As president-elect Donald Trump enters his second term in office, perhaps one of the most quietly significant pieces of legislation to cross his desk will be the newest iteration of the Farm Bill.
The multiyear, comprehensive legislation touches on a wide array of issues concerning agriculture and includes 12 titles ranging from commodities, nutrition and crop insurance to trade, conservation and credit.
U.S. Sen. John Boozman, the Arkansas Republican who serves as ranking member of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, described the bill as “a five-year contract with our farmers, ranchers and rural communities that provides certainty and predictability for the work they do to grow, produce and raise the food we put on our tables.”
“Programs provided by the Farm Bill provide important tools for farmers to manage the risks of national disasters and market downturns while they feed, fuel and clothe our nation and people around the world,” he said.
He added that the Farm Bill also authorizes investments in rural communities, increases opportunities for U.S. trade and helps spur innovations in agriculture research.
“The Farm Bill is important to farmers because it ensures our nation’s food supply remains secure,” said Jay Robbins, director of national affairs at the Arkansas Farm Bureau. “The Farm Bill includes risk-management tools for our farmers, access to nutrition for low-income families, conservation programs and investments in agricultural research, and supports rural communities through the Rural Development Title.”
Jay Robbins
The title works to provide opportunities in rural communities so that people can move to or remain in rural areas without compromising educational prospects, job opportunities or quality of life.
Robbins added that the Farm Bill also provides certainty to farming and ranching families through crop insurance, supports new and beginning farmers, and provides needed funding for trade development.
The Farm Bill also supports programs that provide financial assistance to farmers and mitigate risk, ensuring that it remains profitable to farm and thereby helping keep food on tables in America and around the world.
For example, the Agriculture Risk Coverage program provides payments when farm revenue is less than a set amount, and the Price Loss Coverage program provides payments when prices for a commodity fall below a set amount.
The bill not only benefits farmers and consumers; it also helps conserve wildlife habitat, ensuring ample recreational opportunities in Arkansas and elsewhere.
Harvey Groves, Farm Bill coordinator at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Private Land Habitat Division, said the bill provides funding to restore and conserve wildlife habitat through various programs.
Harvey Groves
“It provides financial incentives to implement wildlife-friendly practices while they’re still producing on their ground on the farmer side and also, too, on the sides of the state that are not necessarily ag production,” he said. “There’s a lot of funding out there that incentivises landowners to do wildlife-friendly practices through the Farm Bill.”
The Conservation Reserve Program and Wetland Reserve Program help convert underused farmland to wildlife habitat. The CRP rents the ground on a 15-year contract, while the WRP is a permanent easement program, Groves said.
He added that the programs can help farmers increase their net income because they do not use resources on parts of their land that do not produce well.
“A lot of those grounds, they probably shouldn’t have been cleared years and years ago, but they were,” he said. “This allows [landowners] to take that ground and put it more into what it should have been or where it should have stayed, and then they’re not losing money on that.”
The programs have been a boon to waterfowl populations, including rare species such as the roseate spoonbill and king rail, as well as deer herds, which has added recreational value to the properties, in addition to making them more wildlife friendly, he said.
The Farm Bill provides funds for a number of other conservation programs, as well. AGFC partnered with the American Bird Conservancy to create Open Pine Regional Conservation Partnership Program No. 1, which provided $5.7 million for woodland restoration across 16 counties and parishes in south Arkansas and Louisiana, and was recently awarded funds for Open Pine RCPP No. 2, which will provide $21.25 million to 47 counties and parishes across the two states.
In addition, AGFC is the lead partner for the North Arkansas Quail RCPP, which provided $750,000 across six counties, and another Farm Bill-funded program, Working Lands for Wildlife, helps restore quail habitat on farms in western Arkansas while promoting responsible farming practices such as cross-fencing for cattle and eco-friendly water tanks.
