While there has been a lot of reaction to President Obama’s FY2011 budget proposals regarding agriculture, in the end it is Congress which writes the budget and House Ag Committee chair Collin Peterson says there is no interest in re-opening the farm bill to change farm program payments. “The minute we open any part of the Farm Bill it unites all of the conflicts and we are back to basically rewriting the farm bill.” He says there is no desire on either side of the aisle to do that.
Peterson told Brownfield’s Ken Anderson the proposed changes to crop insurance could be a different story. The Minnesota Democrat thinks there could be some changes made to “get at some of the regional imbalances in terms of profitability for companies and agents” but he doesn’t agree with taking money out of the base line. He says they took a significant amount of money out of crop insurance in the 2008 Farm Bill and it would not be appropriate to take more out at this time.
Overall, Peterson says the House will write their version of the budget, the Senate theirs, there will be a conference committee to work out the differences but “End of the day I don’t think you’re going to see much impact in the ag area.”
AUDIO: Peterson’s comments on the budget
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[...] Bob Meyer reported yesterday at Brownfield that, “While there has been a lot of reaction to President Obama’s FY2011 budget proposals regarding agriculture, in the end it is Congress which writes the budget and House Ag Committee chair Collin Peterson says there is no interest in re-opening the farm bill to change farm program payments. ‘The minute we open any part of the Farm Bill it unites all of the conflicts and we are back to basically rewriting the farm bill.’ He says there is no desire on either side of the aisle to do that. [...]