OMAHA (DTN) -- While Congress found a compromise late last week that would extend the farm bill and provide nearly $31 billion in disaster and economic aid to farmers, the funding bill also left some programs on the cutting room floor.
Congress left town after votes on Friday and early Saturday to pass a short-term funding bill, a continuing resolution (CR), as well as extend the farm bill through the end of September.
As DTN has highlighted, the bill includes $20.78 billion to cover natural disasters in 2023 and 2024. USDA will need to sort out specific provisions in the bill, including specific aid for livestock producers, Texas farmers affected by water shortages and other requirements. Given the turnover of officials at USDA, it could take months to roll out the application process for disaster payments.
Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., talked about the disaster aid on a call Monday with reporters. Ossoff noted he would be pressing USDA to distribute those disaster funds as quickly as possible.
"There will be a discussion in the next few days about whether this will flow to Georgia in the form of a block grant or direct payments from USDA to impacted producers. But time remains of the essence," Ossoff said.
Also included is $10 billion in economic assistance for commodity producers affected by the cost of production being higher than cash prices. Those payments will be required to be issued to commodity crop producers before the end of March.
For more details, see "Congress Passes Disaster Aid, Short-Term Budget and Farm Bill Extension, Narrowly Avoids Shutdown" here: https://www.dtnpf.com/….
SPECIALTY CROP AID MISSING
Fruit and vegetable growers won't qualify for the $10 billion in economic aid.
Retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, sent a joint letter last week to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House Office of Budget and Management seeking an additional $1 billion for specialty crop producers through the Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crop program.
Stabenow and Scott cited the ongoing market conditions for fruit and vegetable producers.
IRA CONSERVATION DOLLARS IN LIMBO
In crafting the farm bill extension, negotiators rejected transferring the remaining dollars for conservation programs from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into the farm bill. That was about $14 billion that could have been added to the baseline for conservation programs.
"Instead, as a result of its inaction, thousands of farmers and ranchers will be denied the ability to enhance their profit margins, protect their soil and land, and improve water qualify for all of us," American Farmland Trust stated.
The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition offered a similar concern about the IRA dollars, calling it "a colossal setback," said Mike Lavender, NSAC's policy director.
"From here, the 2025 farm bill reauthorization becomes an even more important moment to recoup a small fraction of the conservation investment left on the table today," Lavender said. "Congress cannot continue prioritizing short-term aid while shortchanging farmers' long-term needs. It is well past time for Congress to get serious about a farm bill rooted in sound policies that meet the needs of all farmers."
USDA reported in early December that the department has funded 23,000 conservation contracts with the IRA dollars in 2024 tied to 11 million acres, "contributing to the highest total investment in private lands conservation in any year in the history of USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service."
USDA was planning to release $5.7 billion of the IRA dollars in FY 2025, but now it will be up to the incoming Trump administration to decide if those conservation contracts are funded.
Republicans in Congress will debate how much of the IRA is repealed when they press for a reconciliation bill early in 2025.
E15 CUT OUT
It didn't cost any money, but when congressional negotiators began cutting the CR from 1,500-plus pages down to 118 pages, the lawmakers also dropped the provision that would have allowed year-round E15 nationally.
The National Corn Growers Association expressed its frustration over the decision.
"Corn growers are deeply disappointed that a permanent, year-round E15 solution was not included in the end-of-year legislation package," said Illinois farmer Kenneth Hartman Jr., president of NCGA. "This no-cost provision would have provided a market-driven solution to farmers experiencing low corn prices. We call upon legislators to address this matter quickly in the start of the new Congress and fix this issue once and for all."
Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, told Brownfield News, "To have it in the CR and then have it pulled out unceremoniously, people are pretty salty about it."
EPA has granted eight Midwest states authority to sell E15 year-round, but Shaw said petroleum groups are already petitioning EPA to delay that. Once again, E15 sales for summer 2025 will be up in the air going into the new administration and new EPA administrator.
ORPHAN PROGRAMS
The farm bill extension did not include funding for 19 farm bill programs that do not have baseline funding. This means these programs must have reauthorization to carry on. All told, these programs generally take up $177 million in funding annually.
The initial CR -- the 1,500-page version -- included reauthorization for these programs, as well as language allowing permanent authorization for a few of the programs.
Retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee, had included language providing permanent funding for the Foundation for Food & Agricultural Research (FFAR), up to $259 million. That funding was dropped.
Also, Stabenow had sought $15 million in permanent funding for the Urban, Indoor & Emerging Agriculture office at USDA. That also was stripped from the final bill.
Some other programs lost include:
-- Feral Swine Eradication and Control, which would have received $15 million.
-- Scholarships for 1890s Institutions, $15 million for a program named after Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., the ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee.
-- Organic Certification Cost Share Program and Organic Data Initiative, about $45 million in spending overall.
-- Voluntary Public Access and Habitat Incentive Program, $10 million.
WHAT DID MAKE IT IN
The bill kept language authorizing USDA to designate a research facility in El Reno, Oklahoma, as the Grazinglands Research Laboratory.
Along with disaster and economic aid, the bill will support Texas farmers who are not getting water under treaty agreements with Mexico. According to reports, Mexico is 265 billion gallons behind on its obligations to provide water back to the U.S. on the Rio Grande River. Back in February, the last sugar mill in Texas shut down because of the lack of water. Texas lawmakers wrote their colleagues back in May calling on them to withhold funds to Mexico until the water situation has been resolved.
Thus, the bill included a provision to provide add to farmers who are facing "losses due to the failure of Mexico to deliver water to the United States in accordance with the 1944 Water Treaty."
The bill also had specific language to set aside aid to states with a net farm income for 2023 of less than $250,000,000, as recorded in the data in the Economic Research Service publication "Farm Income and Wealth Statistics" as of Dec. 3, 2024, and fewer than 8,000 farms and an average farm size of fewer than 1,000 acres per farm, as recorded in the National Agricultural Statistics Service publication "Farms and Land in Farms 2023 Summary."
States that meet those conditions include Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Chris Clayton can be reached at Chris.Clayton@dtn.com
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