Bird's Eye View

By James Cardinal

It sure has been a wet summer. In fact, in a recent conversation I was having with a cash crop farmer near Hilbert, he said that Calumet County (east side of Lake Winnebago) was the wettest county in the corn belt this summer. Not just the state, the entire region. Despite the rain, as I’ve driven around the state recently, the corn has been standing tall. In fact, the USDA put out a forecast two weeks ago that predicted that this year’s corn harvest will be 15.1 billion bushels. That would be the third largest harvest ever recorded. And soybeans are doing even better. The same report from the USDA predicted that the soybean harvest will be 4.6 billion bushels, setting an all-time record.

Despite difficult conditions, America’s farmers are feeding the world. But while farmers are doing their jobs, Congress isn’t doing theirs. Negotiations surrounding a new farm bill have broken down. There are plenty of policy and spending debates one could have about the provisions contained within the sprawling farm bill, but what’s not up for debate is the need for a new one. Without a new bill, the federal government is funding outdated programs from six years ago to fund everything from conservation practices to crop subsidies to food stamps, and everything in between.

The reason that the programs are so outdated is that when the five-year 2018 bill expired last fall, Congress kicked the can down the road. Instead of passing a new one, they simply extended the old one for another year, supposedly to give them time to work out the details of a new one. Now, that one-year extension expires next month and Congress, despite having an extra year, is nowhere close to passing a new farm bill. As the deadline draws nearer, it becomes more and more likely that Congress will extend the old bill yet again in order to get beyond the November election.

Failing to pass a new farm bill wastes taxpayer money and doesn’t allow for any reforms to current policy. Think about how long six years is, how much can take place during that time, especially the last six years. There are threats to the global food supply (i.e. Russia’s invasion of Europe’s breadbasket in Ukraine) and changes to how people shop and eat as a result of the pandemic that didn’t exist in 2018. In addition, the threat posed by climate change has continued to intensify over the past six years, as harsh weather and wildfires have changed growing conditions and timing. From an economic standpoint, agriculture has been impacted by post-pandemic inflation, something we’ve all felt at the grocery store in the past few years. As prices for equipment, fertilizer, food, labor, and seed have gone up, so has the cost of the farm bill to the American taxpayer.

Even the version of the farm bill in place now, the 2018 version, was an exercise in kicking the can down the road, with very little reforms or modifications made to its predecessor. The result is a marketplace in which the wealthiest farmers and landowners continue to rake in subsidies to grow corn for ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup despite the market being flooded with both. Perhaps even worse than the corn subsidies are the sugar subsidies which benefit only a very few rich sugar producers while driving up the price of anything with sugar in it. In both cases, the American consumer ends up paying more both in terms of taxes and at the store. Both need to be looked at and either eliminated or reformed.

One change that was made in the 2018 version was a removal of restrictions on how the president could use the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corp. As a result both President Trump and President Biden misused the funds, Trump to pay tens of billions of dollars to farmers who were hurt in his trade war with China, and Biden to promote climate change policies without Congressional approval. Restrictions on how those funds can be used need to be put back in place.

These are just a couple of the badly needed reforms that have to be included in a new farm bill. We cannot afford to simply extend 2018 policies which no longer meet the challenges and needs of today’s marketplace. And while the House has gotten a bill out of committee, it’s doubtful that it has enough votes to pass because Democrats don’t support the Republican bill, and it’ll add billions to the federal deficit so many Republicans also won’t support the Republican bill. In the other chamber, the Senate has yet to produce a farm bill at all. Time is running out, America’s farmers desperately need a new farm bill that has policies aimed at the current climate of farming, not the climate of six years ago.