Chairman criticizes limitations on payments to big farms

By JERRY HAGSTROM
For the Capital Press

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., plans to begin hearings on the 2012 Farm Bill in March or April of this year, and said he is determined to write a bipartisan bill that is within the funding baseline that exists in 2012.

The funding baseline is the amount of money the Congressional Budget Office determines would be spent on all programs in the farm bill if they were to continue after 2012. CBO projects the funding levels based on spending in programs in past years.

Peterson told a joint meeting of the National Association of Wheat Growers and U.S. Wheat Associates that he wants to hold hearings in Washington, D.C., and around the country. Peterson said the hearings will focus on "what is right and working well" from the 2008 Farm Bill, "a critique on how rule-making has gone" and how to construct a safety net that works.

He wants to finish the bill by the end of September 2012, when the current farm bill expires.

Peterson did not address nutrition programs, which now make up 70 percent of the USDA budget, in his speech. Afterward, he said he does not expect the budget for nutrition programs to be an issue because the nutrition baseline has grown as millions of people have signed up for benefits.

While Peterson said he wants agriculture to stay within the baseline, he also said he had told Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack that he is not pleased with the USDA's renegotiation of the standard reinsurance agreement with crop insurance companies that would cut $4 billion over five years. That money would then disappear from the farm bill baseline.

In the 2008 negotiations, Peterson and others pulled $5.6 billion over 10 years out of the projected spending for crop insurance to pay for other programs.

Peterson said he believes that crop insurance may be the centerpiece of the federal safety net at some point in the future. "We need to cover every crop grown in this country," he said.

Peterson also urged farm leaders to use the hearings to take control of the farm bill reform movement.

He said reformers who didn't understand how the bill works dominated the discussion in 2008. There should be changes to the farm bill, he said, but he was highly critical of one of the reformers' biggest goals, limitations on payments to big farmers. The campaign to reduce payment limits "is not reform. It's an ideology," he said.

Reformers contend that Congress can decide what size farms should get farm payments, but "we are not smart enough in government to decide what farm size is," Peterson said.

Peterson said he does not "necessarily have any agenda," but he provided details on what interests him in the next farm bill.

"We need to give you a safety net that will give you back your cost of production. If you lose half your crop you need to get back 30 percent," Peterson said.

Peterson said he favors protecting farmers on "whole farm income" rather than the protection of specific crops.

"One reason I like whole farm is we still have people cheating the system," he said. "We have people planting without any intention of harvesting a crop."