News

With conferees named farm groups push priorities

Now that U.S. House members have been appointed to confer with selected Senate lawmakers on a new farm bill, ag groups are again ramping up their voices.

The National Milk Producers Federation says they “strongly encourage the agriculture conferees to support the dairy title language in the Senate farm bill, and to include its provisions in the final package.” Without the market stabilization program in the Senate’s bipartisan Dairy Security Act, NMPF’s Jim Mulhern says farmers will keep suffering from long periods of poor margins “while taxpayers will subsidize artificially-low milk prices.”

American Soybean Association President Danny Murphy, a grower in Mississippi says it’s well past the 11th hour for a new farm bill and –quote- “the policies established by the conference in the final bill must not lead to skewed planting decisions, production distortions and potential trade challenges.”

Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, says this is a long-awaited announcement and lots of work needs to be done. Johnson says he hopes conferees “will consider the needs of all family farmers, ranchers, consumers and hungry Americans throughout its deliberations.”

He says the bottom line is farmers need a comprehensive five-year farm bill signed into law before the end of THIS year.  Any measure that comes out of the farm bill conference committee would have to be approved by both the House and Senate.