If you're like a large number of Americans, you have spent some time over the last handful of weeks thinking about the NCAA Tournament. Soon after considering the brackets, you produced your selections, celebrating if your teams advanced, and wishing you had chosen differently if they lost.
For America's farmers and any person involved in agriculture, a distinctive variety of competition is just having started. More than the next 18 months, lawmakers on Capitol Hill will hash out the specifics of the 2012 Farm Bill. The outcome of these negotiations will have a important impact on American taxpayersas effectively as every person who relies on food, fiber, and fuel from America's farm and ranch lands.
Now is the time to develop our approach. In the coming months, crippling price range deficits at every single level of government combined with a powerful U.S. farm economy will provide us with a terrific opportunity to rethink our public investment in agriculture. We need to be asking what is it we have to do to assure a stable and viable agriculture? What are we as taxpayers willing to devote to get it? What do we expect to get in return?
A intelligent farm bill will stretch our public investment in agriculture by delivering the greatest advantages to our communities and the environment while assuring that we preserve farmers and ranchers on the land to preserve creating as they do so effectively. It will recognize that agriculture in the new century will be essential to do significantly more with less.
More than the last 25 years, we have lost significantly more than 23 million acres of farmland (an region roughly the size of Indiana) to sprawling development. With the world's population expanding, American's farms and ranches will have to feed billions significantly more individuals on a diminishing land base.
A intelligent farm bill will encourage on-farm solutions to a large number of of the environmental problems we face. Nicely-managed farmland is a tremendous natural resource, delivering clean air, wildlife habitat, and groundwater filters that lower toxic runoff into our lakes and streams, typically at a price effectively below what other standard clean-up solutions price.
Much progress has been produced on the environmental front in the past, but we have to recognize that significantly more requirements to be performed to earn us adequate points to reach the healthy land and food expected by today's shoppers. A recent USDA report on the effects of on-farm conservation practices in the Upper Mississippi River Basin found that past practices have considerably decreased sediment loss from fields and in-stream nutrient build-up. That identical study also found that 36 million acres (62 percent of the basin's cropped places) still suffer from sediment, nitrogen, or phosphorous loss. Farm Bill conservation applications will be crucial to turning about these losses and have to play a central role in the policy lineup.
In addition to these challenges, 21st century agriculture have to grapple with dramatic weather shifts, prolonged periods of drought, punctuated with flash flooding. Indeed, a main function of the farm bill need to be to assist farmers respond to and overcome these challenges.
A intelligent farm bill will make government support significantly more market place oriented and responsive to taxpayers' demands. Farmers want and have applications to assist manage the risks linked with changing markets and weather that are beyond their ability to self-insure. Existing applications don't give them that in a way that is reliable and relevant to the challenges they now face. Farmers don't want and have help when there is not a substantial loss to cover and taxpayers shouldn't be asked to provide it. We as taxpayers have to recognize that we have an interest in helping farmers keep a level of stability that will preserve them on the land creating for the benefit of us all.
So prior to lawmakers establish the brackets for the next farm bill, I hope they will develop a approach that takes into account the challenges and opportunities faced by America's farm and ranch lands. Competition for restricted dollars will be stiff. We have to pick wisely to strengthen American agriculture while having the most bang from our taxpayer buck.
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