Looking to Next Farm Bill
Category: Farm Bill, Grains, Miscellaneous, Oilseeds
(Agrinews) – Everybody, at least for the moment, loves U.S. Rep. Michael Conaway. He hasn’t yet had to craft a farm bill as chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture.
“I’ve been on a two-year honeymoon with production agriculture. Everybody loves me. They all give me hugs and kisses and standing ovations because I haven’t done the farm bill,” he said at the Commodity Classic in San Antonio.
“I anticipate those are going to be some really difficult decisions to make and hard choices, but I raised my hand and lobbied to get this job and I want to be the guy that’s helping to make those decisions.”
Conaway, R-Texas, said President Donald Trump wants the 2018 farm bill, legislation to direct agricultural policy for the next five years, to be completed on time — “and he wants a strong one.”
On ag’s share of government spending:
“We’ve got to do the best job we can to try to hold the line where we are. But there’s $20 trillion of debt. The president has proposed a lot of new spending. That puts a lot of balls in the air at any one time. No one has a real good feel yet how his whole financial picture is going to look.”
On former Ga. governor Sonny Perdue’s nomination to be secretary of agriculture:
“I think Mr. Perdue is going to make a terrific ag secretary. He brings some good credentials to the table. He is a veterinarian by trade, grain merchant, also, as well as having been governor of a state where agriculture is a big deal, so he has been an executive working with constituents who are living whatever is going on in production agriculture … Folks I talk with at USDA are anxious to get a leader in to be able to say what’s going to be his or her vision moving forward. Time is of the essence, quite frankly.”
On the wait for Perdue to be confirmed:
“He has extensive business interests, and those require disclosure, and the FBI has to do a background check. All of that, and he was one of the later ones announced … He should be relatively uncontroversial, quite frankly, and should move through the process very quickly.”
On the previous farm bill:
“The ’14 farm bill was put together giving farmers a lot of choices. It sounded good in ’14. It didn’t sound all that great in ’15 and ’16 when you actually had to make the choices.”
On new legislative priorities:
“Cotton and the dairy program and the ARC-County issues are three that we’ll have to address, among others … While cotton is an important product for me personally in the district that I get to represent, I’m going to try to be as even-handed and non-parochial as I possibly can to get this done and be fair to everybody.”
On the nutrition title of the farm bill:
“I’m driven to get them both renewed on time. If the least resistance is to keep them together and get it done, we’ll do that. If the least resistance is to separate them and get them done, I’ll do that. The only people I hear talking about wanting to separate them are the ones who want to defeat the farm bill. They’re not going to defeat SNAP. They think they can beat the farm bill. And I’m uninterested in beating my own bill.”
