REMARKS BY CONGRESSMAN SHERWOOD BOEHLERT
Meeting with Producers and Agricultural Officials from Chenango County The Delaware-Chenango-Madison-Otsego BOCES Campus, Norwich
Monday, February 25, 2002
Good morning, it's nice to be able to visit with you today. I would like to use my time to talk about the Farm Bill and its potential impacts on agriculture in central New York. I say potential because, as many of you know, it is still a work-in-progress.
But before I get to that, let me thank all of you for taking time to come here today. In particular, I'd like to thank all the producers among you who have taken time away from your farm to come listen and offer your input. Your comments are extremely valuable to me as I work in Congress as an advocate for central New York agriculture. Also, I'd like to thank all the folks in the Chenango County Farm Service Agency (FSA) office, and in particular, Donna Purdy who I know has spent many hours organizing this meeting and the luncheon that follows. And finally, we all need to say thanks to Steve Perrin and BOCES for allowing us to use their facilities, to Maureen Bartlett and her New Vision's Agricultural Science Class for all their help in putting this event together, and to Jeanne Romanowski and her Culinary Artist students that, as we speak, are preparing our lunch-thank you very much for all your hard work.
Let me begin by giving you a brief update as to the status of the Farm Bill. As you all know, the current Farm Bill is set to expire on September 30th this year and Congress is in the final stages of reauthorizing a new bill. The House and Senate have now passed their own versions of the next Farm Bill, and as I speak, selected members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are meeting in Conference to hammer out a final compromise version of the bill that both the House and Senate will have to approve before sending it to the President to sign.
Right now, the Senate bill, frankly, looks much better for agriculture in the Northeast than the House bill. It contains more money for conservation programs, which have traditionally been more helpful to the Northeast than commodity programs, and its dairy provisions are better than the House's by leaps and bounds.
Unfortunately, as we go into Conference the deck is stacked against us. That's because only two of the twenty-or-so conferees are from the Northeast - most of the rest are from the Midwest, and, as you can imagine, they have a slightly different way of looking at the world than we do here in the Northeast. Nonetheless, I'm encouraged that in the end we'll prevail - but we're going to have to watch this conference like a hawk, and be prepared to fight in the trenches to keep the dairy and conservation provisions that we won in the Senate in the final bill.
However, I have gotten a little ahead of myself and want to go back and talk about two issues that my colleagues and I have been pushing for Northeast agriculture-dairy and conservation. And before I talk about the most important issue-dairy-I want to talk about conservation and an amendment I offered during the Farm Bill debate in the House last October. I, along with my colleagues Ron Kind from Wisconsin, Wayne Gilchrest from Maryland and John Dingell from Michigan have been dissatisfied with the federal government's reluctance to bring balance to an agriculture policy that, I believe, is completely lop-sided.
For example, not many people realize that between 1996 and 2000 - almost the entire life of the current Farm Bill - about 84 percent of federal payments went to less than a quarter of America's producers. Eighty-four percent - that's $60.2 billion - that went mostly to farmers in only about a dozen states. And where do you think those states are? Not in the Northeast. They're states like Texas, Ohio, and Arkansas in the South and Midwest where they grow grain and cotton.
Unfortunately, the Farm Bill in the House - drafted by mostly by Southerners and Midwesterners - just made things worse: it increased the total price tag on the Farm Bill to over $17 billion a year, and it continued the inequity in how the money was to be distributed.
My amendment simply would have divided the funding more fairly by shifting $1.9 billion a year from commodity programs to conservation. Producers in thirty-four states would have had access to more federal agricultural assistance under my amendment than under the House bill. New York would have received 87 percent more. And that's why I had the full support of Governor Pataki, Commissioner Rudgers, the entire New York Congressional delegation, and almost all the rest of the Congressional contingent from the Northeast.
Incidentally, even though most Administrations don't like to get involved in regional agricultural fights, President Bush criticized the very same aspects of the bill that I was trying to change when he issued a statement on the day the debate began in the House that said the bill "missing the opportunity to modernize the nation's farm programs through … innovative environmental programs" like the kind in my amendment. He said the House should come up with a Farm Bill that was "better for the environment" and one that helped small and mid-sized farmers. Bush pointed out that in the past, nearly half of all government payments have gone to the largest eight percent of farms, and that the House bill would make things even worse. My amendment would have shifted money away from those programs that distribute money unfairly to programs that all farmers can participate in, no matter how small they are or what they grow.
Unfortunately the amendment was defeated - but only narrowly - by a vote of 200 to 226. Still, the closeness of the vote stunned many of our Midwestern and Southern friends, and that, I believe, was the single most important factor that prompted the Senate to adopt a much stronger conservation title when its turn came to take up the bill.
As a result, the conservation provisions in the Senate bill look much like what I offered in the House, and I'm confident that most of the changes will survive in the final package that Congress will have to approve and send to the President. And that the President will keep his earlier word and ensure that these programs survive.
