A Hearing to Review Farm Policy with Under Secretary Robert Bonnie (February 8, 2022)
Summary
Transcript of "A Hearing to Review Farm Policy with Under Secretary Robert Bonnie" before the Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management of the Committee on Agriculture, February 8, 2022, Serial No. 117-29, with Chair Cheri Bustos presiding via Zoom. The sole witness was Robert Bonnie, Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Ms. Bustos said the hearing was a chance for Members to share what farmers were experiencing and to hear updates on programs under the Subcommittee's jurisdiction. The record closes with USDA answers to submitted questions, including a spend plan for the $100 million designated for implementing relief, covering staffing, information technology and outreach.
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“A Hearing to Review Farm Policy with Under Secretary Robert Bonnie (February 8, 2022).”
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[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
A HEARING TO REVIEW FARM POLICY WITH
UNDER SECRETARY ROBERT BONNIE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
GENERAL FARM COMMODITIES
AND RISK MANAGEMENT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 8, 2022
__________
Serial No. 117-29
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Printed for the use of the Committee on Agriculture
agriculture.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
48-997 PDF WASHINGTON : 2022
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE
DAVID SCOTT, Georgia, Chairman
JIM COSTA, California GLENN THOMPSON, Pennsylvania,
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts Ranking Minority Member
FILEMON VELA, Texas AUSTIN SCOTT, Georgia
ALMA S. ADAMS, North Carolina, Vice ERIC A. ``RICK'' CRAWFORD,
Chair Arkansas
ABIGAIL DAVIS SPANBERGER, Virginia SCOTT DesJARLAIS, Tennessee
JAHANA HAYES, Connecticut VICKY HARTZLER, Missouri
ANTONIO DELGADO, New York DOUG LaMALFA, California
SHONTEL M. BROWN, Ohio RODNEY DAVIS, Illinois
BOBBY L. RUSH, Illinois RICK W. ALLEN, Georgia
CHELLIE PINGREE, Maine DAVID ROUZER, North Carolina
GREGORIO KILILI CAMACHO SABLAN, TRENT KELLY, Mississippi
Northern Mariana Islands DON BACON, Nebraska
ANN M. KUSTER, New Hampshire DUSTY JOHNSON, South Dakota
CHERI BUSTOS, Illinois JAMES R. BAIRD, Indiana
SEAN PATRICK MALONEY, New York JIM HAGEDORN, Minnesota
STACEY E. PLASKETT, Virgin Islands CHRIS JACOBS, New York
TOM O'HALLERAN, Arizona TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
SALUD O. CARBAJAL, California MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
RO KHANNA, California TRACEY MANN, Kansas
AL LAWSON, Jr., Florida RANDY FEENSTRA, Iowa
J. LUIS CORREA, California MARY E. MILLER, Illinois
ANGIE CRAIG, Minnesota BARRY MOORE, Alabama
JOSH HARDER, California KAT CAMMACK, Florida
CYNTHIA AXNE, Iowa MICHELLE FISCHBACH, Minnesota
KIM SCHRIER, Washington JULIA LETLOW, Louisiana
JIMMY PANETTA, California
SANFORD D. BISHOP, Jr., Georgia
______
Anne Simmons, Staff Director
Parish Braden, Minority Staff Director
______
Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management
CHERI BUSTOS, Illinois, Chair
ANGIE CRAIG, Minnesota AUSTIN SCOTT, Georgia, Ranking
FILEMON VELA, Texas Minority Member
SALUD O. CARBAJAL, California ERIC A. ``RICK'' CRAWFORD,
TOM O'HALLERAN, Arizona Arkansas
AL LAWSON, Jr., Florida RICK W. ALLEN, Georgia
SANFORD D. BISHOP, Jr., Georgia DAVID ROUZER, North Carolina
TRACEY MANN, Kansas
MARY E. MILLER, Illinois
Joshua Tonsager, Subcommittee Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Bustos, Hon. Cheri, a Representative in Congress from Illinois,
opening statement.............................................. 1
Prepared statement........................................... 2
Scott, Hon. Austin, a Representative in Congress from Georgia,
opening statement.............................................. 3
Thompson, Hon. Glenn, a Representative in Congress from
Pennsylvania, opening statement................................ 17
Witness
Bonnie Hon. Robert, Under Secretary, Farm Production and
Conservation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.. 4
Prepared statement........................................... 6
Submitted questions.......................................... 37
A HEARING TO REVIEW FARM POLICY WITH UNDER SECRETARY ROBERT BONNIE
----------
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2022
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk
Management,
Committee on Agriculture,
Washington, D.C.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:00 a.m., via
Zoom, Hon. Cheri Bustos [Chair of the Subcommittee] presiding.
