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Farm Bill timeline getting longer
Anymore, writing a Farm Bill is a lengthy process, but it hasn’t always been that way.
Chuck Conner, President and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives (NCFC) remembers when writing a Farm Bill only took a few months.
“I’ve been involved in the writing of six Farm Bills,” said Conner. “The very first Farm Bill I worked on in 1981 we started the debate on the Farm Bill in March 1981 and we were done by the summer of ’81, it took just a few months.”
But Chuck Conner also understands things have changed since that 1981 Farm Bill.
“The process of getting any type of farm legislation through has just grown so much more difficult,” Conner said. “You just have to allow months, if not years worth of time for it to happen or else you’re going to be too late.”
Tags: Congress, Farm Legislation, USDA
I think Connor’s comment on the continual lengthening of time to develop a Farm Bill reflects the growing understanding that the Farm Bill is more than about crops – as it basically was in the 1980’s. Now we discuss farmers, food, and natural capital. It is more difficult and better – agriculture is not a two dimensional plane, but enormously complex. Ironically, as we move forward and begin to intergrate the many facets of agriculture, our policies can move from a disconnected and complicated mess to a more symbiotic policy approach in that we recognize that how farmers manage their land provides both ecological and economic goods. By adding a market and government signal for ecoservices will compliment the existing market and government signal for crops.