UPDATE, 4/18/2018, 3:50pm:Today, the House Agriculture Committee failed to give farmers the farm bill they want. After 4-plus hours of rancorous debate, the committee advanced the chairman’s deeply flawed bill on a party-line vote, 26–20. We expect the full House to take up the bill in the coming weeks.
Last week, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee made headlines by unveiling a truly terrible farm bill proposal, one that dramatically undercuts the nation’s most successful nutrition assistance program and threatens to throw the entire farm bill process into chaos. His committee is set to vote out the measure this morning, though Democrats haverejected it out of hand.
Beyond this highly partisan bill’scynical slap at millions of low-income peopleand their communities, there’s also very little for farmers to like. Deep cuts to incentive programs that help them protect water quality, conserve soil, and build resilience to floods and droughts are among the bill’s many disappointing aspects, along with a failure to invest in connecting farmers with new local customers. In stark contrast,a poll released todayshows that farmersacross the political spectrumare eager for precisely the kind of tools and incentives House Republicans have firmly turned their backs on. And soon they may be looking for political candidates who will give it to them.
Survey says: Farmers want more support for local, sustainable agriculture
The new pollwas conducted in March by Iowa-basedRABA Researchon behalf of UCS. Using telephone interviews supplemented by an online questionnaire, the researchers queried more than 2,800 farmers in seven states—Iowa,Illinois,Kansas,Michigan,Ohio,Pennsylvania, andWisconsin—to better understand how they are thinking about farm policy and sustainable agriculture.
You might expect that farmers would regard thefarm billas an important piece of legislation, and the poll shows that they do. Fully three-quarters of them said the farm bill is “somewhat” or “very important” to their personal livelihoods. In an era ofdeep cynicismabout the ability of Congress to helpfully affect the lives of everyday Americans, it’s a striking number, and it particularly contradicts recent news reports suggesting that rural America “doesn’t have time” for the farm bill.
Digging a little deeper, the researchers uncovered even more surprising results:
- Three-quarters of farmers surveyed said it’s important to the future of farming for farm policies to offer incentives for farmers to take steps to reduce runoff and soil loss, improve water quality, and increase resilience to floods and droughts.That number was even higher in some states—76 percent in Ohio, 78 percent in Kansas, and a whopping 84 percent in Iowa. The finding indicates that farmers are keenly aware of the negative impacts of agriculture on our water and soil resources—and, withextreme weather becoming more common, they are concerned about their ability to cope. Farmers urgently want tools to minimize these impacts.
- Furthermore,74 percent said that strengthening the hand of farmers in dealings with companies that control the production chain is important. This view directly contradicts the recent action by theTrump administration and Secretary Sonny Perduetoend the USDA’s Farmer Fair Practices Rules,这将为p有公平的竞争环境oultry and livestock farmers in contracts with the giant corporations that control meat production and processing and made it easier for those farmers to sue the companies for unfair treatment.
- Similarly,74 percent of farmers said farm policies should support research on ways to increase farm profitability by decreasing the need for costly chemical inputs. They might not call itagroecology, but that’s what it is andwhat it does, and farmers wantfarm policy to fund more of it.
- And69 percent of farmers said policies should help connect farmers with new buyersthrough marketing arrangements like food hubs and farm-to-school programs. These are the kinds of arrangements UCS and other groups have advocated for in the bipartisanLocal FARMS Act.
- Most astonishingly,these results hold across the partisan divide. Poll respondents spanned the political spectrum but leaned heavily Republican. Across the seven states, 55 percent of respondents were Republican, 20 percent Democratic, and 25 percent other.
QUESTION: I’m going to read a list of ways that US farm policy can shape agriculture in the years ahead. Answer yes or no to indicate which you think are important to the future of farming.
It’s election season, and farmer-voters are looking for change
Perhaps the most striking finding in the poll is this: Farmers are looking to back political candidates who will deliver innovation and sustainability for agriculture.
A surprising72 percent of farmers across the seven states said they would be more likely to support a candidate for public officewho seemed to favor farm success through sustainable agriculture priorities instead of business as usual. That number was even higher in some states—74 percent in both Michigan and Pennsylvania. (Swing states, anyone?)
And remarkably, that high level of support wasn’t dependent upon party affiliation, but was held by 76 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of those who identified politically as “something else” across the seven states.
QUESTION: If a candidate for public office seemed to favor farm success through sustainable ag priorities instead of business as usual, would you be more or less likely to support that candidate?
This finding shows that an overwhelming majority of farmers are seeking change in the federal government’s priorities for supporting US agriculture. And why should we be surprised? The poll was conducted just before tensions over trade with Chinathreatened to erupt into a full-scale trade war—in whichfarmers would be early casualties. But those trade tensions are merely compounding the trouble farmers have faced in recent years asprices of leading US farm commodities have plunged. Farm income is将触及12年低点this year, leaving many farmers uneasy about the status quo and looking for new solutions.
House farm bill offers less—not more—of what farmers want (and farm groups call BS)
The bill the House agriculture committee will vote on today neglects or actively undercuts precisely the programs that our poll shows farmers want. Existingworking land conservation programsprovide incentives and technical support for farmers to adopt science-based practices—like plantingcover cropsandmore diverse crop rotations—that reduce erosion and water-polluting runoff, lessen the need for expensive chemical inputs, and build healthy soil to buffer farmers from the impact of floods and droughts. The bill on the table todaycuts nearly $5 billion from these programsover 10 years, and completely eliminates theConservation Stewardship Program—a program so popular with farmers and already so underfunded that in recent years it has had to turn away as many as 75 percentof qualified applicants.
At the same time, the House farm bill as written also largely fails to take on provisions of theLocal FARMS Act, a bipartisan proposal meant to expand the customer base for small andmidsize farmerswhile improving access to healthy food (which is inadequate for15.6 million US households). By overlooking the Local FARMS Act—which includes provisions to strengthen farm to school programs, promote farmers markets, and otherwise build connections between farmers and local consumers, especially low-income individuals and families—the authors of today’s bill are bypassing an opportunity to create jobs and establish reliable revenue streams for struggling farmers while also increasing access to healthy and affordable food for more of our neighbors.
Congress can do better—and we need to tell them
All this has ledfarmandconservation团体join health and anti-hunger groups inpanningthe House farm bill proposal. The National Farmers Union—while attempting to be positive—similarlyexpressed frustrationwith its failure to give farmers what they need:
“[C] ongressional领导严重残废the committee’s ability to address the six-year, 50 percent decline in the farm economy. While they’ve shown little regard for spending and deficits this Congress, they’ve failed to provide adequate resources for food and agriculture at a time of grave financial strain on family farmers and ranchers. This is irresponsible and harmful.
The draft bill that the House Agriculture Committee will vote on today is so fundamentally flawed, we don’t expect many opportunities to strengthen it through the amendment process. But here are two areas—the Local FARMS Act and the SNAP program—where we may be able to make the bill more responsive to the needs of farmers and the public interest.
Tell Congress to fight for farmers and healthy food in the farm billtoday.