After many tedious hours of drafting and negotiation, the U.S. House Agriculture Committee passed farm legislation on July 20 that for the first time includes specialty crops as a major part of the bill.
Congress is preparing to reauthorize legislation that will be in place for the next several years. That’s excellent news for Arizona crop growers, the nation’s fifth largest producer of specialty crops. Specialty crops grown in Arizona include lettuce, carrots, onions, melons, potatoes, spinach, broccoli, cantaloupes, grapes and gourds, among others.
“We represent about 50 percent of the farm gate in this country and we deserve representation in the farm bill,” Paul Simonds, communications manager for Western Growers Association said in a phone interview last week.
Western Growers Association is the nation’s leading agricultural trade association, representing more than 3,000 Arizona and California growers, packers and shippers of specialty crops. Simonds said his organization wants the government to invest in the specialty crop industry because Congress has appropriated billions of dollars over the years for traditional farm crops like corn, soybeans and wheat.
Western Growers is a member of the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance, which developed legislation that focuses on a safer, healthier and more nutritious food supply, the Equitable Agriculture Today for a Healthy America Act (EAT Healthy America Act). “The Farm Bill is no longer just a domestic support program,” said Thomas A. Nassif, president and CEO of the Western Growers Association in a July 19 guest opinion in the Tucson Citizen. “It’s not enough for congressional leaders to continue down the same tired, outdated path, addressing only the needs of the traditional program crops.”
The Arizona Department of Agriculture would also like to see support for specialty crops, said department spokesman Ed Hermes. “Providing funding for research, marketing, and other promotional methods for specialty crops in the farm bill is essential to keep Arizona agriculture strong and promote healthy, nutritious foods,” Hermes said.
The department is also calling for the farm bill to open up the USDA’s commodity, conservation, and disaster assistance programs to ensure specialty crop producers have more of an opportunity to participate. Hermes said the department supports not only an increase in funding but also a permanent allocation for the Specialty Crop Block Grant that was authorized in the Specialty Crop Competitiveness Act of 2004.
Under the legislation proposed by the committee, programs related to specialty crops would receive between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion over five years. Only $200 million was provided to specialty crops in the 2002 farm bill with no block grants awarded to states. The 2007 House bill contains $365 million for state block grants.
Legislators weigh-in
State Sens. Marsha Arzberger and Jake Flake said farming is still a very important industry in Arizona and is one that needs to be taken into consideration as Congress takes up the reauthorization this year. “I think when they’re discussing the farm bill they need to discuss farming policy in the entire nation,” Arzberger said. “There is a lot of agriculture in Arizona yet.” Arzberger, D-25, said farming and agriculture need to be looked at as a national industry and one of the reasons for that is to secure food supply particularly in areas where the industry is threatened by terrorists or other nations.
The United States, she said, is very dependent upon many imports of food. “From an all-around security standpoint, that does not put us in a secure position,” Arzberger said. While she agrees some reform is needed when it comes to subsidies, she also believes there is a need for subsidies if they are directed to maintain the family farmer, whom she says is disappearing from the country.
She also emphasized the importance of water savings and other conservation programs that are available. “Some of these farm subsidies, at least a considerable amount of them are directed toward conservation,” Arzberger said.
The government provides funds and the farmer provides funds and the combination of the two allows more efficiency in water systems.
“Nothing grows in Arizona without irrigation. So you replace an irrigation method that uses heavy use of water with a much more efficient water use and you’ve just conserved water,” Arzberger said.
Sen. Jake Flake, R-5, was in Washington last week lobbying for the farm bill on behalf of Farm Credit Services. Flake said he’s been a board member of the organization for over 35 years. He’s now on the national council and meets with members every six months to discuss agriculture financing.
Flake said he went to the nation’s capital to lobby for more expanded authority to be able to loan money to related industries like grain, seed industries, fertilizer, wineries and for people who either sell to farmers or use farm products.
Although he’d like to see the country get away from subsidies, he said, he does see the importance of them to Arizona farmers. The main subsidy Arizona farmers benefit from is for growing cotton. “Without that subsidy, you couldn’t afford to grow cotton in Arizona,” Flake said. “It would put those farmers out of business.”
One of the rationales, as far as subsidy crops go, he said, is that it holds down the price for the consumer. “If we didn’t get those subsidies, the farmers can’t afford to raise them and the price of food would then skyrocket,” Flake said. He said if the subsides went away, food prices and welfare payments would increase and so it’s really a question of whether to pay the subsidy to keep the farmer in business or let food prices rise and pay more welfare.
A large number of subsidies go to worthwhile conservation projects, Flake said. Conservation projects are necessary, he said, to make the land more productive. “When the land is worn out we need to restore it,” Flake said. “We need to make the best use of our water when we do get water.” He said most farmers in Arizona would like to see a bill that is very similar to the one that was done in 2002.
Flake said four members of Arizona’s congressional delegation didn’t vote for the farm bill in 2002 – Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, and Reps. Jeff Flake and John Shadegg. The reason being, he said, is because in order to get the votes need for the bill to pass, lawmakers start packing on pork projects. “Sometimes they don’t even relate to agriculture, like a library somewhere or a swimming pool or stupid things like that and you know how Jeff Flake is on stuff like that – earmarks,” Jake Flake said. Actually, Flake said, only about 21 percent of the billions that go into the farm bill actually goes to producers of crops for subsides of crops.
It comes as no surprise then that Congressman Flake, Jake Flake’s nephew, is co-sponsoring an amendment that would trim farm subsidies. The amendment called the “Fairness in Farm and Food Policy Amendment” would make reforms to current commodity programs in order to make them more equitable and fiscally responsible. The savings would then be reinvested in conservation programs that benefit farmers across the country and nutrition programs that promote healthier foods and fight obesity. The amendment, said Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., main sponsor of the bill, would save slightly more than $12 billion over five years. Approximately $3 billion would be added to conservation programs and funding for produce growers would rise to $2.6 billion.
