2013 Farm Bill

[Buehler445]

I heard a snippet on the radio yesterday about the farm bill. I've been on the combine solid for several days and it's a PIA to sift through a bunch of articles on my phone. Would anybody be willing to give a summation of where this nonsense is?

TIA

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

Well okay. Then again, this could be privatized.

It is privatized.

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

It is privatized.

Then why'd you say this:

Originally Posted by Buehler445

I don't really care what's in the farm bill as long as they continue to subsidize federal crop insurance.

If it's subsidized, or continued to be subsidized then it's not private.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

Then why'd you say this:If it's subsidized, or continued to be subsidized then it's not private.

Private industry runs insurance. Government subsidizes the premium.

Government does not run MCPI. They set the rules but they don't run it.

They want FSA to manage it and for the love of God and everything holy I don't want that.

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

Private industry runs insurance. Government subsidizes the premium.

Obviously, my point refers the subsidized part.

Government does not run MCPI. They set the rules but they don't run it.

So what.

It's still fascism--indirect socialism or welfare made law.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

Obviously, my point refers the subsidized part.


So what.

It's still fascism--indirect socialism or welfare made law.

If that's your stance then fine.

I disagree. Keeping food production local is worth the money in my eyes.

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

If that's your stance then fine.

I disagree. Keeping food production local is worth the money in my eyes.

I have nothing against keeping food local.

[Iowanian]

Most FSA offices couldn't manage a Swingline stapler.


I think there needs some major reform in the farm bill. Welfare has to be addressed and brought into check.

That said, there are too many subsides for farmers who don't need it and there are too many loopholes with "corporations" having so many subsidiary farm names etc to beat the system.

What I'd like to see would be limitations put on payments(caps) to discourage people buying large chunks of land specifically to take advantage of those programs, and I think any payments need to be tied to a "trigger" based on crop prices. If corn is over $3 for example.

Farming needs to be encouraged to be local and less corporate for sure. You don't see standing corn and beans right now in fields of guys who farm 500-1000 acres, it's the 20,000 acre guys who plant it for the check and don't care if it is harvested.

[banyon]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

Most FSA offices couldn't manage a Swingline stapler.


I think there needs some major reform in the farm bill. Welfare has to be addressed and brought into check.

That said, there are too many subsides for farmers who don't need it and there are too many loopholes with "corporations" having so many subsidiary farm names etc to beat the system.

What I'd like to see would be limitations put on payments(caps) to discourage people buying large chunks of land specifically to take advantage of those programs, and I think any payments need to be tied to a "trigger" based on crop prices. If corn is over $3 for example.

Farming needs to be encouraged to be local and less corporate for sure. You don't see standing corn and beans right now in fields of guys who farm 500-1000 acres, it's the 20,000 acre guys who plant it for the check and don't care if it is harvested.

Agree with this.

There is plenty of waste and fraud to cut on both the food stamp side and the farm subsidy side. These farmers need to start appreciating that we aren't in the Great Depression anymore when most of these rules made sense. On the other side, it makes me want to vomit when I see a married illegal immigrant couple at the grocery store who don't tell the government that they are married, keep their separate names, and the woman draws all the federal funds she can get while the guy has a stack of 100s tax free that he is buying steaks with.

[MOhillbilly]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

Most FSA offices couldn't manage a Swingline stapler.


I think there needs some major reform in the farm bill. Welfare has to be addressed and brought into check.

That said, there are too many subsides for farmers who don't need it and there are too many loopholes with "corporations" having so many subsidiary farm names etc to beat the system.

What I'd like to see would be limitations put on payments(caps) to discourage people buying large chunks of land specifically to take advantage of those programs, and I think any payments need to be tied to a "trigger" based on crop prices. If corn is over $3 for example.

Farming needs to be encouraged to be local and less corporate for sure. You don't see standing corn and beans right now in fields of guys who farm 500-1000 acres, it's the 20,000 acre guys who plant it for the check and don't care if it is harvested.