Members present: Representatives Bustos, Craig, Carbajal,
O'Halleran, Lawson, Bishop, Spanberger, Pingree, Schrier,
Austin Scott of Georgia, Crawford, Allen, Rouzer, Mann,
Thompson (ex officio), Miller, LaMalfa, Johnson, Moore, and
Fischbach.
Staff present: Lyron Blum-Evitts, Prescott Martin III,
Joshua Tonsager, Patricia Straughn, Trevor White, Erin Wilson,
and Dana Sandman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHERI BUSTOS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM ILLINOIS
The Chair. Good morning, everyone. This hearing of the
Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management
entitled, A Hearing to Review Farm Policy with Under Secretary
Robert Bonnie, will come to order.
So, welcome, and thanks to everyone for joining today's
hearing. After brief opening remarks, Members will receive
testimony from our witness today, and then the hearing will be
open to questions. In consultation with the Ranking Member and
pursuant to Rule XI(c), wait, is it XI(c) or XI(e)? Sorry. My
vision is bad. XI(e), I am sorry, XI(e). I want to make Members
of the Subcommittee aware that other Members of the full
Committee may join us later.
Today's hearing to review farm policy with USDA's Under
Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation, Robert Bonnie,
is an important opportunity for Members of this Subcommittee to
share with USDA what our farmers back home are experiencing, as
well as to hear updates on the status of programs under our
jurisdiction.
During the past year, this Subcommittee has held a series
of sessions, listening to our important stakeholders so we can
keep a pulse on what is happening on the ground in farm
country. We have held a hearing with a group of farmers, a crop
insurance agent, and an ag economist to get a better
understanding of how our farm safety net programs are working.
What we learn from those is critically important as we evaluate
how programs are working.
We know that the pandemic has continued to impact all of
society, including supply chain disruptions that have led to
higher input costs for farmers. And farmers across the country
have been experiencing more and more extreme weather events; a
polar vortex, historic drought, multiple hurricanes, and
tornados, in December no less.
There are a variety of critical programs designed to help
farmers through these tough times. I hear through pretty much
every ag meeting that I have how important the Federal Crop
Insurance Program is to help farmers manage this risk.
Congress has also provided significant disaster funding to
provide additional support for producers hit by extreme
weather, funding for which was requested by the Biden
Administration last September. And commodity programs like ARC,
PLC, and marketing assistance loans have been important safety
net options for producers, with several enhancements to those
programs made in the last farm bill.
And just yesterday, Secretary Vilsack announced an
important new initiative, the Partnership for Climate-Smart
Commodities, which will help develop new marketing
opportunities for farmers.
Under Secretary Bonnie, I look forward to hearing your
testimony and getting a sense of what you've been hearing and
how the programs you oversee are working to address the
economic and growing conditions farmers have been experiencing.
[The prepared statement of Mrs. Bustos follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Cheri Bustos, a Representative in Congress
from Illinois
Today's hearing to review farm policy with USDA's Under Secretary
for Farm Production and Conservation, Robert Bonnie, is an important
opportunity for Members of this Subcommittee to share with USDA what
our farmers back home are experiencing as well as to hear updates on
the status of programs under our jurisdiction.
During the past year, this Subcommittee has held a series of
sessions, listening to our important stakeholders so we can keep a
pulse on what's happening on the ground, in farm country.
We have held a hearing with a group of farmers, a crop insurance
agent, and an ag economist to get a better understanding of how our
farm safety net programs are working.
What we learn from those is critically important as we evaluate how
programs are working.
We know that the pandemic has continued to impact all of society,
including supply chain disruptions that have led to higher input costs
for farmers.
And farmers across the country have been experiencing more and more
extreme weather events; a polar vortex, historic drought, multiple
hurricanes, and tornados, in December no less.
There are a variety of critical programs designed to help farmers
through tough times.
I hear through pretty much every ag meeting I have how important
the Federal crop insurance program is to help farmers manage their
risk.
Congress has also provided significant disaster funding to provide
additional support for producers hit by extreme weather, funding for
which was requested by the Biden Administration last September.
