By LINDA McGURK
Indiana Correspondent DANVILLE, Ill. — Farm subsidies, the ethanol boom, renewable energy and water-conservation issues were all on the table when U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) visited the Ohl Brothers Farm east of Danville on Aug. 20 to make a push for his proposed farm bill legislation and to seek feedback for his ideas from local farmers.
About 40 farmers listened to Durbin make a case for a farm bill that replaces the current price-support programs with a two-tier revenue-protection model.
“Farm programs in the past have been very focused on price,” Durbin said. “Now there are many of us (in Washington) who are talking about a new approach. Price protection is no good if your yield is low, and we want to be able to protect farmers in a bad year.”
In Durbin’s bill – co-authored with U.S. Sen. Sharrod Brown (D-Ohio) – the government would provide payments if a farmer’s income falls below 90 percent of the forecasted revenue for a specific crop, based on historic county averages. Farmers would also rely on private revenue insurance to cover losses beyond what the government covers.
Durbin expects his bill to meet resistance from rice and cotton growers as well as from farmers in states with marginal production, who are the biggest benefactors from the existing system.
“It’s going to be uphill, but I think we can sell the concept of revenue protection,” he said about his bill’s chances in the Senate. “It’s going to be a tough year politically to get (a farm bill) passed, but I think we will.
“One of the difficulties we run into is money. Another is trade agreements, which limit some of the things we can do.”
Some of the disagreements about the future farm bill have also concerned the issue of payments to millionaire farmers and corporate mega farms. President Bush favors barring payments to farmers making more than $200,000 per year, but when the House of Representatives passed its version of the farm bill on July 27, it put the cap at a more generous $1 million.
Durbin said he’s for payment limitations for farmers with gross incomes in the $200,000-$250,000 range, since his bill is mainly geared to help local family farmers. “It’s embarrassing to me that payments are going to people who haven’t seen a farm in generations,” he said.
Some farmers in the audience were worried about losing their counter-cyclical payments and loan deficiency payments in the 2007 farm bill, especially if prices take a dive in the increasingly volatile commodity market. But Vermilion County farmer Jim Ohl, who co-hosted the event with his brother Mike Ohl, said he’s mainly hoping the bill will contain adequate support for renewable fuels.
“Anytime we’re able to utilize our corn and beans here at home instead of (importing) a barge of oil is a good day,” he said, adding, “We’re not looking for government subsidies; we just want to be able to sell our crops.”
The farm bill will likely reach the Senate floor in October, by way of the Senate Agriculture Committee. After that, a conference committee will hammer out the differences between the two versions, and what the final bill will look like is still anybody’s guess.
Mike Cunningham, a Bismarck, Ill., grain farmer and feedlot operator who attended the meeting, said it’s too early for him to determine whether to support the Durbin-Brown bill.
“I can only speak for myself, but I feel that when crop prices are high, Durbin’s bill is probably a better deal, but when prices are low the House version is better,” he said. “There are pros and cons to everything.”
As the director of the Illinois Soybean Assoc., Cunningham said one of his main concerns is whether the bill contains enough support for soybean and biodiesel production. “With the current farm bill, they put the floor (for soybean prices) too low. Corn has gotten a lot of counter-cyclical payments, but soybeans haven’t gotten any, so I’d like to see that floor raised,” he said.
Danville resident Tony Augustine said he learned a little more about the farm bill after listening to Durbin, and commended the senator for seeking feedback directly from the people it will affect.
“I think we mostly need to make sure farmers have a good, solid safety net,” Augustine said. “Agriculture is the foundation of the whole economy and wherever agriculture goes, the economy will go.”
This farm news was published in the Aug. 29, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