Agreed 100%

[HonestChieffan]

Originally Posted by banyon

Agree with this.

There is plenty of waste and fraud to cut on both the food stamp side and the farm subsidy side. These farmers need to start appreciating that we aren't in the Great Depression anymore when most of these rules made sense. On the other side, it makes me want to vomit when I see a married illegal immigrant couple at the grocery store who don't tell the government that they are married, keep their separate names, and the woman draws all the federal funds she can get while the guy has a stack of 100s tax free that he is buying steaks with.

Welcome back. Keep this up and I'm gonna have to get on the Banyon Team.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

Most FSA offices couldn't manage a Swingline stapler.

You have no idea how right you are. Currently, in my county there are two ladies that do FSA administration. They are really solid, but there are at least 15 people in the county selling MCPI. Add in all the bullshit the government would require after they take it away from private industry and look the hell out. It would be beyond terrible.

Originally Posted by Iowanian

I think there needs some major reform in the farm bill. Welfare has to be addressed and brought into check.

That's not going to happen. The Senate absolutely will not move from that. Not even a pretend cut that looks they're trying to compromise. Not happening in the foreseeable future.

Originally Posted by Iowanian

That said, there are too many subsides for farmers who don't need it and there are too many loopholes with "corporations" having so many subsidiary farm names etc to beat the system.

What I'd like to see would be limitations put on payments(caps) to discourage people buying large chunks of land specifically to take advantage of those programs, and I think any payments need to be tied to a "trigger" based on crop prices. If corn is over $3 for example.

Farming needs to be encouraged to be local and less corporate for sure. You don't see standing corn and beans right now in fields of guys who farm 500-1000 acres, it's the 20,000 acre guys who plant it for the check and don't care if it is harvested.

For the most part there limits. On direct payments, it's $40,000, traced back to your SSN. If you're doing business as an LLC or Corp receiving payments and you are receiving a payment as a landlord, you have to submit your operating agreement to FSA with your % share of ownership, and your total payments cannot exceed $40,000 between all your entity equity and landowner status.

The ACRE program is an exception, but we had some acres in that program and it only paid out over the limit one time, but we ate it all the other years. It would have yielded better to have all the acres in direct payment.

There are some conservation programs that run through NRCS that don't track payment limits to SSN, and those can be finagled with to get around the limit. But, with that program, we have to follow the requirements to achieve the appropriate conservation goals agreed upon in the contract, and at the end of the thing there isn't a lot left over and it ends up being a cost share.

I'm not familiar with all the programs out there, but the subsidy is limited out by SSN at $40,000. Which in the grand scheme of things isn't all that much in today's world. At $4 corn, that's 10,000 bushels. If you farm 10,000 acres, that's a bushel per acre subsidy at very low price levels.

Additionally, Direct payments are going away. That's pretty much been known since 2008. They're ****ing worthless anyway. Farmers just act as a pass-through for that money to fertilizer, chemical, machinery companies, and sometimes landlords.

I don't know what is going to happen with all the conservation programs, but that seems like less of a subsidy than the direct payment because you have to do specific improvements that almost undoubtedly cost money to be in the programs. I don't even know how many farmers are in the programs. I hear of a lot of counties that have agents too lazy to administer them, so they just don't enroll anybody.

As for your comment about putting the crop out there for the check, I don't know of anybody doing that. If they are, then they're achieving a pretty poor living on $40,000. Some people have chosen to put out crops in poor growing conditions rather than fallow the ground to insure the crops, but if that was a crime, 75% of all our crops would fall into that category. Most of the time (read: everytime but 2012 and 2013) it starts raining and we can grow a crop. But at these crop prices, it is far more profitable to grow a crop than to count on Insurance and Direct Payments. Particularly after what happens to your APH when you bomb a crop.

As for the $3 corn trigger, as far as I know the LDP program is still in effect. It's just been awhile since it has been needed.

