A new Farm Bill will be written in 2007. We can only guess about some of the changes that will take place, but some of the major changes will take place in Farm Programs. Here is an article written by Sonja Hillgren, this article is on the web page AgWeb.com.

Goodbye Farm Programs, written by Sonja Hillgren

For the most part, Congress has given farm groups the legislation they sought over the past five decades, says Alan States, a wheat, corn, sorghum and soybean producer from Hays, Kansas. "Unfortunately, what we've gotten has been counterproductive," he adds.

Unless a gradual transition away from commodity price protection begins soon, says States, U.S. agriculture will be overwhelmed by a tsunami when support is lost. "To be realistic, we have to start now," he said.

States serves on a 23-member committee of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) that spent two years drafting a vision for U.S. agriculture in 2019, the 100th anniversary of the organization.

The committee report, entitled "Making American Agriculture Productive and Profitable" (MAAPP), is not yet official AFBF policy, emphasizes William Sprague, the committee chairman, and former president of the Kentucky Farm Bureau. Nonetheless, Sprague warns, "We feel we should start it sooner rather than later to make this transition as smooth as possible."

A brake on change. But the Farm Bureau is in no hurry to heed its own warnings. Tom Jones, a MAAPP committee member and cattle producer from Pottsville, Ark., likened sweeping change in 2007 to pulling the rug out from under agriculture. Even States says a phase-out should span 20 years, to give agriculture industry time to adjust.

In official policy embraced at the AFBF annual meeting in Nashville last month, delegates voted to extend the current farm bill until a new World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement is reached and endorsed, extending concepts of the 2002 law into the 2007 bill.

If change is necessary and a favorable global trade agreement is achieved, the delegates said, farm programs could come from a menu of conservation payments on working lands, risk management, enhanced crop insurance, revenue assurance, direct payments or commodity loans.

New farm programs, if enacted, would emerge in challenging times. Noting swelling federal budget deficits, the MAAPP report observes, "Nearly all growth in future federal spending will be concentrated in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest payments on the federal debt."

In addition to the successful Brazilian cotton case against the U.S. farm program before the WTO, "other nations are lining up to bring future complaints against it," the report says. While rejecting unilateral disarmament if other countries are unwilling to dismantle their protection, the MAAPP report also says that quickly unraveling support for farmers would have serious consequences for agriculture and rural America.

"Agricultural land, through property taxes, often represents the majority of support for rural schools and rural county infrastructure and is the asset base for many producers and their financial portfolios," the report says. "Land is the basis for several institutions in the banking and credit systems." The ultimate goal, says the report, should be WTO-compliant, revenue-based farm income safety net available to all agricultural commodities.

Close to home. If federal spending for farm programs is scaled back, MAAPP concludes that funds should remain in rural America for world-class education, health care, infrastructure and water supplies. Farmers are more dependent on the viability of rural communities than rural communities are dependent on farming, States says. He says weak rural communities will drive people away from farming because an average of 89% of farm family income is earned off the farm.

With the number of mid-sized farms declining, only 143,000 farming operation produced 75% of the value of all agricultural products in 2002. It took 2 million operations to produce the remaining 25%. 

"Folks whether we like it or not, the structure of agriculture is moving away from those of us in the middle," says Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman. In spite of the hurdles, MAAPP member Ron Warfield, a Gibson City, Ill., producer says, "We envision a viable, productive and profitable industry in 2019."