to American taxpayers” because its backers “have the nerve to tell the American people (it) saves money” when the law’s estimated 10-year cost is $969 billion compared to the current farm bill’s 10-year price tag of $604 billion.

Democrat Stabenow must soothe her colleagues, too.

Crop insurance caps

Her boss, Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin, from corn-soybeans Illinois, wants the taxpayer’s share of the Senate’s expanded crop insurance scheme capped for the biggest of the big farmers. Another, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, seeks major reforms in the sugar program.

But Stabenow, in a conference call to reporters June 13, maintained the bill would move forward, that some solution to the amendment backlog would be found and that southern worries would be soothed.

What the chairwoman didn’t mention was that the bill’s major “reform” to U.S. farm policy, a huge expansion of crop insurance, is neither reform nor farm policy.

If prices fall… Indeed, Daryll Ray’s Agricultural Policy Analysis Center at the University of Tennessee wrote another missive June 8 — that’s four in four weeks — to, again, argue that a farm policy built on crop insurance will quickly turn into a taxpayer and farmer boondoggle should ag prices fall. (See links to all at www.farmandfoodfile.com.)

Ray’s warnings echo predictions for the 1996 farm bill, Freedom to Farm. That one, engineered also by Pat Roberts when he chaired the House Ag Committee, cost three times its projected $42 billion because what everyone said wouldn’t happen — a drop in farm prices — happened.

Buy the highest level of crop insurance! The Senate bill largely banks on that same hope. As such, a prudent manager might want to buy the highest level of crop insurance available.

‘Course, if prices do bleed lower, that highest level will be too low to help.

CARROLLTON, Ohio — The bad news for Carroll County farmers is that the county Farm Service Agency office is closing. The good news, for now, is that there is no timeline as to when the doors will close.

Making it official

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack made the closure of five Ohio FSA offices official May 29. The closure process is to begin immediately.

Five counties

The county offices confirmed for closure in Ohio are: Carroll, Clark, Meigs, Montgomery and Perry counties.

David Baird, executive director of the FSA offices in Tuscarawas and Carroll counties, said the Carroll County office will remain open during the crop certification process, and an exact date for closing has not been set.

After the Carroll County FSA office closes, producers and landowners will need to travel to the Tuscarawas County office in New Philadelphia to complete paperwork or talk to an FSA employee.

“For now, it’s business as usual, as we get through the crop certification process,” said Baird.

But Baird said he expects the office to be closed by 2013.

Pa. offices closing

In Pennsylvania, seven FSA county offices will close as part of the measure.

They include the Blair County office in Hollidaysburg; Carbon County office in Lehighton; Fulton County office in McConnellsburg; Lebanon County in Lebanon; Mifflin County in Burnham; Perry County in New Bloomfield; and Wyoming County in Tunkhannock.

Farm bill 2008

The 2008 farm bill called for the closings. First, USDA identified FSA offices located less than 20 miles from another FSA office that had two or fewer permanent, full-time employees. Additionally, the proposal included all FSA offices with zero permanent employees regardless of location.

BURTON, Ohio — Connecting the urban side and the rural side of the farm bill isn’t going to be easy. Throw in the differing views from both sides of Congress, and most would say it is a monumental task to get a farm bill written.

Farm bill 2012?

Yet, Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-11, is confident that it can be accomplished in 2012.

Fudge visited the Hastings Dairy Farm in Burton, Ohio, May 23.

The meeting was designed as a listening session so Fudge could hear what really matters to the people who are affected by the farm bill.

Urban and rural stakeholders had the opportunity to share their experiences and tell Fudge what parts of the farm bill need funding.

Progress?

Fudge is a member of the House agriculture committee and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Department Operations, Oversight and Credit.

She told the group that the Senate has passed its version of the farm bill and the House of Representatives expects to pass its version of the bill by the August session.

Fudge said the farm bill is much more than just a pathway to help farmers.

She explained because of the district she represents, she has had a lot of contact with the Cleveland Food Bank and the issues that surround it through the farm bill. She knows how important it is to residents in her district that the food bank receives all the funding possible.

Urban and rural

One thing Fudge and those testifying at the hearing agreed upon is that there are more common issues for the two groups than not.

One item that appeared to be a bridge between the groups was ensuring funding continued for farmers to be able to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for food banks.

SNAP benefits. Another issue both sides commented on was trying to make it easier for those receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP to be able to use them at farmers markets so that they can gain fresh fruits and vegetables.

Another issue is helping markets gain access to EBT machines so that the urban areas can receive the fruits and vegetables they need and pay for them electronically. However, that usually costs the farmer money and raises the price of the produce.

On the rural side of the aisle, some of the same issues were mentioned.

Fruits and vegetables

Eric Cotton, a grape grower in Lake County, talked about how specialty crops need to have a place in the farm bill.

He explained he and others like him would also like the SNAP program expanded to make it easier for those using it to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables.

He urged Fudge to find a way to make the farm bill flexible and diverse.

One example he provided as to why it needs to be flexible, was pests.

“We don’t know what will happen in five years, we can’t predict everything. We don’t know what pests will invade in that time period and what we will need to help protect crops and farmers,” Cotton said.

Crop insurance. Sparky Weilnau, a sixth-generation corn, soybeans and popcorn producer, also spoke at the listening sessaion.

He and two other farmers spoke about crop insurance and why it is needed.

“We as farmers need a strong safety net,” Weilnau said.

He explained that low commodity prices, high input costs and the weather present possible problems for farmers.

“There are no questions in my mind that the cycles will continue and farmers will suffer in the future if there is not a safety net,” Weilnau said.

He added that without government support for crop insurance, the price burden for farmers becomes too much, and they can’t afford it.

MILC. Brenda Hastings, a dairy farmer who hosted the hearing at her farm, talked about the necessity of MILC payments and why the payments necessary. She discussed how Ohio may be producing milk, but the cost of commodities to provide the feed for the cattle keeps going up which makes the MILC payments necessary.

Hastings also talked about the limits placed on the MILC payments depending on how many cattle are being milked at the farm. She used her farm as an example and explained they were only allowed to use the MILC payments for two and half months. However, smaller operations are able to obtain MILC payments for an entire year.

Program funding

Pam Haley, a state trustee for the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation and farmer, expressed how important the EQIP and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) funding is and how farmers need it to continue conservation projects. She also told Fudge that by completing EQIP projects, farmers are working to keep their neighbors safe because the funding can be used to help keep animals out of streams and ditches.

“We don’t want a free paycheck. We just ask for a safety net,” said Haley, as she also pointed out the need for crop insurance.

All connected

Ohio Farm Bureau Federation President Steve Kirsch, of Chillicothe, also spoke during the day. He said he listened to both sides during the session and concluded that the issues presented from urban residents and rural producers are diverse. However, there is some common ground in some areas but all deserve to have adequate funding in the 2012 farm bill.

Read Will Flannigan’s take on the Congresswoman’s visit here.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Dairy programs in the draft 2012 farm bill can reduce milk-feed margin volatility, which has plagued milk producers in recent years.

Yet the proposed law does not cut milk supplies and continues the U.S. role in milk export markets.

“It’s important to note that farmer participation in the dairy program is voluntary,” said Scott Brown, University of Missouri dairy economist who testified to Congress on the measure earlier this spring.

Feed ratio link

A major shift in the dairy bill aims to protect producer margins rather than supporting milk prices, Brown said. In addition, producers can buy additional protection above the government base program to further reduce risks.

The new dairy bill would kick in when the price received for milk sinks too close to the cost of feed.

In the past, dairy programs were tied to milk price. Rapidly rising feed costs in a time of low milk prices hit dairy farmers hard starting in 2009, when milk receipts dropped $10.5 billion, the biggest loss since the start of records in the 1920s, Brown said.

What’s proposed

The proposed Dairy Security Act of the farm bill includes two programs: Dairy Producer Margin Protection and Dairy Market Stabilization.

A producer choosing the margin program also becomes subject to the stabilization program. Producers can receive payments from the margin program and face restrictions under the stabilization options.

The margin defined in the law uses an all-milk price less calculated prices for corn, soybean meal and alfalfa.

Under stabilization, producers have limits on their milk production that receive market revenue.

More on margins

Under margin protection, producers will be paid based on their coverage level and USDA reported margin.

Generally, milk prices and feed costs are correlated, so margin payments tend not to occur often. However, when they are out of synch and margins shrink, producer payments would be triggered.

Brown said his computer dairy model shows infrequent need for payments based on low margins, and that the stabilization program runs for short periods, unlike past dairy programs.

The new programs reduce federal payments, one goal of Congress in writing the 2012 farm bill.

His numbers

Program payments depend on producer participation. Rather than estimate farm enrollment, Brown relied on representative-farm research by Texas A&M University.

From that, he assumed 70 percent of the U.S. milk would be enrolled. Brown ran 500 options, a stochastic approach, using different market assumptions in the model. Results were compared with a 10-year milk-production and price baseline.

Results showed only a slight decline in milk production compared to the baseline.

One finding, Brown told Congress, was that producers can reduce risk from low margins by participating.

Volatility also drops. Brown said producers should study buying additional margin protection. The base program is triggered at a milk-feed margin of $4 or less.

“Risk-averse farms can consider buying higher protection up to $8 milk-feed margins,” Brown said.

