The senior member of the US House Ag Committee is relieved to see movement in the House and the Senate on the respective Committee 2024 Farm Bill proposals. In talking with Oklahoma Farm Report’s Ron Hays, Lucas indicated “right now what we have seen from both Chairman Thompson in the House and Chairwoman Stabenow in the Senate are what I would call outlines of their bill proposals- so we are still waiting on hard language.”
Lucas hopes the details will be coming soon and that the promised markup of the Chairman’s mark in the House Ag Committee will happen before the end of the month. Click here for the outline we have at this point from Chairman Thompson.
Lucas says it’s no surprise that there are differences in what has been released- regarding House Chair Glenn Thompson “GT is very focused on the production side of the equation- how we raise the food and fiber, think crop insurance, think price protection and conservation and those kind of things.” Lucas adds the priorities are different for the longtime Chair in the Senate from Michigan- “Senator Stabenow has a particular focus on the nutrition side- always has- on the nutrition side- the SNAP program, what we used to call Food Stamps- so the bills that will come out of the Committee won’t look exactly alike and that’s just fine” as the key will be to get bills from both bodies to a Conference Committee “where we will work out our differences.” Click here for the details released by Chairwoman Stabenow.
Lucas warns producers this won’t be as easy as the 2018 farm bill process was- that measure was a fairly simple rewrite of the 2014 Farm Law when Lucas was chair and the farm safety net was updated in a significant way- the 2018 writers simply took what was in the 2014- added a few tweaks and they were done.
This bill needs support prices updated to reflect higher prices for crops as well as the much higher input costs that have evolved over the last decade. “As all of our producers out there know- from the safety net perspective, after the trade wars, after COVID, after inflation…the safety net is not as strong as it was six years ago and we have got to come up with a way to tighten that up if we are going to meet our obligations and feed ourselves.”
Lucas says he has learned in 2014 that Senator Stabenow will be a tough negotiator when and if we get to a Conference Committee between the House and Senate. Stabenow was on the other side of the table from Lucas in 2014 when the Farm Bill that was passed into law was negotiated and included the revolutionary Title One PLC and ARC provisions.
Asking Congressman Lucas to put on his Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman’s hat- he was very pleased with the full House passing the Weather Act Authorization back on April 30th. Lucas says the measure here in 2024 is building onto the improvements in weather forecasting that was asked by Congress back in 2017- he referred to the multiple tornado event in Barnsdall, Oklahoma this month- “when the Weather Act was passed in 2017, we were trying to improve the early warning efficiency and the average time for a warning on a tornado was eleven minutes. In Barnsdall after the improvements from the 2017 Act- they had a 44 minute lead time from the first tornado warning until it hit- that was a dramatic improvement from the 11 minute average before the 2017 weather bill took a effect.” He says one of the outcomes that he hopes can happen from the passage of the 2024 Weather Act would be to improve that even more and to provide the tools for the National Weather Service to improve all of the weather products that the public can utilize for public safety as well as for forecast products that help farmers and ranchers.
Lucas is hopeful that the Senate will take it up.