Originally Posted by banyon

Agree with this.

There is plenty of waste and fraud to cut on both the food stamp side and the farm subsidy side. These farmers need to start appreciating that we aren't in the Great Depression anymore when most of these rules made sense. On the other side, it makes me want to vomit when I see a married illegal immigrant couple at the grocery store who don't tell the government that they are married, keep their separate names, and the woman draws all the federal funds she can get while the guy has a stack of 100s tax free that he is buying steaks with.

To be fair, the rules for this farm program were set in 2008. And while the Great Depression was horrid (More the dust bowl than the depression), from a purely accounting perspective, 1999-2004ish was worse than the depression. Additionally, in terms of drought, the last 3 consecutive years in my county have been far worse than any single year, much less 3 year span during the dirty 30's. While it is nice that the corn belt has been killing it, save 2012, the rest of the ag industry has not been quite so lucky.

On the SNAP side, yeah. That's shit. And in KS, at least at one time, you could get cash back on the vision card. Wife worked a grocery store in college and they'd buy a little bit of food on their vision card, get cash back, and go back through and buy beer and cigarettes with the cash. Sickening.

That being said, I do like WIC. You have to show actual need and get approved ACTUAL food for your family. I don't know how illegals factor into that, but I am definitely in favor of showing need and getting actual food.

I am also in favor of school lunches, for the most part. I don't know what the requirements to get them are, but in a lot of cases, school is the only place these kids get to eat. And Michelle Obama's plan jacked with that quite a bit. When my wife worked in Garden, there were several kids that only got to eat at school, and then Michelle Obama said they couldn't get seconds on protein. That's ridiculous.

[Iowanian]

Conservation programs, CRP, Wetland grass, forest reserve and a number of other programs are mostly taken advantage of in my area by wealthy out of state or absentee landowners. The tax payers have literally paid for thousands of acres of farms for people who worked it right, a congressman who pushed the program being one of them.

The subside direct payment is one thing, but let's not kid that there are a lot of people out there farming the insurance checks, and let's not pretend there isn't a lot of gray area in that too. no farmer ever "loses" a few wagons of corn.

I support agriculture and farmers, but far more of the new fancy brick front homes I see these days are in corn fields than in towns. You can search those owner names and pretty regularly they've taken in astonishing numbers of subsidies over the past decade.

I'm all for WIC. I don't have a problem providing specific foods to kids in need. I'll always support that.

I'm also in favor of school lunch programs, but I almost wish we'd just cut the crap and just provide lunches and milk as part of an education. I live in an area where quite a high percentage truly need this type of help. I'm ok with it. I didn't fully understand that there really are hungry kids out there. I know of a program where school kids are sent home on weekends with a backpack of food and snacks on the weekend, because they wouldn't eat otherwise. Programs exist in welfare, but if single-mom or dad is a shitbrick meth head.....some kids I know of actually hide the backpack when they get home.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

Conservation programs, CRP, Wetland grass, forest reserve and a number of other programs are mostly taken advantage of in my area by wealthy out of state or absentee landowners. The tax payers have literally paid for thousands of acres of farms for people who worked it right, a congressman who pushed the program being one of them.

The subside direct payment is one thing, but let's not kid that there are a lot of people out there farming the insurance checks, and let's not pretend there isn't a lot of gray area in that too. no farmer ever "loses" a few wagons of corn.

Well, all the conservation programs have a purpose for the money. It's not like they're just spinning money around. They have a set purpose for each program. If they decide that money isn't worth it, that's fine with me. If they want to change their goals, well, that's fine too. But all the conservation money has a purpose to try to change something. It's a little different in your area, where if CRP or whatever goes away and all the sidehills go back to corn put 200lb/acre of N and 50lb/acre P into the Mississippi, you may not like the regulations that come down on account of it. A few years ago I talked to an NRCS guy about all the nonsense they have to do in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the government FUBAR'ed that like you've never seen. On the whole though, if the government is willing to dump conservation programs, I won't be barking.