The analysis of the draft dairy bill shows only small declines in U.S. dairy exports.

For the most part, because of the response to low margins and stabilization of volatility, the dairy program would not operate for long periods. That reduces federal spending and market interference.

The policy came out of Foundation for the Future, a plan from the National Milk Producers Federation. Legislation based on that work was introduced by Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., and Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, in 2011.

Editor:

The U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee did the right thing when it approved a farm bill that contains much-needed change in federal dairy programs, including provisions outlined in the Dairy Security Act. Dairy farmers in the Upper Midwest will benefit from these changes.

The dairy provisions of the Senate farm bill will provide all dairy farmers with a more reliable safety net. The proposed changes will spur innovation in developing new dairy products, and it will help co-ops and other Midwest processors compete in growing world markets.

The Senate’s legislation includes a new, voluntary margin protection program to better safeguard farmers against disastrously low margins, such as those generated by the low milk prices and high feed costs that cost dairy farmers $20 billion in net worth between 2007 and 2009.

This policy was originally developed by dairy farmers, who came together to craft dairy policy that will allow the U.S. dairy industry to be more responsive to markets and provide a better safety net than the programs of the past.

The new margin insurance program replaces a strictly price-based safety net with a program that accounts for milk and feed prices together. It also allows for coverage of more of the country’s milk production than current programs.

Producers are able to participate at varying levels of coverage depending on their needs and comfort levels. Producers also have the option of not participating. If they are comfortable with managing their own risk, or don’t want to be subject to the Market Stabilization Program, they don’t have to sign up.

By removing the “Dairy Product Price Support Program,” we are letting world markets know that the U.S. is a full-time participant. We’re telling customers that the United States is a committed supplier, stopping the practice of leaving the export market in low-price times — just when we need markets the most. And, milk prices become regulated by demand rather than dairy policy.

The Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program was too restrictive in terms of who could participate. It also wasn’t always activated in times of low producer margins.

The Market Stabilization Program (MSP) is designed to kick in only when shrinking demand squeezes producer margins. It’s a temporary program that helps to amplify market signals when there’s more milk being produced than there is demand for fluid milk and dairy products. Once supply comes in balance with demand, the program stops. If world prices drop significantly below domestic prices, the program stops.

When the program is not in effect, there are no restrictions on either entering the industry or growing an existing operation.

As producer directors of our respective dairy processing cooperatives, we have been involved in formulating the policy provisions of the Dairy Security Act and believe it offers the best chance to provide sorely needed reforms to federal dairy policy. We urge the entire Senate to approve the bill that was passed by the Senate Agriculture Committee.

We need a dairy program that gives American dairy farmers consistent access to growing world dairy demand and provides security for all producers.

Randy Mooney,

Rogersville, Mo.

(The author is chairman of the board for Dairy Farmers of America. The letter was also signed by David Scheevel, Preston, Minn.,chairman of the board with the Foremost Farms USA Cooperative; and Pete Kappelman, Manitowoc, Wis., chairman, Land O’Lakes, Inc.)

The reason no picture (other than that of my mug) accompanies these commentaries is simple: If a picture is worth one thousand words — or about 300 more words than are printed here — I’d be out of business faster than you could say “digital photography.” As such, we journalists paint “word” pictures and, given our very limited skills, we usually paint by numbers.

Real numbers, hard numbers, irrefutable numbers that, by themselves, tell a story or add to a conversation.

For example, “Our population trajectory means that from now to 2030, the world will need to build the equivalent of a city of 1 million people in developing countries every five days.”

That’s the opening sentence to the United Nation’s recently released report Food and Agriculture: The future of sustainability.

More numbers

Here are more of its numbers:

– “We now face astonishing levels of waste, 30-40 percent of all food… never makes it to market and consumers in rich countries waste as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa.” and

– “For the first time in history we have as many overweight people as under-nourished people…”

(Link to the report and other supporting documents at www.farmandfoodfile.com.)

Takes new thinking

Building a new city of 1 million people every five days for the next 18 years will require new strategies on how to find more and better use life-sustaining essentials such as food, water, soil and energy. And since these essentials deeply interlock — agriculture, for example, uses nearly 80 percent of all water today — any new strategy for one will have a huge impact on all.

Other mind-boggling numbers

Other numbers are equally illustrative.

Will the latest banking mess, this one by the banking biggie J.P. Morgan, push Congress and the White House to double efforts to regulate how banks use their own funds, the so-called Volker Rule?

It’s hard to know, but one thing we do know is that when banks, led by J.P. Morgan, learned they couldn’t kill the Volker Rule in banking reform they worked to make it ineffectual.

This past February, reports Jesse Eisinger for ProPublica, an independent, non-profit news service, they succeeded.

