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Crop insurance could be target for cuts

The chief lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation, Mary Kay Thatcher, says crop insurance could be a major target as Congress begins work on a federal budget in 2015.

“I think with the Republicans in charge, they’re going to want to produce a budget. We haven’t had one in eight or nine years,” Thatcher says. “So you look at appropriations bills, there’s always cuts that come along.  We’re anticipating in Appropriations that crop insurance will be a major target.”

One scenario has politicians who seek further cuts in the food stamp program agreeing to make cuts in crop insurance as well. But Chip Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association, says they’re very much opposed to Congress tinkering with any portion of the farm bill.

“Crop insurance is vital to what every farmer in this country does,” Bowling says. “We don’t want it to be opened back up. We worked long and hard to get what we have.  It took a long time to get there.”

Bowling says as they worked with Congress on the farm bill, no one expected commodity prices to drop so quickly.

“That’s what brought this conversation up—they’re worried about what kind of payments are going to go out,” he says. “When we started to work on the farm bill for 2014, we chose as an organization to give up subsidies—and here we go, the first year out it looks like we’re going to receive some payments. That was not our intent when we sat down to come up National Corn Growers’ policy on the farm bill.”

Bowling says the best thing to do is leave the farm bill alone.

“If they leave it alone, they’ll find out it’s going to work”.