Planted in ag policy One of the authors of the 2014, 2018 farm bills will address convention goers


By Trista Crossley
Editor

Fischer

One of the authors of the 2014 and 2018 farm bills will be on hand at the 2024 Tri-State Grain Growers Convention to give his perspective on ag policy in the coming year.

Bart Fischer may still be heavily involved in the operation of his family’s wheat farm in Oklahoma, but these days, he’s also firmly planted in the world of ag policy. Fischer spent nearly nine years in Washington, D.C., as the chief economist on the House of Representative’s Agriculture Committee. He was also the trade advisor to the Ag Committee chairman during North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations and the trade war on China. He is currently co-director of Texas A&M’s Agricultural and Food Policy Center and an associate professor in the agricultural economics department. Fischer plans to address the farm economic outlook and, of course, the farm bill in his convention keynote presentation.

“We will have just finished up a presidential election, and we are going to have a much better sense of where the conversation in D.C. is headed, particularly with respect to the farm bill,” Fischer said. “I think we’ll have a much clearer picture by the time we gather in Coeur d’Alene.”

The 2024 Tri-State Grain Growers Convention will be held Nov. 19-21 at the Coeur d’Alene Resort in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Growers can register for the convention online at wawg.org/convention/registration/.

Fischer sees the farm bill as a vital risk management tool for farmers, who must deal not only with Mother Nature, but with markets that are dominated by factors outside of their control.

“For a grower to be able to navigate that and take all the enormous risks they face, they have to have tools at their disposal to be able to manage those risks. In essence, that is what a farm bill does. It is intended to provide risk management to growers,” he explained. “The farm bill certainly doesn’t remove all the risk. This year is a perfect example. There’s an enormous amount of risk that growers are shouldering as prices have softened this year and input costs remain sky high. A farm bill doesn’t remove the risk, but it does provide some tools for helping mitigate the risk.”

Fischer laughed when asked if he thinks Congress will pass a farm bill before convention, saying, “Absolutely not. I would love to be surprised, but absolutely not.” The 2018 Farm Bill expired in September 2023. Congress passed a one-year extension that expired Sept. 30, 2024.

The Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M works with both the House and Senate ag committees on food policy. The center has 96 representative virtual farms in 30 states, representing all the major growing regions in the U.S., including farms in Eastern Washington and a wheat farm in Oregon. When the ag committees want to know how a policy change would impact growers, such as a change in reference prices or in crop insurance premiums, the Center can apply the change to the representative farms and see the result. 

Fischer said each of the farms is backed by real life growers. The Center works with a panel of four to six growers in each location to design a farm that is representative of their area. The information is updated every two years.

“We take all of that information, and we are able to simulate the impact of any policy change on the bottom line of those farms,” Fischer explained. “It gives Congress a snapshot. We can’t speak for every farmer, because how do you convey what’s going on on over 2 million different farms? But we’ve found, over time, it does a really good job of painting a picture of reality on the ground for policymakers. It’s been a pretty effective tool going on for four decades.”

One of the biggest ag policy problems Fischer is currently working on is the fact that the farm safety net hasn’t kept up with the explosion in the cost of production, a problem made more acute by the collapse in commodity prices. The Center has done a lot of work on the need to update reference prices in the Price Loss Coverage program. Other ag policy issues the Center is working on include increasing funding for market access programs and dealing with the huge increase in conservation funding — $20 billion — that came from the Inflation Reduction Act and how that might impact conservation funding in the farm bill.

Fischer hopes that his convention presentation underscores the importance of grower engagement in Washington, D.C., especially during farm bill talks.

“Rural representation in D.C. is very small. The farm part of the farm bill is increasingly a smaller and smaller portion of the bill, so I think it is incredibly important for growers to engage to make sure that their voices are heard and not to just assume it is going to be taken care of,” he said.

More information about Texas A&M’s Agricultural and Food Policy Center is at afpc.tamu.edu.  

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