Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is catching up with Congressman Frank Lucas to discuss the minibus appropriations bill’s impact on agriculture, the farm bill, and more.
Lucas first discussed the minibus appropriations bill, which included spending on Agriculture and FDA. This bill will be part of the effort to avert the government shutdown.
Within the directives document for USDA/FDA- available here– one thing that jumped out in our first reading of some of the details of policy found in this measure includes language that Congressman Frank Lucas and others have been demanding regarding the need for the US Secretary of Ag having a seat at the table at CFIUS:
“The agreement makes the Secretary of Agriculture a member of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) with respect to covered transactions involving agricultural land, biotechnology, and industry. The agreement requires the Secretary to notify CFIUS of agricultural land transactions reported under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) that may pose a risk to national security. For these purposes, the agreement provides a $2,500,000 increase in the Office of Homeland Security for CFIUS reviews and a $1,000,000 increase in the Farm Production and Conservation Business Center to improve AFIDA reporting.”
As Lucas has been working for quite a while on the foreign land ownership issue, he said it became incredibly more important when Oklahoma went into the medical marijuana business and suddenly developed many different entities owning property throughout the state.
“I had a difficult time getting the attention of my colleagues in Congress, because it just didn’t seem like that exciting of an issue,” Lucas said. “A few years back, when it turned out the Chinese had purchased farmland near military bases, suddenly the folks up here woke up. Then with the drug issues, that woke up more people. In this appropriations bill, that six bills which fund a big portion of the federal government, passed out of the House and now waiting to go to the Senate, use the language that I have worked on literally since I wrote a letter to the GAO in 2022 asking them for review of foreign land ownership.”
While the minibus appropriations bill contains matters that are important to rural America, Lucas said until recently, this issue has not been of high focus at USDA under the Biden administration.
“The bill also includes money for the reporting process to go from pieces of paper to electronic of this stuff so that we will be able to pursue it, and it makes, in particular detail, the Secretary of Agriculture a part of the CFIUS board because of the national food security issues, which secretary Vilsack agreed a long time ago he needs to be on that board, and now we are bringing it to fruition,” Lucas said.
Lucas said the set of bills passed in the minibus should have been passed last September.
“Funding the basic operations day-to-day at USDA is important,” Lucas said. “The farm bill provides mandatory money for crop insurance, price protection, a variety of programs, but the salaries, the expenses of running the operations, the computers, the software, all of that stuff was funded by the annual appropriation.”
Now, Lucas said the government is funded until the end of September 2024, and the appropriations committee is set to begin work on the fiscal year of 2025.
“There are so many things like the Farm Bill, reauthorizing the Weather Act, NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) that must have spending allocation numbers to be written,” Lucas said. “Until this appropriations cycle, which hopefully will be completed in the next ten days, is done, then we can’t discuss spending for the coming year and make the allocations for the various committees.”
Lucas said there is work to be done, but he is confident that there will be a 2024 farm bill because many individuals working on the bill have the incentive to complete it promptly.
“If we get it to the White House, it will be signed,” Lucas said.
Regarding the SEC’s ruling earlier this week to remove Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions reporting requirements for farmers and ranchers, Lucas said even though this was an important victory, the battle will continue as he sees more rulemaking attempts in the future.
Lucas also discussed the recent wildfires and those impacted in Texas and Oklahoma. During his road tour to the area, Lucas said many of the pastures he saw looked like something out of the 1930s.
“Those pastures were blowing sand,” Lucas said. “That will take a while to overcome the environmental damage.”
