By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Bob Stallman, American Farm Bureau Federation president, thinks the final version of the farm bill will be similar to the recently-passed House version.

In Ohio to attend the 2007 Ohio Farm Bureau Leadership Conference, Stallman talked about current issues, starting with the farm bill.

“Given the degree of support that bill has received from the agricultural industry, the nutrition industry, the conservationists, I think it’s going to be difficult for the Senate to come out with something that’s radically different, although there will be differences,” he said.

More Conservation Security Program incentives and a standing ag disaster assistance program were two possible differences Stallman mentioned.

“The budget is really the 800-pound gorilla in the whole debate – where do you find the money?” Stallman said. “While I think there will be some differences, at the end of the day I think it won’t be that far in terms of basic structure from what the House passed.”
Ohio Farm Bureau Federation (OFBF) members questioned Stallman about immigration. For agriculture, the solution is a flexible, legal program that allows workers who want to work in agriculture to cross the border, earn their money, improve their economic condition and then go back home in a legal fashion, he said.

The agricultural workforce is about three million individuals. About two million of those are farm family members. but a little more than 900,000 people are hired to work in agriculture. Probably more than half of those are illegal immigrants, Stallman said.
 “If we’re really successful at sealing off the borders, then particularly in the specialty crop sector, fruit and vegetable production, our economists estimate that 30 percent of production will shut down here in the United States and go outside the borders of this country ... because they can’t do it economically here,” he said.

Concerning ethanol, Stallman said it was an environmentally positive way to produce a renewable fuel supply to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy. While animal feed costs have risen where corn is the primary base, he said the marketplace would take care of that.

“Producers will plant for the market,” he said. “If prices are high, they’ll produce more of that product.”

Finally, Stallman expressed a concern about long-term, viable production agriculture in this country.

“Those young people who are going to be necessary to maintain our production system, whether they want to be farmers themselves or maybe want to work in the agribusiness sector, if they don’t see opportunity there they will abandon agriculture and agribusiness for other pursuits,” he said.

“A big part of what I do is talk about hope for the future and the fact that we have to have this production system. People have to eat, we have to continue producing food and fiber and fuel.”

In some farm families, parents are encouraging children to get an education and get off the farm, Stallman said.

“That’s not good,” he said. “We need to figure out a way to encourage those young people to come back – if not production agriculture, then the whole agribusiness sector, which is roughly 16 percent of our economy, if you look at it all the way from farm gate to consumer plate. There are a lot of opportunities there.”

This farm news was published in the Aug. 29, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.