Few surprised by the long wait for a new Farm Bill

As Gomer Pyle was fond of saying, "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!"

It's now fairly certain that a farm bill will not be passed before the election in November. Did we really expect anything different from our leaders, as the last three farm bills were not renewed when due?

The current farm bill, formally known as the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, is set to expire Sept. 30. It provided $288 billion over a five-year period.

The House passed their version of that farm bill in July of 2007, and the Senate passed their version in October of the same year. The two versions of the bill were reconciled; vetoed by President Bush; over-ridden by Congress; found to have been improperly presented to the President; corrected and re-passed by Congress; vetoed again; and over-ridden again, becoming law on June 18, 2008 - about nine months after the previous bill expired.

The bill before that, the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, was not passed until May of 2002; after the 1996 farm bill had already expired.

The first Farm Bill was created in 1933 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It provided subsidies to farmers in the midst of the Great Depression, as well as conservation incentives meant to combat the effects of the Dust Bowl period. That bill, known as The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court because they did not like the tax structure used to fund the bill. A replacement bill was passed in 1938.

The "Farm Bill" got a bad rap, in part because it has traditionally paid farmers not to farm. The effort to control surplus commodity supplies, and to control the price of those commodities, began in the 1930's when mechanization and increased production to feed a war-torn Europe caused huge surpluses in the States.

The 2012 (or will it be 2013?) Farm Bill will transition away from direct subsidy payments to farmers, focusing more on risk management in the form of crop insurance programs. But it should be pointed out that a huge portion of the bill has to do with things other than farming, price supports and crop insurance.

It also has to do with agricultural exports, humanitarian assistance, food stamp assistance for poor Americans, forestry programs managed by the U.S. Forest Service, rural development, and renewable fuels.

The Senate has passed the bill, but it is deadlocked in the Republican controlled U.S. House of Representatives. The impasse, of course, is over the dollars. Republicans want to cut the program more; Democrats object to $16 billion reduction in food stamps for the poor.

Adrian Smith, western Nebraska's representative in the House, is not in favor of forwarding the current bill for a vote on the floor of the House, partially because of the increase in food stamp spending, which he claims has more than doubled since the previous farm bill. He has said, "What would be far more disastrous than a brief lapse in the Farm Bill authorization is the failure of a Farm Bill on the House floor."

In the middle of the debate are agriculture producers, who are already worried about the affect of the drought on next year's product. Now, because of the inability of Congress to meet their deadlines, producers have one more uncertainty to contend with.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!