NASCOE Now Legislative Article

                                                                                                                     BY

KEVIN BEEKMAN, MWA LEG CHAIR

FARM BILL - NASCOE has been doing a lot of “Congress watching” these past few months watching the Farm Bill proceedings. The House passed their version of the Farm Bill on July 17 and the Senate passed their version on December 14. The next step in the process will be for the Conference Committee to come to an agreement and pass it on to the President for his signature. The biggest challenge that we see right now is for the Conference Committee to come up with a Farm Bill that meets the Presidents approval. The President’s staff has gone on record to say that both the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill do not go far enough with changes so it will be interesting to watch in the next few months.

Congressional staffers from both the House and Senate will be working on this during the holiday break. They will be working on some of the minor details for the Conference Committee but the main issues will need to be worked on when both the House and the Senate get back from recess. Here are a few observations:

1. The basic structure of the last Farm Bill remains in place for price and income support. The change could be that some options would be available to producers relative to revenue based programs and some changes to loan rates and target prices for some crops. Both the House and the Senate have different ideas about revenue based programs.
2. Both the House and Senate are close when it comes to Dairy programs.
3. Payment cap changes are offered by both the House and the Senate but are different when it comes to what levels are acceptable.

Many things could change between now and when the President signs a Farm Bill but NASCOE will continue to monitor the process. The House returns on January 15 and the Senate returns on January 22 which means that farm bill conferees will not officially meet until the end of January. Congress also extended the 2002 Farm Bill until March 15, 2008 to give the conferees time to reach an agreement and it also protected some commodity budget baseline spending. What all this means is that we probably will not have a farm bill until late February.

COLA – The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 was passed by Congress and signed by the President of December 26. This provided an overall average increase of 3.5% for a Cost of Living Allowance. The breakdown of this between overall increase and locality pay has not been done yet.

REORGANIZATION TASK FORCE – Your NASCOE Executive Committee is in the process of putting together a Reorg Task Force. The Legislative Committee will be represented in this group. The purpose of putting this group together is to discuss where we are at now, where we want to be if USDA is reorganized, and how we might get there. It is important to be proactive with this topic. NASCOE will provide more information once the group is put together and who is involved in this group.