Havre panel talks issues in the next Farm Bill

Montana Sen. Jon Tester held a listening session with local agriculture producers Thursday at Montana State University-Northern, where he heard from a panel of people representing agricultural organizations as well as local producers and citizens about their desires for this year's Farm Bill.

Tester said this year's Farm Bill will have wide-reaching effects and it's important that Congress gets it right as it will have a significant impact on people looking to keep feeding the U.S. as well as the world.

"The Farm Bill is pretty damn important," he said, "and the ideas you give us here will allow us to stay in business and keep family farms and farmers working the land."

Among those on the panel was Montana Grain Growers Association President Mitch Konen, who said a bad farm bill can do serious damage to ag-reliant communities and a good one will help keep operations going for generations.

Konen said his organization's biggest concern is crop insurance, which he said needs to be invested in if local producers are going to stay in business.

Konen wasn't the only one on the panel that spoke about investments in crop insurance, but he said there are a lot of farmers out there who will not make it without that insurance, especially with input costs surging and inflation making everything more difficult.

"Food is a national security issue," he said. " ... And without that crop insurance and subsidy there, the premium would be way too high."

He said reference prices for wheat, which haven't changed in many years, also need to be raised.

He said he realizes that any rise in reference prices represents a substantial increase in the funding required for programs that use it, but the current price is nowhere near enough for producers to break even.

Another subject that Konen, among others, brought up was the lack of staffing at Farm Service Agency locations in Montana.

He said the agency desperately needs staff to help producers navigate programs and keep their businesses operational and whatever the government needs to do to support them needs to be done immediately.

Another member of the panel, Montana Farm Bureau President Megan Hedges, also talked about the issues at FSA saying so many people are aging out of the organization leaving the agency with a deficit of institutional knowledge.

She said those employees who remain need more education on the programs the agency handles and how they interact with each other so producers make their way to programs that work for them.

Hedges, who is a crop insurance agent, also talked about crop insurance, saying her home county would maybe have two operations still in business if there was no crop insurance.

FSA Committee Chair Ryan Lankford attended as a member of the public and agreed with panel members about the state of the agency saying the hiring process is intimidatingly long and involved and the pay is too low, so not a lot of people actually get hired.

Another big issue brought up by panel members was the Montana Drought Monitor, which they said desperately needs to be updated and more monitoring stations put in.

Hedges said there is too much distance between stations and improving their precision will allow for more accurate maps and encourage people to participate in relief programs that are based on drought conditions.

Rocky Boy-area Rancher Leon LaSalle, who was also on the panel, said Fort Belknap was split in half, with one side deemed to be in exceptional drought conditions while the other half was considered in extreme drought conditions, leaving half of them without access to disaster relief programs.

"It was just as dry on one side as the other," LaSalle said.

North Central Montana Stockgrowers Association Director Rich Roth said improving the monitoring tool would be helpful, but he also thinks the programs that base whether people qualify on the monitor's readings also need to be more flexible.

Roth said programs designed to help producers in general could use more flexibility and less red tape.

He said some programs require an unnecessarily complex series of steps to get any money from, and when producers are in need they can't afford to wait.

He said he understands these programs need accountability, but there are ways to streamline the process, like letting producers submit photos instead of having to wait for an inspector to verify claims of dead animals, and allowing DocuSign.

"There are always going to be some people trying to game the system," he said. "But most farmers and ranchers are just trying to make it to the next day."

Roth said fraudulent claims don't last long when it comes to these programs and sometimes it's more important that money gets out the door to the people who desperately need it.

Tester agreed that there is too much red tape and that is something that he's hoping to address in the bill.

Many panel members also brought up mandatory country-of-origin labeling, which panel member Walt Schweitzer, president of Montana Farmers Union, was particularly outspoken in his desire to see implemented.

Schweitzer said when country-of-origin labeling was mandatory, the industry saw the best commodity prices they had ever seen, across the board.

In addition to all of these issues, panel members and audience members has specific concerns they wanted to see addressed either in the Farm Bill or in other legislation.

Schweitzer said the bill desperately needs a competition title included, as meat producers and consumers continue to be exploited by the increasingly monopolized meat packing industry.

He said the past six decades have seen the industry become increasingly consolidated under the justification that such centralization helps keep food prices cheap, but producers and consumers are both being gouged by four large packers who are manipulating the market.

Schweitzer said the U.S. needs more local processing as well, since the pandemic exposed just how fragile the food supply chain was, with consumers seeing food shortages in stores while producers euthanized animals and dumped milk.

He said they need more market transparency and they need Tester's bill to establish a U.S.-Department-of-Justice-backed investigator to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act to pass.

Schweitzer also said Right to Repair legislation needs to be passed and investment in places like Northern which train the people producers and processors need to stay running.

He also talked about Tester's recent efforts to pass a bill banning sales of land to people and organizations affiliated with the governments of hostile foreign powers like China.

He said the fact that so much of Montana's beef and pork processing is foreign-owned is concerning, especially when workers in some of these facilities were put in danger by being forced to work in unsafe conditions during the pandemic.

Much of LaSalle's comments focused on the difficulties faced by producers on the reservation.

He said there were a lot of great ideas for programs in the 2018 Farm Bill that allowed tribes to negotiate with the federal government about how programs would work on their lands but, four years later, those negotiations only just started.

He said the Department of Agriculture needs to do a better job of communicating with tribes in general and they need to be part of conversations about these programs and how they are going to function.

LaSalle also talked about the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, which he said is extremely important to reservation producers but doesn't provide them with as much help as it should.

He said the way they calculate the value of land on reservations is unrealistically low, which needs to be addressed.

He also talked about the Pasture, Rangeland, Forage insurance program which he said has premiums so high that reservation-based producers are frequently priced out of it, despite wanting to use it.

LaSalle also said he wants to see sequestration of disaster payments cease and for the $50,000 limit on FSA's microloan program raised so it will be useful to people other than producers just starting out.

Montana Association of Conservation Districts Dean Rogge, another panel member, talked about his organization, which focuses on promoting soil health and water conservation as well as natural resource conservation in general.

Rogge said his organization's biggest focus at the moment is addressing the state's irrigation infrastructure, which he said is largely outdated and in need of serious investment.

He said he recently toured the U.S. and Canadian sides of the border at the St. Mary Diversion and Conveyance Works, which diverts water stored near St. Mary River and diverts it to the Milk River before it flows into Canada, and the difference was clear.

"We ought to be embarrassed at what's on our side," he said. "They are 100 years ahead of us."

Members of the audience also talked about more specific issues, like increasing local control of agriculture policy and certain producers gaming the system and taking advantage of programs that were designed to promote organic farming.

Tester said he takes exception to the latter issue in particular, having worked in organics for years, saying people engaging in that kind of behavior need to be thrown out of the program when caught.

After the session Tester said he had almost four pages of notes to take back to the Senate Agriculture Committee including on issues that he hadn't heard in previous sessions.

During the session he said some of the issues brought up are relatively easy fixes, but some things are going to be harder to get passed.

He said new spending of any kind is always going to be a challenge but raising reference prices, which he agreed is something that needs to be done, is going to be something they have to fight for.

Tester also said getting new crops added to the list of those covered by insurance is probably going to be a battle as well, but he's confident that he and his colleagues will find a way to get both of these issues into the bill.

He said he's also working on a bill that could streamline the process of hiring for federal government positions which might address the challenges at FSA, an issue he hadn't heard talked about in any previous sessions.