After months of bickering, members of the U.S. House and Senate agriculture committees are optimistic that a deal on a new five-year omnibus Farm Bill is not far off. For farmers and hunger advocates in Vermont, an end to the uncertainty would be welcome.
Lawmakers in December passed a one-year continuation of the 2008 farm bill, which extended the act through the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30. A continuing resolution last month allowed certain farm conservation programs to continue operating, but other programs are on hold pending a new bill.
University of Vermont dairy agronomist Bob Parsons noted that while there are few immediate effects to Vermont farmers, the longer a farm bill is pushed off, the less farmers can count on programs that the bill funds, such as crop insurance, dairy support payments and loan and conservation programs.
For dairy farmers, prices have remained relatively high all year. In October, Vermont milk prices reached $21.90 per hundredweight (100 pounds of fluid milk), a price high enough that dairy support payments are unnecessary. But since most farmers sell their milk on the commodity market, any significant dip in price would leave them struggling to get by without a safety net.
Most drafts of the new farm bill have eliminated the Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC), the current dairy price support program, and replaced it with a plan that would tie dairy support payments to a program intended to reduce severe price drops. The program would tell farmers to drop production when prices start to fall, in theory preventing the cycle of overproduction that drove milk prices close to $12 per hundredweight in 2009.
The most recent version of the farm bill, passed by the House in July, split off nutrition funding and gutted dairy provisions. The bill went nowhere, since it was starkly different than the one worked out by House and Senate agriculture leaders.
But nutrition funding, particularly the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has been the primary sticking point in the negotiations over the farm bill. Traditionally, the combination of agriculture and food stamp programs in the bill has allowed it to garner a broad base of support from rural and urban lawmakers.
The Senate version of the bill makes $4 billion in cuts to the SNAP program over 10 years, while the nutrition bill that the House cleaved from the farm bill and passed in September cuts $39 billion over the next decade by significantly tightening program restrictions. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that over the decade, this reduction would strip 14 million people of SNAP benefits.
On Nov. 1, the SNAP expansion contained within the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expired, so all households receiving SNAP benefits saw a reduction in monthly benefits. For the approximately 100,000 people on 3SquaresVT, Vermont’s version of the federal SNAP program, the cut amounts to about $36 less per month for a family of four.
Top members of the House and Senate agriculture committees are expected to enter into negotiations this week, and Senate Agriculture Committee chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., was optimistic about reaching a deal within the month.
“I feel confident the four of us can come together,” she told Politico on Tuesday.
Joining Stabenow on the negotiating team are Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss.; Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn.; and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla.