LITTLE ROCK — During Wednesday’s Arkansas Farm Bureau annual convention, Gov. Mike Beebe told nearly 1,000 farmers, ranchers and farm industry insiders that federal lawmakers need to treat farmers fairly while trying to reduce the deficit.
“I fear what is going to happen in [Washington],” Beebe said. “All of us are going to have to suffer a little bit. Farmers, like the rest of us, will have to take cuts. But we need to be rational and we need to keep food prices low.”
The recent failure of a bipartisan special congressional committee seeking to reduce the nation’s deficit means the proposed 2012 farm bill starts anew. The House and Senate agriculture committees recommended $23 billion in cuts to agriculture funding over a 10-year period.
Senate Agriculture Chairman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.; Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.; House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla.; and Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., had hoped to push the farm bill through the supercommittee to avoid even bigger cuts when the current farm law expires at the end of next year.
However, farmers and farm lobbyists, including the Arkansas Farm Bureau, thought the cuts were disproportionate to other programs whose budgets also were being cut.
Joe Christian, a member on the Arkansas Farm Bureau board who grows soybeans and rice near Jonesboro, said he’s glad the supercommittee failed because now lawmakers can start over on the 2012 farm bill. The current farm bill expires in September.
“There will be more input and it will be more transparent,” he said. “[Politicians] should cut everything the same. If everything got cut by 1 or 2 percent, it wouldn’t hurt that bad.”
One of the issues with the proposed farm bill was the elimination of direct payments. Growers get the payments regardless of crop yields or prices. Instead, the committees recommended bolstering crop insurance, said Stewart Doan, senior editor of Agri-Pulse, an agriculture newsletter that follows public policy.
“That pitted [groups of farmers] against each other,” Doan said.
Doan added that federal lawmakers will start debating the new farm bill in January.
According to rice and soybean farmer Steve Orlicek of Arkansas County, the current farm bill provided a “safety net.” Though commodity prices are high right now, which means farmers don’t need as much in direct payments, Orlicek said that when prices fall farmers will need those payments.
Otherwise, he said, it will be too expensive to farm and supply would suffer, causing food prices to spike in the U.S.
“My biggest concern about the 2012 farm bill is there isn’t going to be enough money,”Orlicek said. “Agriculture makes up a [tiny] percent of the entire budget. We just don’t have the numbers that other groups have” to be treated fairly.
Another issue brought up during the convention was U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
Arkansas Farm Bureau President Randy Veach, while addressing the crowd at the Peabody Little Rock hotel, said the EPA “doesn’t have a clue about what [farmers] do.”
He said regulations should be crafted by lawmakers instead of by the EPA. He added that farmers need to police themselves with regard to the environment, because it gives ammunition to groups pushing for more regulation.
“One bad actor can ruin things for everyone,” Veach said.
Orlicek noted he never moves too quickly to adjust for EPA mandates because the agency “changes [its] mind a lot.”
Business, Pages 27 on 12/01/2011