Congress Steps in to Protect Smaller Farms

BOTTOM LINE WEATHER POINTS
– Congress reverses USDA interpretation of the 2008 farm bill to help smaller farms.
– Thousands of farmers would have been denied coverage under USDA's regulations.
– Revised bill expected to cost $20 million over 2 years, until a permanent fix is found.

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To safeguard hundreds of thousands of farmers overlooked by current farm bill regulations, Congress is stepping in to revise key mandates set by the USDA. The House of Representatives reversed a ruling under the farm bill last week that would have denied weather-related subsidies to countless small-acreage farmers.

Members of the House overruled a provision in the 2008-2009 farm bill that would require producers to have at least 10 base acres of land to receive program benefits, according to the Bemidji Pioneer of Minnesota.

“The USDA’s decision to eliminate such a large number of base acres could affect hundreds of thousands of producers all across this country,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, DFL-7th District, said in a statement. “Their selective interpretation of the farm bill is doing no favors for America’s farmers and ranchers, who are rightly concerned that the department is ignoring the Congress’ clearly stated intent. With passage of this bill, we are making clear to farm country that the farm bill will be implemented as Congress intended.”

The congressional action is in response to the USDA's June 30th reinterpretation of the 2008 farm bill, which states that farmers may not aggregate their sum acreage to satisfy the minimum 10-acre cutoff for federal subsidies.

Waiving the 10-acre rule will be important for Minnesota producers, says Kevin Paap, president of the Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation.

“That was clearly the intent of the farm bill to be able to put together, if you had smaller acreages, that you could aggregate them together to get above that 10-acre rule,” Paap said in a telephone interview.

Ultimately, Paap claims that the USDA's interpretation is biased against farmers whose acreage qualifies them for aid, but can technically be excluded because of administrative loopholes.

"I don’t think you should discriminate against one farmer versus the other just because maybe one farmer’s got a landlord that’s got 20 or 30 acres and somebody is running the same amount of land but happens to have more landlords, more individual pieces."

"H.R. 6849 will restore the intent of Congress by allowing the small farmers who provide food for the nation’s table to receive the payments they deserve for their work," said House General Farm Commodities and Risk Management Subcommittee Chairman Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., the original sponsor of the bill.

The measure passed last week by the House is estimated to cost $20 million over two years until a more permanent solution can be reached, according to Peterson.