How much 'farm' is in the Farm Bill?
Farmers question why so much of bill covers nutrition programs
Second in a series exploring the Farm Bill debate - where it's been and where it's going.
When American Farm Bureau lobbyist Mary Kay Thatcher talks to farmers around the country, she encourages them to have a 30-second sound bite ready to counter the inevitable negativity on Farm Bill programs - especially when talking to their urban neighbors.
Many of those people hear "farm subsidies" and believe they should be cut drastically, not realizing that most of the dollars in the Farm Bill are not for farmers.
One of the first things Thatcher hopes that farmers point out is that three-quarters of the money allocated by the legislation does not go to farmers.
"Of the $911 billion in 'Farm Bill' spending over the last 10 years, 76 percent of it was for nutrition programs," she told Wisconsin Farm Bureau members at their recent annual meeting.
The "Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008" doesn't even contain the word "farm" but most lobbyists, lawmakers and even farm groups use the shorthand "Farm Bill" to describe it, because it does include the commodity, conservation and other programs important to farmers.
In the minds of many taxpayers, though, all that spending goes to farmers. That is something that farmers need to do their best to counteract, says Thatcher.
The parts of the legislation that affect farmers include 7 percent for commodity programs, 7 percent for conservation programs, 9 percent for crop insurance subsidies and 1 percent for research.
Meanwhile the number of Americans using food stamps has now reached 44 million - one in seven citizens. With the slow pace of the economic recovery, this constituency of hungry Americans is going to be important in the coming legislative policy wrangling.
Many involved in the Farm Bill debate don't believe there will be cuts to the food safety net programs because of the slow economic recovery and the need of citizens.
Though it has not been made public, some policy insiders said that a Farm Bill deal hammered out with the failed Super Committee in December proposed $4 billion in food program cuts over 10 years.
Because the committee failed to reach an agreement, that Farm Bill agreement didn't come to pass. With that committee failure, automatic cuts called "sequestration" are mandated to go into effect.
Federal feeding programs may benefit from the failure of the Super Committee because they are exempt from this sequestration.
The program formerly known as Food Stamps is now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and it is the largest government food program.
In late 2011, Congress passed a spending bill that includes funding of nearly $137 billion for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA.) The spending authorization included $80 billion for SNAP.
Mario Castillo, president of the Aegis Group, a lobbying and public relations firm in Washington, was chief of staff for the House Agriculture Committee during two Farm Bill cycles in the 1980s.
Working for Rep. Kika de la Garza (D-TX), Castillo remembers that the food stamp program and others for feeding hungry Americans were a big part of the Farm Bill then too.
Historically, Castillo believes that the nutrition programs have been part of agricultural policy since 1939 and there's good legislative reasoning behind that link.
"You put Bossie next to someone who's hungry and you can get enough votes."
If the two weren't joined, he says, legislators wouldn't have enough votes to pass a Farm Bill - especially now with a shrinking number of farmers. "It's been tried, but it doesn't work. It's a way of bringing the votes in that you need to pass the Farm Bill."
Taking the two apart would be like "separating the left arm and right arm," Castillo said, because farm programs and feeding programs are both under the authority of the USDA.
But that doesn't mean the programs couldn't be improved through farm policy, perhaps linking food stamps to locally or regionally grown food or finding ways to help food stamp recipients eat more nutritious foods
"We may have to rethink what the Farm Bill means," said Castillo, in a telephone interview with Wisconsin State Farmer.
Lawmakers divided on party lines
But he adds that the legislative world has changed significantly since he was there. Congress is now ruled by "divisiveness and utter hatred based on party ideology" that makes compromise difficult - if not impossible.
Castillo said that when he was chief of staff for the House Agriculture Committee there was a lot of hard work and late nights, but there was also collaboration and esprit de corps. "There wasn't a 'my way or the highway' mentality," he said.
At that time, Castillo worked with Congressional aides who had been there for 10, 15 or 20 years. "They knew what had been tried in the past and what hadn't worked. They were the institutional memory."
He also feels that staffers on Capitol Hill are grossly overworked with an endless barrage of electronic messages. "Because we weren't part of a global internet when I was there, there was time for deliberate, considered, reasoned discourse," he said.
"Today, how can you expect anyone to be a master of any one subject like dairy policy?"
The lack of that instant messaging back then also meant that there wasn't as much chance of small disagreements getting out of hand. "The passion of the moment wasn't inflamed by instantaneous communication the way it is today."
Barry Flinchbaugh, a veteran of many Farm Bill debates, agrees that the link between the food producers and those who consume food under the various USDA programs is an important one.
The 1968 Farm Bill was the first that the Kansas State University professor of agricultural economics worked on and he's been involved in each of the farm policy debates since then. He believes it is a good move to keep the farm programs and those for feeding Americans linked together.
"You don't want to take food stamps and these other programs out of the Farm Bill budget and put them in the Department of Health and Human Services as some farmers would like to do.
"If you did that, how would you get representatives like Nancy Pelosi, with maybe two farmers in her district, to vote for it?"
Some are using the social media to call for renaming the Farm Bill, the "food bill," but Flinchbaugh doesn't think that will catch on. "If farm groups don't do it why expect the media to do it?"
There has also been a move to call the USDA the Department of Food or maybe Food and Agriculture, he said, but he doesn't know how serious that effort is.
Large food programs funded in USDA
In addition to SNAP, the USDA's food programs include the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and other child nutrition programs - the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program and others.
(Funding for WIC and the child nutrition programs, haven't traditionally been included in the Farm Bill.)
According to Amber Canto, the Poverty and Food Security Specialist with Cooperative Extension in Madison, the Farm Bill is the source of funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP.)
The first provides food and assistance to food banks, local food pantries and other food distribution centers.
In the 2011 appropriations bill that funds 2012 activities, the federal government allocated $260 million for TEFAP and $176.8 million for the CSFP to supplement the diets of low-income pregnant women, new mothers, infants, young children and the elderly with USDA commodity foods.
In a report on Farm Bill funding prepared for the "Status of Wisconsin Agriculture" from the University of Wisconsin, Canto noted that in 2010 there were 40.3 million people each month living in 18.6 million households who used the SNAP program.
The numbers were even higher in 2011.
In Wisconsin in 2010, there were roughly 980,000 residents getting SNAP benefits, which is roughly one in every six people living in the state.