“Bank lobbyists with complicit regulators and legislators took a simple concept and bloated it into a 530-page monstrosity of hopeless complexity and vagueness. They couldn’t kill the rule. Instead, they are getting Congress and regulators to render it morbidly obese and bedridden.”

And now J.P. Morgan is again rattling global markets because of fat, complex bets the bank made with “Volker” money that even it can’t explain.

Ag not immune

We do the same in agriculture. How else can you explain the monstrosity of hopeless complexity and vagueness that is the beef checkoff where 660 directors in 45 different state beef councils hope to impact the 106-member checkoff board that is accountable to 535 members of the same Congress that gave you the 530-page Volker Rule?

A similar situation exists in the soon-to-be-expanded federal crop insurance program. From 2000 to 2010, “taxpayers contributed more than $42 billion” to the “15 private companies” that administer the program,” according to a December 2011 story in the Atlantic magazine.

That tab will go higher under 2012 farm bill ideas because a bigger share of crop revenue, not crop yields, will be insurable. That means revenue shortfalls, not just production losses, will trigger more and bigger payments.

Last year, a good production year, taxpayer subsidies for crop insurance totaled $7.3 billion.

According to the Government Accountability Office, premium subsidies are expected to average $7.8 billion per year from 2012 to 2016 for a five-year total of $39 billion.

But that’s less than direct program payments received mostly by grain and cotton farmers from 1995 through 2010. Those payments totaled $167.3 billion, or about $11.2 billion per year.

Is that the picture farmers want taxpayers to view: $7.8 billion of subsidies, not $11.2 billion? And how does that policy approach supply food and drink to one million new global citizens every five days?

Hard numbers, hard questions and even harder answers. Maybe that’s why I’m not smiling in that picture.<

Danger prowled Capitol Hill shortly after the Senate Ag Committee approved its version of the 2012 Farm Bill April 26.

The trouble wasn’t from folks who might have lost out when the committee “streamlined” 23 conservation programs into 13 to “save” nearly $6.4 billion over the next 10 years or from angry farmers who, if the Senate bill holds sway, will lose more than $5 billion a year in direct farm program programs beginning in 2013.

No, the real danger that day was getting a bipartisan slap in the kisser if you asked any committee member what part of the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012 contained any reform, food and jobs.

Changes

Certainly, the legislation contained big changes: $4 billion in cuts to nutrition programs, a Rural Development title that cut over $1 billion in the coming decade and, touted Ranking Member Pat Roberts of Kansas, “over SIXTY (his emphasis) authorizations eliminated from the Research Title,” cutting “at least $770 million over 5 years.”

Cutting agricultural research programs and chopping Rural Development is neither wise nor brave. It is easy, however, like taking lunch money from weakest kid on the school bus and declaring “Look what I found!”

Crop insurance

The centerpiece of the Senate farm plan is an expansion of crop insurance, the fastest-growing hottie chased by everyone in Congress because it looks both great and cheap. Two recent examinations of it, however, say it is neither.

Study 1

The first, authored by Iowa State University economist Bruce Babcock for the Environmental Working Group, claims a crop insurance program that “covers crop losses of more than 30 percent” — yield shortfalls, not today’s heavily subsidized revenue guarantees — could be given free to all farmers and save taxpayers “$26 billion in premium subsidies over 10 years,” $3 billion more than the entire Senate bill saves. (Links to the 25-page Babcock report and other documents are posted at www.farmandfoodfile.com.)

The reason, explains the report is because “over 80 percent of ‘crop’ insurance policies now insure business income even if there is no yield loss … This has doubled the cost to taxpayers …”

In practical terms, writes Babcock, that means “the average unsubsidized premium” for a 15 percent deductible “revenue” protection policy on a Champaign County, Ill., corn farm is $52 per acre.

After the federal subsidy, however, the price plummets to $26. A similar, 15 percent “yield” policy carries an $11 per acre subsidy and, after application, costs $17 per acre. So, what would you do if you could insure 85 percent of total revenue — a guaranteed yield and a guaranteed price — for $26 per acre or just 85 percent of yield at $17 per acre?

You’d spend the extra $9 because it offers more coverage, less risk and carries a bigger subsidy. And that’s exactly what has happened; farmers use the bigger subsidies to, wisely, “buy up” coverage. As such, federal crop insurance subsidies have soared from $2.4 billion in 2001 to $9 billion in 2011.

Study 2

A second study, done by the Government Accountability Office, calculates that if crop insurance subsidies were capped at $40,000 per individual — “as it is for other farm programs” — federal costs would have been $1 billion cheaper in 2011.