On the insurance thing, I can't say one way or the other if there is a lot of fraud there. I know I can't afford to cheap crops out and catch the insurance on the way by. Bombs demolish a guys APH and make his premiums skyrocket. Over the long term, I just can't do it. Your area is an entirely different world, though and there may be some guys jacking shit around there. There is a guy here that is rumored to do it here, but I can't imagine he actually does. Most of what we rent is sharecropped, if any of my landlords found out I was shuffling bushels, I'd never rent another acre.

Plus, I NEED good APH's, and if I were to take away a good crop out of an APH, it would affect my profitability significantly in shitty years (like the last 2). I don't need any help bashing my APH's. But like I said, you are in a different part of the world than I am.

Originally Posted by Iowanian

I support agriculture and farmers, but far more of the new fancy brick front homes I see these days are in corn fields than in towns. You can search those owner names and pretty regularly they've taken in astonishing numbers of subsidies over the past decade.

Farming has been profitable in recent years, where there has been production. And there are a couple new fancy houses going up around here, too. And I don't mean to sound pretentious, but farmers have a ****ton of skin in the game, versus an 8-5er. It is really easy to wrap up 10's of millions of dollars in land, equipment, and investment in growing crops. Hell, some of the big ones might be in the 100M's. So with that amount of risk on the table, I won't begrudge a guy that makes money.

I'll crawl off my soapbox now and recognize that if they are cheating the system, they should DIAF. In fact, now that we're talking about it, I remember a big farmer in the next county south that was blatantly fraudulent with FSA payments. So much so that the feds investigated him. I don't know how he managed to get away with it, but all that happened was his daughter went to jail for a couple years (with a small child at home). Guy was a real piece of work and got away with it, God knows how.

I'm with you on the school lunches. I hadn't ever thought of including them in the service. But where I'm at now, I don't mind paying for my daughter's lunches and the kids of poorer parents getting a break.

[HonestChieffan]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

Conservation programs, CRP, Wetland grass, forest reserve and a number of other programs are mostly taken advantage of in my area by wealthy out of state or absentee landowners. The tax payers have literally paid for thousands of acres of farms for people who worked it right, a congressman who pushed the program being one of them.

The subside direct payment is one thing, but let's not kid that there are a lot of people out there farming the insurance checks, and let's not pretend there isn't a lot of gray area in that too. no farmer ever "loses" a few wagons of corn.

I support agriculture and farmers, but far more of the new fancy brick front homes I see these days are in corn fields than in towns. You can search those owner names and pretty regularly they've taken in astonishing numbers of subsidies over the past decade.

I'm all for WIC. I don't have a problem providing specific foods to kids in need. I'll always support that.

I'm also in favor of school lunch programs, but I almost wish we'd just cut the crap and just provide lunches and milk as part of an education. I live in an area where quite a high percentage truly need this type of help. I'm ok with it. I didn't fully understand that there really are hungry kids out there. I know of a program where school kids are sent home on weekends with a backpack of food and snacks on the weekend, because they wouldn't eat otherwise. Programs exist in welfare, but if single-mom or dad is a shitbrick meth head.....some kids I know of actually hide the backpack when they get home.

Don't plan to get into a major pissin match especially tonight. But, let clarify. CRP has never been lucrative enough to buy land if you didn't already own it. It barely equalled rental rates and certainly never equaled rental rates on productive non erode able land. If someone could afford to buy it before CRP and use the rent to pay part of the payment, the same math, maybe not as good applied and still does post CRP. Hundreds of thousands of acres are being taken out of CRP because the terms are poor, the program has been reduced and the cash isn't there for land owners.

Forestry programs have been pretty dismal. Missouri certainly has a ton more forest acres than Iowa and its been a lousy program. Mostly because you must set it 100% to forestry and cannot graze the timber or grass ares inside the timber.