This amendment comes as a response to the Agriculture Committee moving ahead with its own version of the farm bill and not accepting the sponsor’s prop
osed bill. The sponsor’s bill, titled FARM21, would have established farmer savings accounts and placed more money into rural development, conservation and nutrition. Matthew Specht, spokesman for Jeff Flake said, “We’ve kind of made some improvements to FARM21 and modified its set-up so it converts to an amendment rather than a stand alone bill.”
Kevin Rogers, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau, said his organization is “not thrilled” with Flake’s amendment. “It basically, in my opinion right now, stands against the structure of the farm bill,” he said.
It does away with the safety net for agriculture, Rogers said, and over a period of years eliminates the support to keep the food and fiber produced here in the United States relatively inexpensive. Rogers said the Arizona Farm Bureau has supported Congressman Flake over the years on several different issues such as trade and immigration reform, but this, he said, is one of those times where they differ strongly.
Arizona ag associations
Jim Klinker, chief administrative officer for the Arizona Farm Bureau, said he is closely monitoring an issue on payment limits that could penalize large farmers. Klinker said there’s a lot of debate about not allowing larger farms to participate in payment limits. What some would like to do in the next farm bill, he said, is keep large farmers from participating in the farm bill by receiving payments or subsidies.
That isn’t fair, Klinker said, because there are things that critics of this practice are not taking into consideration. He said one of the things in Arizona that needs to be taken into consideration is that the large farmers have the same costs as the small farmer, just more of them. “We’ve always had large farms in Arizona,” Klinker said.
They’re large, he said, because there are water costs Arizona farmers have to pay that Midwest ones don’t because they have more rainfall amounts. Large labor costs also come into play because they require more workers.
What’s driving this issue, he said, is the proverbial movie star or rich basketball player who might have a farm for investment purposes and the person who manages their farm might advise them to use the farm bill to receive payments just as other farmers do.
“I’m not trying to defend the movie star or the basketball player or sports star in participating in the farm program, but that discussion affects other large farmers and we have always had large farms in Arizona,” Klinker said. Arizona Farm Bureau believes if the farm bill is there for American agriculture, it ought to be there for all American agriculture, Klinker said.
Last week, the House Agriculture Committee passed a new farm bill (HR 2419). The bill, scheduled to go to the floor on July 26, is where the main test of the payment provision will come, Farm Bureau president Rogers said. As it stands, the bill bans federal subsidies to farmers with incomes averaging more than $1 million a year and stops farmers with multiple properties from collecting payments. The committee cleaned up that portion of the bill so that it’s only production family farmers who receive the benefits. The committee voted unanimously on the provision.
Rogers was in Washington this week to monitor the progress of the bill. He said his organization is pleased with the bill that passed committee. “We like the bill,” Rogers said. “There are things in it we wish weren’t there, but that’s OK. It was one of those negotiated things between the Republicans and Democrats.”
One item he disagrees with is that there is a change in what’s called the three-entity rule. That provision allows farmers to participate in three different farming entities basically in three partnerships. Rogers said under the bill the House Agriculture Committee passed, the three-entity rule has been eliminated. He would prefer to see the rule still there, Rogers said, but he understands the rationale of continuing to reform the program to make it more cost efficient. That, he said, helps lower the baseline or the budget.
“We hope that it will be passed and we’ll have a new farm law for the next five years that farmers and ranchers and really the citizens of this country can depend on to make sure we’ve got the food and fiber producers to ensure a reliable food source,” he said.
Chris Udall, executive director of the Agri-Business Council of Arizona, said as the state’s reclamation representative to the National Water Resources Association and a supporter of the Family Farm Alliance, they are primarily concerned with water issues and the focus on irrigated agriculture in the Western states. The organization’s primary mission, he said, is to work with the Bureau of Reclamation, whose mission is to provide water and power to agriculture.
Udall said they’ve been closely watching and supporting the Regional Water Enhancement Program the Bush administration is proposing. “It creates a new $1.75 billion, 10-year cooperative conservation program improving water quality and water conservation on working agriculture lands on a regional scale,” he said.
The council is also supporting the redesign of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) since both programs would be registered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Those programs, Udall said, give irrigation districts a chance to improve their infrastructure and water delivery capability.
The council is not directly involved, but is monitoring disaster assistance. Udall said in the 2002 farm bill, that provision literally saved the businesses of many farmers across the country.
Battle over last minute proposal — veto threatened
Fox News reported on July 26 support for the bill unraveled the day before as the White House threatened a veto because the measure doesn’t do enough to cut farm subsidies. Also, Republicans from farm states, who previously showed support for the bill, are now saying they will oppose the legislation because of a last-minute proposal to tax certain foreign-owned companies with U.S. subsidiaries. Those taxes, Fox reports, would partially pay for $4 billion in food stamps and other nutrition programs.
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said he had been up most of the night working with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to gain votes from Democrats who have opposed certain parts of the bill. The Democrat leaders agreed to shift money to international nutrition programs, for example, to gain support from Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass.
The tax proposal by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, has angered Republicans. The GOP sees Doggett’s proposal as a betrayal of a bipartisan effort to pass the measure. Also, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wrote Congress to emphasize the discontent the business community has with the bill saying the proposal would cost U.S. jobs by disrupting foreign investment and ruining relations with trade partners.
Peterson said he has the votes to pass the bill and said if the president vetoes it, the administration will have “failed rural America and all Americans” by opposing legislation that has broad support from conservation, agriculture, nutrition and renewable energy advocates.