Hagel's frugality message not well received

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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star

GRAND ISLAND — You couldn’t call this preaching to the choir. There were no “amens” here Wednesday as Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel warned an audience at a farm bill hearing that the American public is growing increasingly concerned about federal deficits and that the next farm bill needs to be adjusted accordingly.

Nor was there much harmonizing when Hagel cited recent estimates that 70 percent of direct government farm payments now go to about 10 percent of producers.

“Our farm policy has drifted far from where it was originally intended to be 70 years ago,” Hagel said in an opening statement.

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Chuck Hagel

Chuck Hagel

But most of the Nebraska testimony that followed at a 3½-hour event presided over by Saxby Chambliss, Georgia Republican and chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, ran toward extending the current farm bill — a bill Hagel voted against — for at least one more year.

And as Chambliss, Hagel and fellow Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson listened, much of the farmer feedback from a dozen vantage points seemed to go away from a sterner attitude toward the payment limitations that Hagel wants to lower to $250,000.

“Our organization has struggled with payment limits for a number of years,” said Steve Ebke of Daykin and the Nebraska Corn Growers. “What we’ve had some difficulty with is assigning a dollar value.”

Steve Wellman of Syracuse, speaking for the American Soybean Association, said its policies favor no individual payment limits at all. “We believe the payments should follow where the production is at,” Wellman said.

In other words, a farmer raising three times as many soybeans as a neighbor should get a government payment that’s three times as big.

Wednesday’s regional field hearing was the most recent in a series of stops that also included Iowa Tuesday and Montana today. It’s all for the sake of gaining a better understanding of what farmers want as the 2002 farm bill expires, Chambliss said.

In his opening statement, Nelson spoke favorably of an approach that would address both food security and fuel security through attention to ethanol. Later he offered a possible solution to a crop insurance problem in which drought had diminished farmers’ yield histories and hurt their claim potential.

But Brad Lubben, part of Wednesday’s audience and a farm policy analyst at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said afterward there’s a good chance the current bill will be extended.

That’s because of unresolved issues about farm subsidies in world trade talks, Lubben said. It’s probably also a sign of agricultural anxiety about budget cuts.

“We don’t want to talk about it, but the deficit issue is on the top of everybody’s mind,” he said.

The size of individual farm payments is another dominant issue, because the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C. has posted the amounts individual farmers are getting each year on its Web site.

The Washington Post has added fuel to that policy fire with a detailed look at individual payments in a recent series called “Harvesting Cash.”

But Lubben is among those who think a focus on individual amounts is the wrong focus. “It clouds the real debate.” And that is: “Should payments be based on production or should they be based on farms?”

Although several who testified Wednesday wanted to leave commodity portions of the farm bill as they are, optimism didn’t seem to be running high about farm policy encouraging the next generation of farmers.

Doug Nagel of Davey, father of two young sons, said he feels fortunate to have a wife who provides off-farm income. He called agriculture “too capital intensive,” and said it would be easier for him to make money at a job in Lincoln.

How about David Hilferty of Grant, father of four? “At this point, I would not recommend that any of them come back to the farm,” Hilferty said. “They can make more money elsewhere.”

In sifting through those perspectives later, Chuck Hassebrook of the Nebraska Center for Rural Affairs in Lyons reached a broader, and not very satisfying conclusion.

“I think it’s profoundly troubling,” Hassebrook said, “that there are leaders of agriculture who would say this farm bill is working well and should be extended — and, at the same time, that there is no future in agriculture.

“If there is no future in agriculture,” he said, “then this farm bill is not working.”

Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or at ahovey@alltel.net.