I think if you were able to get the details, it wasn't wealthy and out of state non farm folk who jumped in, it was older retired landowners who could lock in a price for 10 years and did so rather than play the grain markets and risks associated with crop share and crop rental. Not to say some of what you say didn't happen but a great deal was more older retired farmers and their kids.


Re crop insurance...amen brother. Way to much is going out in very questionable situations. Bullshit needs to be called but FSA and the fed folks never call fouls on the big boys.

Hard to believe how easy farmers can ID the bullshit and the fraud and the worthless programs but the geniuses we have in Washington can't...makes you understand the program isn't aimed at farmers in most cases.

[Buehler445]

House passes farm bill. Color me surprised.

Link

WASHINGTON (AP) — After more than two years of partisan squabbles over food and farm policy, the House passed and sent to the Senate Wednesday an almost $100 billion-a-year, compromise farm bill containing a small cut in food stamps and preserving most crop subsidies.



The measure, which the House approved 251-166, had solid backing from the Republican leadership team, even though it makes smaller cuts to food stamps than they would have liked. The bill would cut about $800 million a year from the $80 billion-a-year program, or around 1 percent. The House had sought a 5 percent cut.

The legislation also would continue to heavily subsidize major crops for the nation's farmers while eliminating some subsidies and shifting them toward more politically defensible insurance programs.

House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., who has been working on the bill since 2011, called the compromise a "miracle" after years of setbacks. An early version of the legislation was defeated on the House floor last June after conservatives said the food stamp cuts were too modest and liberal Democrats said they were too steep.

The House later passed a bill with a higher, $4 billion cut, arguing at the time that the program had spiraled out of control after costs doubled in the last five years. But cuts that high were ultimately not possible after the Senate balked and the White House threatened a veto. The Senate had sought a cut of $400 million annually.

The savings in the cost of the food stamp program would be generated by cracking down on some states that seek to boost individual food stamp benefits by giving people small amounts of federal heating assistance that they don't need. That heating assistance, sometimes as low as $1 per person, triggers higher benefits, and some critics see that practice as circumventing the law. The bill that was passed Wednesday would require states to give individual recipients at least $20 in heating assistance before a higher food stamp benefit could be authorized.

Some Democrats said the food stamp cut still is too high.

Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, one of the states that has boosted benefits through heating assistance, said the cut will be harmful on top of automatic food stamp cuts that already went into place in November.

"I don't know where they are going to make that up," McGovern said.

And some conservatives continued to argue that the food stamp cuts are too low and the overall bill spent too much money. In the end, 63 Republicans voted against the legislation.

"This is exactly the kind of logrolling that we fought to prevent this summer," Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman said of the House's rejection of the bill in June. "It spends money we simply don't have."

To pass the bill, Lucas and his Senate counterpart, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, found ways to entice many potential naysayers. They spent more than two years crafting the bill to appeal to members from all regions of the country, including a boost in money for crop insurance popular in the Midwest; higher rice and peanut subsidies for Southern farmers; and renewal of federal land payments for Western states. The food stamp cut was low enough that 89 Democrats voted for the bill.

They also backed away from repealing a catfish program — a move that would have angered Mississippi lawmakers — and dropped language that would have thwarted a California law requiring all eggs sold in the state to come from hens living in larger cages. Striking out that provision was a priority for California lawmakers who did not want to see the state law changed.

For those seeking reform of farm programs, the legislation would eliminate a $4.5 billion-a-year farm subsidy called direct payments, which are paid to farmers whether they farm or not. But the bill nonetheless would continue to heavily subsidize major crops — corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton — while shifting many of those subsidies toward more politically defensible insurance programs. That means farmers would have to incur losses before they could get a payout.

The bill would save around $1.65 billion annually overall, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amount was less than the $2.3 billion annual savings the agriculture committees originally projected for the bill.

An aide to Lucas said the difference was due to how the CBO calculated budget savings from recent automatic across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration.