June 27, 2017

Southeast Farm Press - Brad Haire

Gainesville, Fla., June 24, where the committee heard publically what needs changing, but most importantly, what doesn’t need messing with in the next bill.

To the backdrop of multiple years of suppressed prices for traditional farm bill commodities and farm incomes cut in half across much of the U.S. farm landscape, opening the session “Conversations in the Field,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway, from Texas, made a few points to the gathering:

• The next farm bill will come with harder choices to make and will have fewer resources in which to fund it than the 2014 legislation.
• There will not be the direct payments, which were done away with in the last bill. So, they will not be able to harvest that money back into the system again.
• He and the committee are driven to get next farm bill done on time. The current farm bill expires Sept. 30, 2018.
• The decisions that need to get made for September 2018 will not get any easier in October of 2018. “We’re just going to have to go ahead and make them. We hope to get it done on time, right, wrong or indifferent, to let you know what you have to live with the next five years: the producers, bankers, creditors, equipment dealers.”

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