The Farm Bill affects all of us, Commissioner Weathers says

Congress passed the first Agricultural Adjustment Act as part of the New Deal in 1933 to help struggling farmers during the Great Depression.

In 1938, Congress passed another farm bill, which included the requirement that farm legislation would be updated every five years.

With the Agricultural Act of 2014 nearing its September expiration, farm and nutrition communities throughout the United States are advocating for a forward-looking, fully funded 2018 Farm Bill.

All of us have a stake in the Farm Bill, because all of us care about access to the safest, highest quality and most affordable food supply possible.

That food supply begins with farmers, of course, and without an effective investment in the safety net of agricultural production, farmers won’t have the tools and resources they need to be successful.

Even with a safety net, farming is risky business, which is why crop insurance is a top priority for the 2018 Farm Bill.

South Carolina farmers know all too well the crippling impact of a natural disaster, having weathered the great flood in 2015, a tropical storm and a hurricane in 2016, and a late freeze in 2017.

Although we’ve been fortunate more recently with seasonal weather, farmers know they’re always one weather event away from crop devastation. Because Congress did away with direct disaster relief payments to farmers in the 2014 Farm Bill, crop insurance is a farmer’s primary line of defense against weather-related crop destruction.

Here’s the challenge: the highest level of crop insurance coverage a farmer can obtain still doesn’t cover 100 percent of their losses. Our losses from the drought and flood of 2015 taught us that. Our farmers cannot afford any cuts to the crop insurance program in this Farm Bill.

Specific commodity challenges always exist; this time it’s dairy and cotton.

Thankfully, both the U.S. House and the Senate have passed disaster relief provisions for both industries as part of the recent appropriations bills.

Specifically, the legislation puts cotton back into the Title I commodity programs and waives the cap on livestock insurance.

We have several other priorities for this legislation, including animal disease prevention.

Specifically, we support a proactive animal disease program that includes bringing together federal and state stakeholders to reduce the impact of high-consequence animal diseases, provide rapid detection and response capabilities and develop disease mitigation and prevention technologies.

Like animal disease, invasive plants and pests can be significant threats to our crops.

The 2014 Farm Bill created an invasive species program, and we support continued funding for this programming that addresses plant pest and disease management and prevention.

Other Farm Bill priorities include maintaining or increasing funding for several initiatives, including trade and export promotion, specialty crop block grants, conservation programs and agricultural research and extension programs. The sustainability of our natural resources and the safety and security of our food system depend on it.

SNAP

A safe and sound food supply is only as good as people’s access to it.

The 2018 Farm Bill must also maintain funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Access Program, better known as SNAP.

It’s important to remind ourselves that the SNAP portion of the Farm Bill is approximately 80 percent of the dollars.

Some legislators in 2014 supported removing SNAP provisions from the Farm Bill and putting it in a separate bill. Doing so would be detrimental to the coalition necessary to pass a Farm Bill and would likely impact passage of any meaningful agriculture legislation.

With food safety in mind, the new Farm Bill must address the many implementation challenges that came with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a landmark bill signed into law in 2011.

The good news is that FSMA shifted the focus of food safety regulation from being response-driven to prevention-driven. The difficulty is that FSMA compliance can be costly for food producers. The 2018 Farm Bill should include resources to assist producers with FSMA compliance, including low-cost loans for infrastructure upgrades.

Where are we with all of these Farm Bill priorities?

We hope to have a strong bill by the end of September.

The House of Representatives has begun working on its bill, but the Senate has not. We continue to talk with our congressional delegation about the importance of funding the Farm Bill. If a new Farm Bill is not passed by the expiration on Sept. 30, the alternative is to extend the current date.

We also have made our positions clear to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. He is an old friend of mine and good friend to South Carolina agriculture.

He has visited our state twice since he took office as the nation’s top agriculture officer.

You might recall that Secretary Perdue visited the Orangeburg area during his August trip to Charleston for the eclipse.

In January he visited two farms in the Midlands and held dialogue sessions with local farmers.

As you can imagine, the Farm Bill was a hot topic, as was trade and more specifically, the North Atlanta Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Our farmers and our economy need the United States to remain in NAFTA, and we need NAFTA to be updated and modernized without harming our industry.

One significant legislative hurdle we face as an agricultural industry in South Carolina is that none of our congressional delegation members serves on a House or Senate agricultural committee.

Our advocacy certainly is important for full House and Senate votes, but it would be nice to have local representation on the committee level.

Pride in agriculture

With that said, we will continue to speak out on behalf of our South Carolina farmers and agribusiness industry.

As I wrote in The Times and Democrat’s farming special section in the fall of 2017, we have a lot to be proud of when it comes to agriculture and agribusiness in South Carolina.

Agribusiness is our state’s largest industry, with a $42 billion dollar economic impact.

We want to grow that number to $50 billion by the year 2020. This 50-by-20 goal is one of the reasons we support a strong Farm Bill and will continue to represent our industry’s best interests to Congress and to state and local leaders.

Remember that when we talk about our industry, we’re really just talking about people: the people who grow and produce our food and the people who purchase and consume it.

We all have a role to play in agriculture, and asking your congressional representatives to support a strongly funded and unified 2018 Farm Bill is an important way to contribute to an industry that serves South Carolinians every day.