Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., released the text of her draft farm bill on Monday with just weeks remaining in this Congress and more than five months after releasing a detailed summary of the proposal.
The 1,397-page bill would limit President-elect Donald Trump's use of the Commodity Credit Corporation account to compensate farmers for trade losses as he did in his first term.
The top Republican on Senate Ag, John Boozman of Arkansas quickly rejected the proposal.
“An 11th hour partisan proposal released 415 days after the expiration of the current farm bill is insulting. America’s farmers deserve better," he said in a post on X.
The bill includes a 5% increase in reference prices for the Price Loss Coverage program, and changes to the reference price escalator that would increase the effective reference price after periods in which market prices have been elevated.
The bill's increased funding is partly offset by restricting USDA's use of the CCC from 2025 through 2030 unless the department has congressional authority. The bill says the CCC "is authorized to use its general powers only to carry out operations as Congress may specifically authorize or provide for."
The Congressional Budget Office would be directed to estimate the savings of the provision at $6.7 billion. The provision could potentially restrict the ability of the Trump administration to provide assistance to offset the impact of retaliatory tariffs.
“The foundation of every successful Farm Bill is built on holding together the broad, bipartisan Farm Bill coalition,” Stabenow said in a press release. “This is a strong bill that invests in all of agriculture, helps families put food on the table, supports rural prosperity, and holds that coalition together.”
Leaders of the House and Senate Ag committees have complained for months that Stabenow hasn’t fully engaged with them in negotiating a new bill, and it’s not clear her draft could get through committee on a party-line vote. Democrats currently control the committee by one vote, 11-10, and Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., has said that the reference price increases Stabenow proposed in May were insufficient.
Under the Stabenow bill text, the reference prices would be set at $3.89 for corn (up from $3.70 under the 2018 farm bill), $8.82 for soybeans (up from $8.40), $5.78 for wheat (up from $5.50), and 38.5 cents for cotton (up from 36.7 cents).
The Agriculture Risk Coverage guarantee would be increased to 88% of the benchmark revenue, up from 86%.
According to the release, the bill would provide $20 billion “to strengthen the farm safety net to support all of agriculture and establishes a permanent structure for disaster assistance so emergency relief reaches farmers faster,” $8.5 billion “to help families make ends meet, put food on the table, and improve access to nutrition assistance,” and $4.3 billion “to improve quality of life in the rural communities that millions of Americans call home."
The release of Stabenow's bill text comes as Republican leaders of the House and Senate Ag committees have turned to talking about the need for a package of disaster aid and relief for commodity price declines.
Boozman said last week he wants to write the legislation in a way that would add baseline to the next farm bill, something lawmakers did for cotton and dairy producers in early 2018 to pave the way for passage of a new farm bill later that year.
The House Agriculture Committee advanced a farm bill in May but it has never been put on the House floor, and the legislation isn't fully paid for, because the CBO estimate for CCC savings is far below what the committee needed.
For more news, go to Agri-Pulse.com.
