While lawmakers continue the back-and-forth on the budget, some are keeping their eye on the farm bill. Speaking on the Senate Floor, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) made a plea for farmers.
“The whole purpose of the Farm Bill is supposed to be to help farmers. What an idea. Yet seven out of eight dollars, again, seven out of eight dollars in the Farm Bill is for something else. Our farmers depend on crop insurance, commodity programs such as the Agriculture Risk Program, ARC as we call it, and Price Loss Coverage which is the PLC program, and disaster programs to help them deal with difficult crop yields, markets, and rising input costs. Farmers can’t control the weather or the price and that’s the reason they need help,” he said. “We have to remember farmers put food on the table but there’s a lot of people that don’t understand that.”
He said the farm safety net in the farm bill is vital to keeping America farming.
“This safety net is a level of pricing if the price goes under a certain amount. We help our farmers overcome that cutback where they can survive. The problem is that the safety net price has not been risen since 2012. And we don’t think the prices have gone up? We’ve lost our mind,” he said.
Tuberville warned there would be consequences if those prices weren’t raised.
“We’re going to be buying all of our food and everything that we eat from other countries. It’s coming. We have got to raise our reference prices we’ve got to help out our farmers,” he said. “These programs these reference prices allow our farmers to continue clothing, feeding, and fueling every citizen in this country, and a lot of other countries.”