And commodity programs like ARC, PLC, and marketing assistance
loans have been important safety net options for producers, with
several enhancements to those programs made in the last farm bill.
And just yesterday, Secretary Vilsack announced an important new
initiative, the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities which will
help develop new marketing opportunities for farmers.
Under Secretary Bonnie, I look forward to hearing your testimony
and getting a sense of what you've been hearing and how programs you
oversee are working to address the economic and growing conditions
farmers have been experiencing.
I would now like to welcome the distinguished Ranking Member, the
gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Austin Scott, for any opening remarks he
would like to give.
The Chair. I would now like to welcome the distinguished
Ranking Member, the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Austin Scott,
for any opening remarks that he may have.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. AUSTIN SCOTT, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM GEORGIA
Mr. Austin Scott of Georgia. Thank you, Chair Bustos, and I
also would like to thank Under Secretary Bonnie for being here
today, and congratulate you on your confirmation to head up the
Farm Production and Conservation mission area.
Over the past 5 years, that mission area has been extremely
busy with implementation of the 2018 Farm Bill, disaster
assistance, working to combat illegal tariffs from China, and
protect the food supply in the face of disruptions due to
COVID. I hope that we use our lessons learned from these past
couple of years as we go into the next farm bill to help
improve on all of those areas.
I grew up working on a farm, and owned several hundred head
of cattle with my grandfather at one point. But today, I am
part of the 98 percent of Americans whose primary connection to
agriculture is eating every day. Only two percent of the people
in this country are classified as farm producers. That comes
from a pretty broad definition, and I want everybody to
understand that anybody who has the potential to produce $1,000
in sales in this country by definition is considered an ag
producer. The reality is there are about 200,000 full-time
farmers and farms, most of which are family-owned, that are
responsible for producing about 85 percent of the food supply
in this country. I want to say that again: 200,000, or
approximately \1/10\ of 1 percent of the American population,
are farm families who are responsible for 85 percent of the
food supply that we consume on a daily basis. That is a very
small line of producers that stands between us being self-
reliant and us being dependent on foreign countries for our
groceries.
That is why I think it is critical that we have an
effective farm safety net, and that we have open and honest
discussions about where our food supply comes from and the
danger of disrupting that from some of the policies that are
being promoted by the extreme left.
Mr. Secretary, I look forward to hearing your comments and
your concerns today. I want to thank you for appearing before
us. I look forward to additional oversight as we push forward
in these years, and I again want to charge the Committee with
making sure that we are taking care of America's food supply.
With that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you to our Ranking Member, Mr. Scott.
The chair would request that other Members submit their
opening statements for the record so our witness may begin his
testimony, and ensure that there is ample time for questions.
With that, I would like to introduce Under Secretary Robert
Bonnie. He oversees the mission area that houses the Farm
Service Agency, Risk Management Agency, Natural Resources
Conservation Service, each of which plays a critical role in
delivering programs and assistance for producers across the
country.
Prior to joining USDA, Mr. Bonnie was at Duke University,
and also worked at the Bipartisan Policy Center. This is Mr.
Bonnie's second time serving in a confirmed position at USDA,
having previously been Under Secretary of Natural Resources and
Environment during the Obama Administration. And he has also
served in senior staff roles at USDA under both the Obama and
Biden Administrations. He brings a deep wealth of knowledge and
experience to his position.
Welcome, Under Secretary Bonnie. We look forward to hearing
your testimony. You will have 5 minutes, and you will see that
there is a timer that should be visible to you on your screen,
and will count down to 0, at which point your time will have
expired. Under Secretary Bonnie, please begin when you are
ready.
STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT BONNIE, UNDER SECRETARY, FARM
PRODUCTION AND CONSERVATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mr. Bonnie. Madam Chair, Ranking Member Austin Scott, I
appreciate the opportunity to be with you today to discuss farm
bill implementation and USDA's ongoing work to serve America's
farmers, ranchers, and forest owners.
While COVID-19 continues to present challenges for in-
person staffing of USDA offices, our staff have continued to do
their jobs at full capacity. Indeed, we have implemented
several new pandemic programs on top of our existing farm
safety net and conservation programs. As we navigated the
pandemic, our priority has been on the safety of our staff.
FPAC has deployed an incident management team to monitor the
spread of the disease and to adjust staffing accordingly.
