<b>By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER<br>
Ohio Correspondent</b> </p><p>

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The road to developing a 2007 farm bill has been long and challenging, and there is no end in sight, acting USDA Secretary Chuck Conner told the 89th annual meeting of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation.</p><p>
“The farm bill has been stalled in the senate,” Conner said. “This is frustrating for farmers who are eager to make their planning decisions for next year.”</p><p>
There is still time to produce a good farm bill, but passing it as it stands now would not be in the best interest of farmers, he said. The proposals the USDA offered in January contained reform, he said. The goal was not only to increase support for American agriculture but to enhance that support by spending as efficiently as possible.</p><p>
That also means trimming some fat, Conner said.</p><p>
Some reforms are necessary on outdated programs that are no longer serving their original purpose. One reform “is to put an end to what is referred to as beneficial interest or pick-your -price phenomena,” Conner said. “As our policy now stands, government payments can now be locked in by producers when the market price is low. They also have the option to hold off and wait to sell those crops until a much later time when the prices have recovered.”</p><p>
In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina and the price fluctuations that followed, the option of locking in low rates when the price was low and selling later when they had fully recovered generated payments of $3 billion to farmers.</p><p>
“While they were perfectly legal, they were not based on any actual loss on the farm,” Conner said.</p><p>
The Bush administration’s proposal would require that producers give up their beneficial interest in the crop at the time that they lock in the loan. This would ensure that producers receive the price support through the loan rate while eliminating the pick-your-price option (payments without corresponding losses).</p><p>
Another reform Conner talked about, that has been controversial, is the adjusted gross income cap of $200,000.</p><p>
“We believe this change would affect only about 38,000 people who are among the wealthiest two percent of Americans, yet it would generate by enactment over $1.5 billion in savings,” he said.</p><p>
He showed a map with red dots indicating how many large farm payments are going to the city of Manhattan. “It wouldn’t be a problem if this were Mercer County, Ohio, where people were working hard on the land, but this map is of Manhattan, New York City, and those big dots track millionaires living on Park Avenue in New York City,” Conner said.</p><p>
“These farm subsidies are paid for by taxpayer dollars. When we allow payments to go to people with adjusted gross incomes of more than $200,000, the flip side of that is we are asking 98 percent of Americans to subsidize the very people who are absolutely some of the wealthier Americans that exist. I believe that is wrong.”</p><p>
Conner repeated that he remains optimistic that the Senate can still put together a good farm bill that the president can be proud to sign this year.</p><p>
“Now is the time to put in place policies designed to continue the remarkable economic growth in agriculture we have seen over the last three years,” he said.</p><p>