Barry Flinchbaugh, professor emeritus at Kansas State, didn’t mince words about the current state of the farm economy during a recent Farm Foundation forum on implementation of the farm bill.
“I don’t know if we really comprehend or grasp the fact that net farm income has been cut in half in the last five years. That’s an astounding statistic,” he said.
Given the current struggles of farmers, Flinchbaugh thinks the recently passed Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 is the most important farm bill since at least the 1980s.
“I think when the history book is written, the real impact of the (2018) farm bill is that it is farmer friendly,” he said.
Flinchbaugh was on a panel with Tara Smith, vice president of federal affairs for Michael Torrey Associates, a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm; and Alan Bjerga, senior vice president of communications for the National Milk Producers Federation.
Flinchbaugh credited Congress for putting aside partisan bickering and passing the farm bill just ahead of the late December government shutdown.
Most of his comments centered around conservation programs. “Some in farm country argue that it’s a mixed bag,” he said.
The Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program both remained in the farm bill even though an earlier House version of the bill proposed killing CSP entirely. The five-year bill will shift funding for CSP, which pays participating farmers based on the performance of conservation measures, to EQIP, a conservation cost-share program run by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Both programs were the subject of intense negotiations on Capitol Hill even though they are relatively small parts of the overall farm bill.
Certainty is what farmers need most right now, Flinchbaugh said. “It’s not coming from the trade war or the government shutdown. The real certainty is the farm bill,” he said.
And the trade war is something he thinks farmers have been unfairly hurt by.
“We need to end this trade war now,” he said, pounding his fist on a table. “Putting tariffs on aluminum and steel was stupid, period. Agriculture has been an innocent bystander.”
Flinchbaugh said farmers have been hurt on two fronts: by retaliatory tariffs, including the 25% tariff slapped on U.S. soybeans from China; and by higher machine costs caused by tariffs placed on imports of aluminum and steel.
Flinchbaugh called for the government to end the trade war and start negotiating multilateral trade agreements to open new markets for farm products.