COVID-19 is not the only challenge that American
agriculture faces. Between 35 to 40 percent of the contiguous
U.S. experienced severe to exceptional drought last year. The
region hardest hit was the West, in which 80 percent
experienced severe to exceptional drought. In response, USDA
both updated the ELAP Program to help cover the costs of
transporting feed for livestock that rely on grazing, and
lowered the drought intensity threshold that triggers
assistance.
FSA is now moving quickly to deliver $10 billion provided
by Congress in additional disaster assistance to agricultural
producers impacted by wildfire, droughts, hurricanes, winter
storms, and other eligible disasters from 2020 and 2021. In
implementing this law, our goals are to reduce the paperwork
burden on producers, ease agency administrative burdens while
maintaining accountability, and encourage producers to use
existing safety net programs by linking assistance to them.
USDA will follow a two-phase process to administer relief
to eligible producers with the first phase utilizing a
streamlined process that relies on existing data that producers
have already provided to USDA. We plan to distribute at least
half of the $750 million for livestock through the first phase
by the end of March.
With increasing extreme weather, crop insurance remains a
vital tool for agriculture. RMA continues to develop and expand
its offering to row crops, fruits and vegetables, and other
parts of agriculture. We recently announced a micro-farm policy
to ensure we are helping producers of all sizes. We developed
and implemented a Pandemic Cover Crop Program to incentivize
use of cover crops across 12 million acres. We recently
announced an additional insurance coverage for corn farmers who
split-apply nitrogen, a cost effective and environmentally
friendly practice.
Agriculture has a vital role to play in mitigating
greenhouse gases. Fortunately, many of the practices that
benefit the climate also improve agricultural and forest
productivity. USDA's approach to climate change for agriculture
and forestry will be voluntary, incentive-based, producer-led,
and grounded in science.
Yesterday, the Secretary announced the Partnership for
Climate-Smart Commodities funding opportunity. Using CCC
dollars, USDA will partner with agriculture and forestry to
scale the adoption of climate-smart practices associated with
commodity production, and quantify and verify the climate gains
from these pilot projects. Our goal is to de-risk the adoption
of climate-smart practices so that farmers, ranchers, and
forest owners can benefit from the development of emerging
markets for climate-smart commodities.
We are in the midst of the 2022 crop year signup for ARC-
PLC, an important safety net program that provides critical
support to mitigate fluctuations in either revenue or prices
for certain crops. In November 2021, we issued $1.8 billion in
payments for producers for the 2020 crop year, and we are on
pace for enrollment this year with a deadline for signup in the
middle of March.
We are committed to making USDA's farm and conservation
programs available to all farmers and ranchers and forest
owners. Last August, FSA published the final rule for the Heirs
Property Relending Program to help producers and landowners
resolve heirs property and land ownership and succession
issues. All three FPAC programmatic agencies are increasing
outreach and assistance in historically underserved
communities.
Beginning farmers and ranchers represent more than \1/4\ of
the farming population, but have historically experienced more
difficulty obtaining assistance from USDA. FPAC will continue
to prioritize assistance to these farmers and ranchers.
Likewise, urban agriculture is of growing importance, as FSA
now has 11 urban county offices focused on programs and
engagement with producers, and we just announced the membership
of the Urban Agriculture Federal Advisory Committee.
I look forward to your questions today, and thank you again
for having me.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bonnie follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Robert Bonnie, Under Secretary, Farm
Production and Conservation, U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Washington, D.C.
[Chair] Bustos, Ranking Member Scott, and Members of the
Subcommittee, it is a pleasure to meet with you today in my new
capacity as Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation
(FPAC).
My name is Robert Bonnie, and I was honored to serve during the
Obama Administration as Under Secretary for Natural Resources and
Environment and as a senior advisor to Secretary Vilsack. With that
experience I have had the opportunity to see both the possibilities and
the challenges that define American agriculture. As I focus on my new
role within the FPAC Mission Area and survey the breadth of what we
have accomplished in partnership with Congress, I am pleased to report
that we continue to meet the evolving challenges our producers face
through implementation of the 2018 Farm Bill provisions, the
establishment of pandemic response programs, and administration of
disaster programs.
2018 Farm Bill Update
First, I want to thank this Committee for working tirelessly to
improve the farm economy through the 2018 Farm Bill and subsequent
provisions. Strengthening the farm safety net has been even more
critical during this pandemic, and the improvements from the 2018 Farm
Bill that FPAC agencies have implemented set the foundation for new
programs and changes to meet the toll that the pandemic has taken on
our producers.
