At the 2023 Rural Economic Outlook Conference, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, caught up with Texas A&M’s Bart Fischer and talked about the next farm bill.
Aside from his role as Research Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University, Fischer is also the former Chief Economist of the House Agriculture Committee. Fischer was a key player in the 2014 and 2018 farm bills.
With everything going on in Washington D.C. at the moment, Fischer said it is hard to predict which direction things will go. One positive factor, Fischer said, is that Senator Debbie Stabenow has announced her retirement soon, so she will have a great interest in completing the farm bill and doing a good job of it.
“We don’t know how the process is going to unfold, but it will unfold, and eventually, we will have a new farm bill,” Fischer said. “For me, right now, the message I conveyed this morning was it is much more important to get a good farm bill done at this point.”
One topic Fischer touched on at the conference was the common misconception that if a farm bill is not reauthorized, there will be no crop insurance. Crop insurance, he added, is authorized outside of the farm bill.
Conservation programs such as EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program), Fischer said, were reauthorized until 2031 last fall during the Inflation Reduction Act.
“Ironically, a lot of the farm bill has already been reauthorized,” Fischer said.
Certainly, Fischer said there are plenty of smaller programs in terms of funding that need to be reauthorized, but the biggest yet to be reauthorized is Title I.
Looking back to the 2014 farm bill, Fischer said thanks to Congressman Frank Lucas, one of the signature pieces of Title I was the inclusion of the Livestock Forage Program.
“Now we go into this farm bill with LFP permanently paid for already, and we don’t have to go through that process this time around,” Fischer said.
Fischer said having to wait a year or two for a completed farm bill is not the end of the world if it means charting a better course for the years that will follow.
In the words of Frank Lucas, Fischer said, “We write farm bills for the bad times, not the good times.”
