While Congresswoman Kristi Noem raises money for the 2014 campaign that she says she's not thinking about, the real leaders in Washington are working on the Farm Bill. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack got the House and Senate Ag committee leaders together Thursday to talk turkey and cotton subsidies. House Ag Chairman Lucas signals we may see the Farm Bill worked into the big fiscal cliff deal.
Chuck Hassebrook of the Center for Rural Affairs reminds rural folks that they should be rooting for the bipartisan Senate version of the Farm Bill. Hassebrook notes the Senate continues support for Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance and small-town water and sewer grants. Rep. Noem and her Republican colleagues say South Dakota small businesses and towns don't need that money. The Senate version also gives more support for conservation.
Hassebrook notes that protecting these programs isn't a budget-buster, especially if we just get smart and stop subsidizing crop insurance for giant corporate farms:
Both bills spend less on traditional farm payments than prior bills, but more in premium subsidies for crop insurance. And neither bill imposes any cap on premium subsidies to mega farms.
If one corporation farmed the entire state of Nebraska, the federal government would pay 60 percent of its crop insurance premiums on every acre, every year. Unlimited payments subsidize mega farms to drive smaller operation out of business by bidding land away from them.
The Government Accountability Office found that applying a $40,000 cap on premium subsidies for crop insurance would raise $1 billion annually.
That won’t be considered in the lame duck session, but it should be. That $1 billion could replace all the farm bill cuts in conservation and all the rural development cuts over the last decade, and still leave half the savings for deficit reduction [Chuck Hassebrook, "Rural Issues in the Lame Duck," Daily Yonder, 2012.11.14].
But if we're hoping for rational policies in in the Farm Bill, New York University professor Marion Nestle says forget it:
Well, it's so astonishingly irrational it just takes your breath away. This is a bill that started in the 1930s and has been added onto incrementally without anybody sitting back and saying, "[What would we do] if we wanted to promote farm policy -- a rational farm policy we all agree would feed everybody, would make a living for farmers, would protect farm workers, would protect the environment and would promote health?"
The bill does anything but that. It is designed to protect certain parts of the food supply but not others: commodities, not fruits and vegetables. With today's concerns about obesity, the idea that the farm bill does not promote production and consumption of fruits and vegetables seems bizarre.
...You cannot read the farm bill because each aspect of it refers to amendments to previous bills. So unless you know the 30 different previous bills that have been passed, you really can't. It doesn't read like a text.
One more point: Nobody in Congress can understand it either [Marion Nestle, interview with Lynn Rossetto Kasper, "NYU Professor Plows Her Way Through 663-Page Farm Bill," The Splendid Table, November 2012].
That's just one more reason we need a Congresswoman with real intellectual curiosity and a desire to lead. Have fun at Kristi's birthday party!
If Noem doesn't learn quickly how to bring home the bacon she will be fanned like the chaff she is.
Congress will be in session less than 10 days this month. The President goes on Christmas vacation soon. They spend their time insulting each other. If you poke someone in the eye enough times, they might not be willing to make any deal and walk away. I am pretty sure that there will be no farm bill, no deal on the fiscal cliff and no raising of the debt ceiling next year.
"He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor dampened, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue... In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns."
-Sun Tzu, the Art of War
That the politicos of the upper Missouri River support the hoarding of water after blaming the Corps for doing it in a wet year like 2011 is so two-faced that it is impossible to comprehend except that campaign money determined it be made so.
Just wow. Great post, Doug.
http://dakotatoday.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c208953ef017d3e4990e8970c-pi
Noem will be weak if nothing happens in this congress.
There really needs to be a discussion about whether the federal government should be throwing money at "small-town water and sewer grants" and other such similar things.
We have city government, county government, state government, and federal government. If some town somewhere in SD or Idaho or Rhode Island needs water and sewer upgrades then the people and businesses who benefit from that service need to figure out how to pay for it.
Over the years the federal government has undertaken to pay for too much stuff at all levels of government - and run up gigantic deficits in the process. This "free money" has allowed lower levels of government to do projects that local people would not support if they actually had to pay for it themselves. The federal government is enabling lower levels of government to avoid prioritizing "needs" versus "wants". Why the federal government should pay for a bridge on 41st street in SF or for the state to buy land for a state park in Lincoln County baffles me.
Money would be saved at the federal level if city projects were left to cities, county projects were left to counties, and state projects were left to states. Better decisions would be made about what is worthwhile and what is not when the people who would benefit from a project are the ones who have to pay for it.
Using Rorschach's logic, Rural America would still not have electricity.
Get off the grid, South Dakota; then tear out the main stem dams.
Jeremiah, are you confising the Rural Electric Coops with government?
Bill, do you think the electric coop money fell from the sky?
Not the sky, the people.
Rural electrics pay off the loans by charging 10c per kilowatt-hour and then taking on an "energy charge" atop that.
Farm programs should limit payments to the equivalent of one or two minimum wages-years equivalent. Stop all payments to corporations of any kind.
Fund loan programs to stimulate efficient use of energy and wind energy to produce methanol and ammonia. Doing as Denmark does and utilize nighttime charging of car batteries to utilize nighttime electricity, etc.
Agriculture policy can be a prime way to end our need to import a drop of foreign oil or continue destroying polar ice.
Keeping the most people possible off the coastal areas that will flood as a consequence of global warming is a subsidiary of agriculture programs which keep productive people in rural areas with higher ground.
The current most incredible waste of federal money is dumping money into rebuilding homes and businesses in areas subject to flooding that is likely to get worse in the too near future.
We get so much nonsense from Congress it is hard not to conclude that some of the most ignorant stupid people in the US gravitate to the place so they can feed their simple egos.
The best kind of limits on farm programs is not to have the program in the first place. As tough as it may sound, getting rid of subsidies altogether for federal crop insurance is the best approach for small/moderate size farmers. Nothing wrong with insurance but the preminums should not be paid by the federal government. If farmers want to reduce risk, they can start thinking about self insurance rather than paying $10,000/acre for land. They should consider "longer" rotations to reduce crop risk. Doing favors for the "have's" in agriculture only leads us further down the road toward big time concentration in farming. Within a few generations, only people with certain last names will be farming.
R: on that note, the Lake Herman Sanitary District is using $10K of DENR money to conduct a feasibility study on a central sewer system for Lake Herman. The board (Charlie Stoneback and I) would not have voted to do that study without that outside subsidy. And when we get the recommendations of that study, I am certain that voters around the lake will not support building a sewer system unless someone else pays for it.
"Without a new Farm Bill, universities will lose funding for research on important topics like nutrition, food safety, resource conservation and pest management, to name a few.
Without a new farm bill, USDA agencies will be unable to enroll new acres in critical conservation and wildlife habitat programs."
http://blogs.usda.gov/2012/12/07/why-should-young-people-care-about-the-farm-bill/