More staggering, adds GAO, the $40k limit would have affected only 3.9 percent of all “participating farmers, who accounted for about one-third of all premium subsidies …”

Against that evidence, Senate aggies fattened today’s fast-expanding crop insurance program even more, and House aggies are on record ready to join ‘em at the subsidy trough because, as Babcock writes in his report, “The only rationale for a new federal revenue guarantee program on top of existing revenue insurance programs is that it seems politically easier to defend than direct payments.”

But crop insurance, fat or lean, is not a farm program. “Crop insurance will not provide protection against price declines that occur across years that typically persist across multiple years,” warns University of Illinois extension specialist Gary Schnitkey.

As such, the Senate’s Farm Bill is like trading sugar water for Kool-Aid. It’s a sweet deal for farmers, but it’s just more empty spending by Congress.

Click here to see what lawmakers had to say about the bill.

WASHINGTON, DC — Dairy organizations had conflicting things to say about the most recent version of the farm bill, which was approved by the Senate Agriculture Committee April 26.

The Senate legislation includes a new, voluntary margin protection program endorsed by National Milk Producers Federation, to better safeguard farmers against “disastrously low margins” like those seen between 2007-2009.

“The Senate has taken a huge step in the right direction by including the dairy reforms modeled after NMPF’s Foundation for the Future program,” said Jerry Kozak, President and CEO of NMPF, in a statement to media. “We commend Senators (Debbie) Stabenow and (Pat) Roberts for their leadership and diligence in shepherding the farm bill past this point.”

Safety net

Kozak said the dairy title contains a better safety net for farmers in the form of the Dairy Production Margin Protection Program, which offers them a basic level of coverage against low margins, as well as a supplemental insurance plan offering higher levels of protection jointly funded by government and farmers.

Those who opt to enroll in the margin program will also be subject to the market stabilization program that asks them to reduce milk output when margins are poor.

The committee also approved two amendments to the dairy title of the farm bill: One that authorizes a review of the market stabilization program at the end of the five-year farm bill lifespan; and a second that extends the Milk Income Loss Contract Program (MILC) program through June 2013, at a reduced rate, so there is a safety net in place while the U.S. Department of Agriculture implements the new dairy margin insurance program.

DFA support

“By including provisions of the Dairy Security Act in the (bill), the committee has taken an important first step in truly reforming the dairy safety net, providing producers the tools they need to remain competitive in the global market and facilitate the industry’s growth and long-term sustainability,” said Dairy Farmers of America Senior Vice President John Wilson.

“Since the devastating dairy economy crash of 2009, dairy farmers, industry organizations and cooperatives —including DFA — have worked to develop a new system that better protects the interests of producers in a highly volatile industry,” he continued. “The dairy provisions included in the (bill) provide producers options to protect their margins and the ability to strengthen exports, both of which will be instrumental in maintaining the vitality of the U.S. dairy industry.

The National Farmers Union said it welcomes the adjustments made to the new Agriculture Risk Coverage program, which will allow farmers to choose a coverage plan that allows them to best manage their risk. Additionally, the temporary extension of the Supplemental Revenue Assistance (SURE) program to cover disaster-level losses suffered during the 2012 crop year and of the MILC will provide “needed protection during the transition period” as the next farm bill is implemented.

But NFU President Roger Johnson expressed concern “that the legislation does not do enough to protect farmers and ranchers against long-term price collapses. A program such as the Market-Driven Inventory System (MDIS) would help protect against such collapses and should be implemented in the final bill,” Johnson said.

International Dairy Foods Association praised the margin insurance program for giving farmers “the ability to manage price volatility” without including a supply management policy that “discourages investments by dairy food companies and takes away opportunities for dairy farmers to expand production. ”

IDFA argues against the dairy market stabilization program, saying it will “raise consumer prices, hurt exports, cost thousands of new jobs and stifle investments in new facilities.”

Soybeans

American Soybean Association President Steve Wellman said “ASA is encouraged that the bill includes a revenue-based risk management program that is equitable between crops, and will partially offset losses incurred at either the farm level or the county level.

“Other key features of the bill include its consolidation of multiple conservation programs, targeting of conservation funding toward conservation measures on working lands versus land retirement, authorization and funding for the new Foundation for Food and Agriculture, full funding of the Foreign Market Development Program (Cooperator) and Market Access Program (MAP), and mandatory funding for ASA’s two Energy Title priorities, the Biobased Market Program and the Biodiesel Education Program.”

The policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Fred Hoefner, said “the committee was able to make sure that hardworking farmers — not mega farms and absentee investors (who do not farm) — are the key beneficiaries of farm programs.”

The Sustainable Ag Coalition also praised the Sodsaver provision, which protects native grass and prairie lands. The provision reduces crop insurance premium subsidies and tightens program rules in a manner that will reduce the “taxpayer-funded incentive to destroy important grassland resources,” according to the coalition.