Although the programs are primarily focused on conserving habitat for grassland birds such as the northern bobwhite quail, the programs benefit deer, turkeys and other wildlife too, Groves said.
Another program, the Migratory Bird Resurgence Initiative, provides $6 million a year for winter water habitat on unmanipulated rice fields, meaning the fields have not been disked. Groves said the program opens up new land for hunting on a limited basis while relieving hunting pressure on migratory bird populations.
The Migratory Bird Resurgence Initiative helps provide winter water habitat on certain rice fields, here, and projects such as the Open Pine Regional Conservation Partnership Program, below, provides habitat for grassland birds such as the northern bobwhite quail. (Photos provided by AGFC)
“It’s been hugely successful,” he said. “We’ve had lots of thank you letters for this. It gives Arkansas sportsmen a chance to hunt rice fields and, sometimes, in places where they wouldn’t have been able to historically.”
Not counting the CRP and WRP, programs funded by the Farm Bill have a total economic impact of about $40 million on Arkansas, he said.
“That’s a significant amount of funding that we need to come from the Farm Bill,” he said. “Our wildlife pays that bill if we don’t.”
Farming, at its core, is conservation, Boozman added.
John Boozman
“Farmers, ranchers, forest landowners take great care of our environment,” he said. “It’s important they have the tools to practice good stewardship.”
The first Farm Bill was passed in 1933, and there have been 18 Farm Bills in the years since, Robbins said. The bill is historically renewed every five years, and the last Farm Bill was passed in 2018.
In addition to providing a safety net for farmers, the Farm Bill provides funding for wildlife conservation efforts. (Photos provided by AGFC)
“If the Farm Bill is not extended, all the programs within the Farm Bill would return to the 1949 Farm Bill,” Robbins said. “Without a Farm Bill extension, authorization and funding for an array of programs would end or wind down, including everything from rural development to conservation, research and some nutrition programs.”
Boozman said it is essential to update the 2018 Farm Bill in a way that strengthens the safety net for farming communities. The COVID-19 pandemic, international trade disruptions, historic inflation, record trade deficits, increased input costs, depressed commodity prices and devastation caused by natural disasters are just a few factors that have negatively impacted farmers, he said.
“One Arkansas farmer recently shared that he had the best crop yield of his career, but he’s still underwater because commodity prices are well below the cost of production,” Boozman said. “Many farmers across the country are in this same boat. Unfortunately, this is a problem that can’t be resolved by planting more acres. Congress must act to develop a Farm Bill that meets the times.”
The current Farm Bill includes outdated risk management tools, he added, since the reference prices that make up the current farm safety net were established in the 2014 Farm Bill based on production-cost data from 2010.
“That means the current farm safety net is nearly 15 years old, and without the meaningful updates I’ve been calling for, it is ineffective in protecting against the current combination of historically high input costs and commodity prices that look more like what was seen in the 1980s,” he said. “This dynamic means producers cannot insure or produce their way out of this crisis and may be on their second or third consecutive year of operating in a deficit.”
In December, Congress passed a stopgap spending bill that included a one-year extension of the Farm Bill, as well as disaster assistance and economic assistance for farmers. Boozman said passing a new five-year Farm Bill is at the top of the agenda.
“Passing a Farm Bill that will be signed into law by President Trump is my top priority,” he said. “I am committed to working with the agriculture community, members of the committee, Congressional leadership and the incoming [U.S. Department of Agriculture] Secretary Brooke Rollins to support rural America through an improved five-year Farm Bill.”
In addition to modernizing the farm safety net to reflect current economic challenges, other priorities could include increased investment in trade programs, broadband expansion and agriculture research, as well as enhanced oversight of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to reduce payment errors, he said.
Robbins added that the Arkansas Farm Bureau would like to see a Farm Bill that strengthens risk mitigation measures, provides long-term investments in conservation practices, increases support for the Price Loss Coverage and Agriculture Risk Coverage programs, and increases statutory reference prices.
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