Editorial

There are times when just saying "no" isn't enough. We hope that's where the House Agriculture Committee is coming from.

Last week the committee rejected a package of cost-saving policy changes proposed in the Obama administration budget. The changes would have modified the current Farm Bill. In fact, there's a lot of merit to considering all of those ideas when hearings begin later this spring on a 2012 Farm Bill.

In its budget message to Congress, the administration asked for fewer federal dollars to go toward underwriting crop insurance, for a new and lower cap on the maximum amount of payments awarded to an individual recipient and for a new way to calculate eligibility for many payments made through programs in the farm bill.

This is the second year the House committee has balked at administration budget requests. Then, as now, the overriding reason appears to be leaving intact procedures set in the 2008 Farm Bill.

"We are united and I think we have overwhelming support in the House" to leave things as is, Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., told a Reuters reporter after the committee agreed to its letter turning aside the administration.

Peterson, the House Ag Committee chairman, has a point in waiting. The 2008 bill, for the first time, put a ceiling on those who get crop payments. The cutoff is less than $500,000 in adjusted gross income earned off the farm, or less than $750,000 in on-farm adjusted gross income. To change the calculation to another standard mid-term could impact a lot of farm business decisions already made.

The Obama budget proposal would lower the income cut-off, stair-stepping down to ceilings of $250,000 in off-farm income and $500,000 on-farm over three years. That policy would also extend beyond the life of the current Farm Bill if enacted to start in the 2011 federal fiscal year, which begins this October.

There's a principle behind the various crop assistance payments, and in crop insurance itself. They were designed to help the farmer through hard times, not to line the pocketbooks of the people who have vast non-farm income and do a bit of agriculture on the side.

Hearings are the way to shape such agricultural policy, to ask the hard questions about how much the federal government ought to be spending on direct farm aid, conservation programs and all the rest. That's the time for agriculture interest groups and others to chime in with suggestions on better ways to operate what have become multi-billion-dollar programs. Let's have the debate first and then fine-tune the policy.

It's also an opportunity to look at triggers for disaster relief for farmers, rather than do as the Senate did and tackle a new disaster policy issued by the Senate Ag Committee a couple of weeks ago. Those ad hoc disaster bills in recent decades have ballooned farm payments, sometimes when actual losses have been few and far between.