“These lands are diminishing at a rapid rate and protecting them provides ranching opportunities and economic, environmental, and recreational benefits to rural communities,” Hoefner said.

Local foods

The coalition also praised the committee for reauthorizing local food and organic programs, such as the farmers’ market and local food promotion program, and National Organic Certification Cost Share.”

The coalition criticized the committee for failing to provide “adequate funding for the beginning farmer and rancher development programs,” minorities and limiting resources for new farmers, and for not making “needed improvements” in farm to school programs.

Produce

Robert Guenther, senior vice president of public policy for United Fresh, said the committee “has confirmed what our members have been saying for quite a long time: Investments in fruit and vegetable producers translate into a healthy industry — from field to table — while creating job opportunities and improved nutrition for consumers.

The following provisions are for produce farmers

• Funding of $150 million annually for the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable program; annual funding at $50 million per year for DoD Fresh program to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to schools and service institutions.

• Investment of $70 million annually for the Specialty Crop Block Grant program. The Specialty Crop Research Initiative was funded at $25 million per year ramping up to $50 million by 2017.

• Increased funding of $60 million in 2013 up to $65 million 2017 for pest and disease management programs. The Market Access Program ($200 million per year) and Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops ($9 million per year) were fully funded.

• Hunger-Free Communities Grant Program for fruit and vegetable SNAP incentives was funded at $100 million over 5 years. Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Program was funded at $100 million over five years.

Click here to see what commodity leaders had to say.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The farm bill is on its way to the full Senate, following a bipartisan vote April 26 in the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

Authored by Committee Chairwoman Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Ranking Member Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the bill reforms food and agricultural policy by eliminating direct payments and emphasizing the need to strengthen risk management tools for farmers.

Properly called the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012, the bill would reduce the deficit by $23 billion by eliminating unnecessary subsidies, consolidating programs to end duplication, and cracking down on food assistance abuse.

“The Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012 will save taxpayers billions of dollars while promising a safe and healthy national food supply,” Stabenow said in a released statement. “By eliminating duplication, and streamlining and consolidating programs, we were able to continue investing in initiatives that help farmers and small businesses create jobs.

“We’ve worked hard to put together the best bill possible,” said Roberts. “We’ve cut deficit spending while at the same time strengthened and preserved programs important to agriculture and rural America.”

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said the bill overhauls the farm safety net, bolsters rural economic development and ensures access to healthy and affordable food. He is chairman of the Subcommittee on Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Food and Agricultural Research.

Brown called the bill “the most sweeping reform to agriculture policy in nearly 20 years,” adding that it “promotes Ohio agriculture, protects critical nutrition programs, promotes conservation,” and invests in farm-based renewable energy.

Highlights:

Here is an overview of what the bill would do.

• Eliminates direct payments. Farmers will no longer be paid for crops they are not growing, will not be paid for acres that are not actually planted, and will not receive support absent a drop in price or yields.

• Consolidates two remaining farm programs into one, and will give farmers the ability to tailor risk management coverage — meaning better protection against real risks beyond a farmer’s control.

• Strengthens crop insurance and expands access so farmers are not wiped out by a few days of bad weather.

Consolidates and Streamlines Programs:

• By ending duplication and consolidating programs, the bill eliminates dozens of programs under the Agriculture Committee’s jurisdiction.

• The bill consolidates 23 existing conservation programs into 13 programs, while maintaining the existing tools farmers and landowners need to protect and conserve land, water and wildlife.

Improves Program Integrity and Accountability:

• Increases accountability in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by stopping lottery winners from continuing to receive assistance; ending misuse by college students; cracking down on retailers and recipients engaged in benefit trafficking; increasing requirements to prevent liquor and tobacco stores from becoming retailers; eliminating gaps in standards that result in overpayment of benefits; and maintaining benefits for families in need.

Grows America’s Agricultural Economy:

• Expanding export opportunities and helping farmers develop new markets for their goods, and investing in research to help commercialize new agricultural innovations.

• Growing bio-based manufacturing (businesses producing goods in America from raw agricultural products grown in America) by allowing bio-manufacturers to participate in existing U.S. Department of Agriculture loan programs, expanding the BioPreferred labeling initiative, and strengthening a procurement preference so the U.S. government will select bio-based products when purchasing needed goods.

• Spurring advancements in bio-energy production, supporting advanced biomass energy production such as cellulosic ethanol and pellets from woody biomass for power.

• Helping family farmers sell locally by increasing support for farmers’ markets and spurring the creation of food hubs to connect farmers to schools and other community-based consumers.

• Extending rural development initiatives to help rural communities upgrade infrastructure and create an environment for small businesses to grow.