Here are some of the conservation highlights that, while not yet final, I think have a good chance of becoming law in the next Farm Bill:
· Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) - the water quality program that recently awarded farmers in the Upper Chenango River Basin $150,000 for the next five years (congratulations!) will be boosted by about 500 percent from $200 million a year to about $1 billion. EQIP is also likely to be available to a broader range of farmers.
· Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) - another program that Chenango County farmers have aggressively implemented will be expanded beyond its current nationwide cap of 36 million acres. How much is difficult to say, but probably around 40 million acres.
· Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) -- New York State has the highest number of participants in WRP in the nation, and last year eleven producers in the Chenango County signed up, too. The program will grow beyond its current cap of 1 million acres nationwide to allow an additional 150,000 to 250,000 acres to be signed up each year.
In Washington, where almost everyone is a lawyer or businessman, few people understand that farmers are the principle stewards of the land. Few understand that they produce more than food and fiber; they also live on the land that determines whether the rest of us enjoy clean water, open space, and other environmental benefits. But they can't do that if they're going out of business. And that's why I believe its better to spend some of the money in the Farm Bill money on programs that help keep farmers who conserve the environment in business. It's a better use of federal dollars, I believe, than sending our money south and west, to big grain and cotton farms that already receive more than their fair share.
Of course funding agricultural programs aren't the only way that Congress can help farmers. Last year Congress passed the largest tax cut in a generation. And in doing so, also repealed the estate or death tax. Since individuals and families own ninety-nine percent of all U.S. farms, repealing the estate tax should help family farms stay productive for future generations.
Now let me change gears for a minute to talk about the most important part of the bill for New York - what's in it for dairy.
As you probably know, Congress over the last three years provided dairy farmers across the country with about $1 billion in "market loss" payments. Before that dairy farmers generally didn't get any direct payments from the government. But things have been harder recently for dairy farmers across the country. At least here in the Northeast, we had the dairy compact. Some 1,200 of New York's 7,500 dairy farmers were able to sell their milk into the compact. But as you are all too well aware, the compact expired on September 30th last year.
It was good for us, but the Midwest said it was bad for them. And despite the fact that we built strong support in the House - we have 163 cosponsors on our bill to reinstate the dairy compact, with New York included - we've been blocked. In the Senate, Senator Daschle has long been an ardent foe, and the leadership from my own party are from the Midwest. But probably our biggest stumbling block in the House is Wisconsin Representative Jim Sensenbrenner. He's the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, though which the compact bill would have to go to reach the floor for a vote. But he's kept it bottled up in Committee. And it's very difficult to force a full committee chairman to pass a bill out of committee over his objection.
So we have had to look at other options for helping our dairy farmers. One presented itself during the debate on the Farm Bill in the House: a national dairy compact. I supported it, but it failed - by only 22 votes. Still, we were close enough to keep our momentum in the Senate and were able to pass a modified version of this proposal: a counter-cyclical dairy payment program. Now, I'm the first to admit that it's far from ideal, but it's more than what we've got now. It would not replace the dairy price-support program and federal milk-marketing orders. Instead, it would serve as an alternative to regional dairy compacts and emergency payments to farmers.
Under the proposal, dairy farmers in twelve Northeastern states - including New York - would receive a federal payment whenever the minimum monthly market price for fluid or Class I milk falls below $16.94 per hundredweight. The payment received by Northeast farmers would be 45 percent of the difference between the $16.94 target price and the market price. A separate program would also be established for dairy producers in the rest of the country.
Funding for the program would be capped: total payments to producers in the Northeast would be limited to $500 million over the program's three-and-a-half year lifespan. And for individual producers, payments would be limited to the first 8 million pounds of annual milk production. If my math is correct, that's about a 400 to 450-cow dairy - well above the average size herd in New York.
The Northeast payment program is modeled after the Northeast dairy compact, but with two key differences. Under the expired compact, processors paid the full difference between the $16.94 fluid milk target price and any market price shortfall. In the proposed Northeast program, the federal government would pay, and farmers would only receive 45 percent of the difference between the $16.94 target price and the market price.
It's important to point out that the program is proposed to last for only three and a half years. That means that we have time to work on a revived and expanded compact in the meantime. As you know 25 state legislatures have already passed legislation endorsing a compact and another eight states are on the way. Pretty soon, the Northeast is going to have a few more friends to help us out. And when we do, you can bet we'll be back, knocking on the doors of our friends who've blocked us in the past. And that time, I think we'll be able to persuade them to open the door.
So, to conclude, while things have at times looks exceedingly dim for New York agriculture, we should do much better under this Farm Bill. Even though we're not out of the woods yet, even though this Farm Bill is poised at the time when it's most critical to be watchful and ready to fight, in the end I'm hopeful we'll have a much better package of programs for dairy and for conservation than we started with. And in the future, you can be sure that I'll to continue to work to make sure that these programs are used to help the hardworking farming families of central New York. Thank you.