MGGA talks Farm Bill to packed Havre crowd

Talking to a near overflow crowd at the Northern Agricultural Research Center south of Havre Wednesday, representatives of the Montana Grain Growers Association said the new Farm Bill has some good points and some drawbacks for Montana farmers and ranchers.

A main point they hammered home is producers need to research what options will be best for their operations and everything planned and ready when signups start — some perhaps delayed until next year.

But not all that will happen is known.

“We’ve put a disclaimer in here,” MGGA Past President Ryan McCormick of Kremlin said at the start of his presentation. “There are some of the things that are going to go on in the implementation process that we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen here.

“There are a few things that aren’t set in stone yet that we’re still working through and trying to figure out what angle we’re going to push for and what’s going to happen.”

The room continued to fill as the presentation started, with more than 75 people eventually coming to the meeting in NARC’s meeting room at Fort Assinniboine south of Havre.

As people continued to trickle into the room at NARC, research center staff members continued to bring in more chairs.

NARC Superintendent Darrin Boss stopped McCormick a few minutes into his presentation to take tables out of the room and bring in chairs for people who could not find a seat.

MGGA Vice President Charlie Bumgarner said he was glad to see the crowd.

“Apparently the farm bill must have passed because we all want to know, maybe, how its going to work,” he said.

The previous farm bill expired in 2012, and USDA programs in the bill have run on extensions since then. The bill, passed early this year after the two-year delay, eliminates several programs, including direct payments, the counter-cyclical program, the Average Crop Revenue Election Program and the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments for crops.

The ARC and SURE programs eliminated are new, implemented in the last farm bill passed in 2007.

Loan programs, LDP and Marketing Loan Gains, and SURE for livestock, bees, trees and fish were extended.

New programs replacing the eliminated programs are Price Loss Coverage price safety net — replacing the former counter-cyclical program — and the Agricultural Risk Coverage revenue loss safety net.

The bill also consolidates conservation programs, combining 23 programs in the 2008 Farm Bill into 13 programs and capping the Conservation Reserve Program at 23 million acres. It sets a goal of enrolling 10 million new acres a year in the Conservation Stewardship Program and maintains EQIP, the Environmental Quality Improvement Program, at slightly reduced funding.

McCormick said MGGA was disappointed in some changes — the loss of the direct payments will have a major financial impact, for example — but Montana had to take some losses to get a compromise bill passed.

A major change discussed was the variety of options in the new programs.

McCormick said signup for programs will be for five years — the life of this bill — and producers need to carefully look at the options to decide whether to use the ARC or PLC programs and what form of them to use. The producers need to figure their yields versus county yields, the prices they have been receiving and what yields and prices they expect they might see.

MGGA is putting up programs on its website at http://mgga.org to help registered users figure out the best options, he and MGGA Executive Vice President Lola Raska said.

In the programs, operations can be signed up for PLC or for ARC based on the individual farm or on a county level — McCormick said that is by farm number, not by farmer, so a producer could have different parts of an operation signed up under different options.

The crops and yields are on record also can be updated, and it will be important for farmers to decide what options to take, he said.

New crop insurance programs also are implemented, with insurance required for compliance in conservation programs. McCormick said language allows farmers and ranchers now considered compliant with insurance to be grandfathered in.

Timing of signup is part of the issue, along with what the language of the actual implementation of programs will be, McCormick said. Ag operators need to have their information together so they can make the decisions as to what options will be best for their farms, he said.