Moving forward

Bob Stallman, president of American Farm Bureau Federation, said the bill “is not perfect, but it is a suitable policy vehicle with sold framework on which to make further improvements. “Certainly, having a bill in place this year is in the best interests of all farmers.”

National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson said the bill will mean good things for jobs and farm-produced energy.

“This represents progress toward providing a fiscally responsible farm safety net directed to family farmers and ranchers,” he said in a statement. “The bill’s investment in rural America will create jobs and opportunities for farmers to continue providing energy and conservation benefits to all Americans.”

Hello again!

With favorable weather for working ground in most parts of Ohio, the Farm Service Agency wants to remind producers of highly erodible land conservation and wetland conservation compliance.

Highly erodible land conservation

FSA programs require compliance with HELC and WC provisions on form AD-1026. These provisions require producers to follow an approved conservation system on all highly erodible land planted to an annual crop as determined by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Be sure to have determinations made on any new land you plan to plant to annual crops. Also, if you will plant a different crop on your current cropland, check with NRCS to assure the new crop will qualify under your conservation system.

Wetland conservation

Wetland conservation provisions state that converting a wetland to make possible the planting of a crop will result in the loss of all USDA benefits. To avoid this possibility, it is strongly recommended that producers check with NRCS before starting to work in the fields.

Producers renting or purchasing land that may have a converted wetland status should check with their county office to learn if there are any restrictions.

Farm bill regulations provide that, unless exempt, persons are ineligible for benefits under certain programs administered by USDA if they: plant an agricultural commodity on a wetland that was converted after December 23, 1985; or convert a wetland after November 28, 1990.

Restrictions

FSA may not approve any loan or loan guarantee to drain, dredge, fill, level or otherwise manipulate a wetland, or to engage in any activity that results in impairing or reducing the flow, circulation or reach of water except in the case of activity related to the maintenance of previously converted wetlands.

The following provides permitted uses and restrictions of certain wetlands for compliance with wetland compliance provisions: wetlands can be farmed under natural conditions, but not converted; wetlands converted before November 28, 1990, cannot be planted to an agricultural commodity and retain eligibility for benefits; wetlands converted after Nov. 28, 1990, must either be restored to wetland status or mitigated to regain eligibility for program benefits; wetlands that can be farmed under natural conditions cannot be manipulated in any way, unless the NRCS determines the work would have a minimal effect on the wetland values; and wetlands converted before December 23, 1985, can be farmed and maintained.

Additional information about highly erodible land and wetlands is available at your local USDA Service Center.

That’s all for now,
FSA Andy

It was, literally, a sight for sore eyes. Two years ago March 12, trumpets blasted in Ankeny, Iowa, as America’s new gladiators for agricultural justice — U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., his antitrust chief Christine Varney, U.S. Department of Agriculture boss Tom Vilsack and hundreds of farmers — gathered for a day-long discussion on “competitive dynamics of the seed industry; trends in contracting issues, marketplace transparency and buyer power; and agriculture enforcement and cooperation at the Federal and state levels.”

This first-of-its-kind hearing was the start of a year-long, five-meeting examination into what many farmers and ranchers considered was the growing dysfunction, even out-right manipulation, of agricultural markets.

“(T)he central questions is,” posed Vilsack in his opening remarks, “are farmers and ranchers in the country currently getting a fair shake? Is the marketplace providing a fair deal to all who are in the farming and ranching business? Is there sufficient transparency?”

OK, the secretary can’t count.

Markets

But all three questions were, and remain, prescient. Many farmers and ranchers believe markets for inputs like seed and fertilizer have so few players that competition is nonexistent.

Livestock producers, especially cattle and poultry growers, have long complained about paper thin, contract-driven slaughter markets dominated by vertically integrated meatpackers.

Two years hence, however, nothing — not one major regulatory or ag antitrust case — has been brought. In fact, there’s been more backing up than moving forward.

Examples

For example:

The DOJ’s avenging antitrust angel, Christine Varney, is long gone and her replacement, Acting Assistant Attorney General Sharis Pozen, in her post since just last August, is on her way out in late April.

USDA’s efforts to strengthen rules and increase market transparency over meatpackers — showcased by its politically-charged, 18-month battle to update the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) — has been a well-documented bust.

And, in a show of pure political power, meatpackers and “their lackeys,” as Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley calls them, have lobbied Congress to drop all livestock market concentration provisions in the rewrite of the 2008 Farm Bill. Why not.

DOJ’s Antitrust Division, with its comparatively puny $160 million budget, 360 attorneys and 55 economists, is easily out-gunned by global ag players. It’s worse on the political side says ag concentration expert C. Robert Taylor, the Alfa Eminent Scholar and professor of ag economics at Auburn University.

