Senate passes Farm Bill; Hagel votes against it

A day after the House passed the Farm Bill by a 318-106 margin, the Senate on Thursday passed the bill by a vote of 81-15.

While U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., voted for the Farm Bill, U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., voted against it.

The bill will now be sent to President Bush, who is expected to veto the legislation. Hagel said he will vote to support Bush's veto.

Hagel said Congress, as with the 2002 Farm Bill, "squandered an opportunity to produce responsible legislation that would have instituted real reform in our agriculture policy."

Hagel also voted against the 2002 Farm Bill.

"We must reconnect our policy to its original purpose: providing a true safety net to real farmers when they need it most, while limiting government involvement in producers' decisions," Hagel said.

He said one of the biggest problems with this Farm Bill is that it still does not close the loopholes that allow big landowners and agribusinesses to abuse the farm payment program.

"Fewer than half of America's farms benefit from our current farm policy, and nearly 66 percent of farm payments go to only 10 percent of producers," Hagel said. "It is unwise and wrong to continue these policies. The real farmers and taxpayers lose. The big guys win."

Hagel said the bill continues a payment system that encourages producers to base their business decisions not on market conditions but on the subsidies for which they are eligible.

"It will continue to distort land valuations and inflate food prices, while jeopardizing our trade agreements," he said. "We need a Farm Bill that significantly reforms our current policy."

Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said during a stop in Grand Island on Wednesday that if he was in the Senate, he would vote for the $290 billion Farm Bill.

Johanns, who defeated his Republican opponent, Pat Flynn, on Tuesday for the Republican Senate nomination, resigned as ag secretary last year to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Hagel.

For his part, Nelson said the Farm Bill passage addresses many concerns facing American agriculture.

"While this bill isn't as strong as I would have liked, it contains measures important to the farmers, communities and people of Nebraska," he said.

Nelson said the bill provides essential programs such as the safety net that supports farmers in cases of disaster or economic downturn, nutrition programs for low-income people, programs for rural economic development and provisions aimed at improving energy security through domestically produced renewable fuels.

The bill also includes many programs and projects Nelson pushed for as a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, such as the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and water use research in the High Plains Aquifer Region.

If the Farm Bill hadn't passed, Nelson said, rural America would likely have lost billions in baseline funding that would be gone forever due to increasing pressures on the federal budget.

"As farmers are planting the most expensive crop in history, now is not the time for Washington to turn its back on rural America," he said. "While this bill falls short of the reforms that are needed, the cost of doing nothing to Nebraska and rural America would be too great to endure."

Keith Olsen, president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau, said his organization supported final passage of the Farm Bill and will support the vote to override a likely veto by the president.

"While we believe this bill keeps the safety net mostly intact, we are concerned about whether this safety net will be sufficient in the future," Olsen said.

Because of higher input prices and a new plateau in the level of crop prices, Olsen said, "direct payments may very well be the most important part of the commodity title to address the income risk for crop producers in the future."

"Overall, we do have some concerns about this Farm Bill," he said. "But when you consider the political uncertainties in the future and the fact the Farm Bill is way past due, this bill is much better than the alternative of having no bill at all."

The 2008 Farm Bill includes permanent disaster assistance; mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL); interstate shipment of state-inspected meat; continuation of the Milk Income Contract Loss program with added cost of production; more than $900 million for specialty crops; $7.9 billion for conservation programs; more than $10 billion for domestic and international nutrition programs; payment reforms by eliminating the triple-entity rule and requiring direct attribution of farm program payments; and increased funding for the next generation of renewable fuels.

The Farm Bill includes new incentives for the development of cellulosic biofuels. The renewable fuel standard calls for production and use of 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels by 2022. The Farm Bill contains a new, temporary production tax credit for up to $1.01 per gallon, available through Dec. 31, 2012, with an estimated cost of $403 million over the 10-year budget window.