Farm Bill Priorities
Illinois Farm Bureau® (IFB) Farm Bill Priorities
Priorities for the farm bill come directly from the grassroots policy process and reflect the beliefs and ideas of our membership.
First and foremost, we hope to see a farm bill drafted and enacted before the year is over.
IFB believes the farm bill must:
- Maintain current crop insurance programming.
- Be WTO-compliant, provide price and revenue protection for farmers, and link nutrition and commodity programs.
- Maintain both SNAP and TEFAP in their current form.
Title 1 – Commodity programs
We Support:
- Allowing farmers to update base acres and yields.
- Increased commodity loan rates.
- Inflation-adjusted farm program payment limits.
- Producers or landowners - subject to a new or a previous farm reconstitution - to combine farms or maintain an individual farm number.
- Producers who elect to include HPO should be allowed to receive the harvest price if it is higher on prevented plant acres.
- Dairy risk management programs that address negative price differentials; changing or eliminating state-by-state adjustment factors in Dairy -RP that greatly limited support to producers; improving the accuracy of the DMC feed price component; providing NASS with sufficient resources to estimate alfalfa prices more accurately.
Title II – Conservation Programs:
IFB supports improvements to USDA Conservation Programs including:
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- Five-year CRP contracts.
- A flexible, renewable one-year program that pays rates like CRP that incentivize nutrient loss reduction and other programs that incentivize water quality improvements.
- Carbon sequestration incentives for farmers who use cover crops.
- A new water quality credit for producers.
- Using CSP to reward operators for practices they have already adopted and allow them to earn more points for maintaining practices over time.
- Hiring more conservation engineers.
- Providing additional flexibility for harvesting cover crops for feed during normal growing conditions.
Title XI – Crop Insurance:
We support:
- Creation of a local or state-farmer committee to hear farmer appeals of RMA decisions on overspray and planting dates or on any decision that adversely impacts crop insurance policy holders.