In 2010 and 2011, Taylor gave presentations to USDA, DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission on the size and scope of global fertilizer cartels. Each, he recalls, led to lengthy discussions.

“But when it came time to talk about what to do,” recalls Taylor, “most said that if they proceeded to investigate they’d get a phone call from Capitol Hill in 10 minutes telling them their agency’s budget was being slashed.”

That pressure continues to ensure the big will get bigger.

Proof arrived March 20, when Viterra Inc., a $12 billion grain merchandiser that handles 45 percent of all western Canada grain, announced it was selling itself to Glencore International, a $186 billion global giant with grain trading assets from Australia to Argentina to Estonia.

As part of the deal, Viterra will sell its agri-products division to Agrium, Inc., a $15.5 billion-per-year company that labels itself “the largest global provider of agricultural crop input products and services.”

Reuters news service viewed the Viterra deal as the opening salvo in “a second wave of consolidation” for new agbiz players like Noble ($57 billion in 2010 sales) and Wilmar International ($44 billion in 2011 sales) to challenge the old “ABCD” lions — Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus — in world food markets.

Some fight

Three of ABCDs (Dreyfus, a private firm, doesn’t reports sales) posted $146 billion in collective revenue last year. Or about $120 billion more than the entire budget of the U.S. Justice Department.

COLUMBUS — The current strong grain markets are likely to limit U.S. farmers’ interest in putting ground in the Conservation Reserve Program, even with a signing bonus increase — to $150 an acre from $100.

In a move to get farmers to enroll up to 1 million new acres of land into the federal Conservation Reserve Program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced it would increase a one-time signing bonus for the program to $150 per acre from $100.

The increase will be available only to owners of approved land that features wetlands and benefits duck nesting habitat and certain animal species, including upland birds, the USDA said.

Is it enough?

But the increase may not be enough incentive to get more growers to forgo planting crops that have fetched record prices in recent months, according to Ohio State University ag economist Brent Sohngen.

That’s because the offer comes at a time when high crop and land prices are enticing more farmers to put the land into production.

Currently some 30 million acres are in the program, but 6.5 million acres are set to expire from conservation programs this fall.

Sohngen said with crops fetching higher prices — soybeans increased 9.5 percent last month to $13.13 a bushel — more farmers are likely to consider returning their farmland to crops rather than participating in CRP.

Record prices

With crop prices at historic highs due to increased global food demands and higher commodity prices that have caused land values to rise, more farmers are finding that they can make more profit by renting their land to other farmers for production, said Sohngen.

“You’ll probably be lucky to get 70 to 80 percent of land back into the program this year as more and more farmers are likely to take the risk and farm the land,” he said.

“It’s become a real tradeoff for some — have the guaranteed, stable payment to keep the land in CRP or take a chance to get a higher payment farming it.”

April 6 deadline

In Ohio, some 338,117 acres of farmland are currently enrolled in the conservation program, said Christina Reed, spokeswoman for the Ohio Farm Service Agency. Of those, 26,561 acres are set to expire this year, she said.

The general sign-up program for farmers who want to put land into CRP is from March 12 to April 6.

Also new this year, USDA said that producers whose land meets eligibility criteria for wetlands and certain animal species can enroll in the program at any time.

Land is chosen for CRP using an Environmental Benefits Index that considers wildlife, water, soil, air, enduring benefits and cost, to determine the environmental benefit of the land, according to Reed.

Program impact

One reason land is set aside in the conservation program includes efforts to reduce erosion, which can cause soil runoff that results in chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorus getting into streams, rivers and lakes, the USDA said.

The federal agency estimates that the program keeps some 600 million pounds of nitrogen and some 100 million pounds of phosphorus from making their way into waterways.

The conservation program also benefits the creation of wildlife habitat by the increase in planting of grasses, trees, wildflowers and other vegetation, said Marne Titchenell, an OSU Extension wildlife specialist.

More than money

Non-financial considerations are also often important for farmers and landowners when deciding to enroll in CRP, said Ohio State ag economist Carl Zulauf.

These considerations include whether to take on the task of finding and negotiating with a farmer on rental terms as well as the environmental benefits achieved by being in the program, he said.

Zulauf said a broader policy question exists. “What is the tradeoff between environmental advantages from CRP versus additional supply of commodities from farming land in CRP?

“Additional supply could benefit consumers, especially the poor, through lower food prices, so the question becomes how many acres should the U.S. withdraw from production to put in CRP?”

This question will likely be an issue in the 2012 farm bill debate, especially if commodity prices remain high, Zulauf said.

And Sohngen said if the U.S. refocused efforts on CRP to get the right land enrolled in the program, “we could do just as good a job of conservation with fewer acres.”