Crop Insurance
The tools Congress provided in the 2018 Farm Bill further
strengthened crop insurance programs, and I'm glad to report that
producers have already benefited from these improvements to this strong
public-private partnership. I am pleased to share a few of these
improvements that are helping support the crop insurance safety net for
farmers, who face increasingly severe weather patterns due to climate
change. For instance, the Risk Management Agency (RMA) now provides
coverage for rice growers who use innovative irrigation practices such
as alternative wet-dry and furrow irrigation. Producers now have the
ability to insure land in multiple counties through Multi-County
Enterprise Units--recognizing the practical realities that farms often
cross county lines and insurance should accommodate that. We
implemented the Quality Loss Option to reduce the impact quality losses
have on a producer's future crop insurance coverage. We developed a new
nursery policy that is easier for producers to access and for insurance
companies to sell and service, a new policy for strawberries in Florida
and California, and a new Micro Farm Policy targeted at providing a
crop insurance policy for smaller producers who sell locally, such as
for farmer's markets. We also introduced Hurricane Insurance
Protection--Wind Index (HIP-WI) for the Gulf Coast, Eastern Seaboard,
and Hawaii that provides prompt payment to producers when a hurricane
hits. Lastly, the Pasture, Rangeland, and Forage insurance program now
has over 200 million acres insured compared to under 100 million in
2018.
RMA continues to work with stakeholders, private insurance
providers, and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation Board of
Directors to develop new, innovative, and financially-sound policies
and plans of insurance to adapt to the changing risk management needs
of farmers and ranchers that have thus far resulted in 40 new insurance
products to further strengthen the crop insurance program. Recent
examples include Dairy Revenue Protection (DRP) that has only been
offered for a few years but now already covers 30 percent of the milk
production in the U.S., the Enhanced Coverage option that allows
producers to purchase up to 95 percent levels of coverage, and key
policy changes and subsidy increases to the Livestock Risk Protection
(LRP) plan to bring those policies in line with row crops. The changes
made to LRP have resulted in a remarkable increase of over 1,000
percent program participation.
In addition to the increased participation in DRP, RMA is also
seeing growing participation in the Livestock Gross Margin for Dairy
Cattle and producers who purchase crop insurance for their specialty
and organic crops. This is a testament to our work with producers and
interest groups to strengthen the farm safety net and the public-
private partnerships that enable us to deliver crop insurance.
Farm Programs
The 2018 Farm Bill reauthorized the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC)
and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs with some modifications for the
2019 through 2023 crop years. The ARC program is an income support
program that provides payments when actual crop revenue declines below
a specified guarantee level. The PLC program provides income support
payments when the effective price for a covered commodity falls below
its effective reference price. Payments, if triggered, are issued after
October 1 of the year following the program year. When comparing ARC/
PLC participation from its authorization in the 2014 Farm Bill and
inaugural program year 2014 to program year 2019, enrollment increased
by 8.7% and a total $6,281,422,160 was issued in payments for 2019,
making it the largest amount since the 2016 program year. For program
year 2020, enrollment increased by 10.6% and payments were issued in
the amount of $2,162,805,971.
On March 2, 2020, the Farm Service Agency (FSA) published changes
to the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) as required by
the 2018 Farm Bill. The 2018 Farm Bill made the buy-up coverage option
for NAP permanent, with the payout limit for buy-up coverage increased
to $300,000. It also codified that NAP coverage must include local,
organic, contract, or other premium prices, and maintained the fee
waiver and 50 percent premium discount for beginning, socially
disadvantaged (SDA), and veteran farmers.
The farm bill also made NAP available to producers when limited
insurance coverage or only Whole-Farm Revenue Protection is available
and directed FSA and RMA to collaborate to collect and share data so
that RMA can develop policies that address gaps in coverage for NAP
users so both agencies can help transition crops and counties from NAP
to crop insurance. This includes helping beginning farmers use NAP as
an on-ramp to Federal crop insurance. Since program year 2019, nearly
$400 million has been paid to producers enrolled in NAP, who otherwise
would have been left without risk management coverage through RMA for
crop losses due to low yields, loss of inventory, or prevented planting
due to natural disasters.
On February 26, 2020, FSA published a rule making changes in its
supplemental disaster programs as directed by the 2018 Farm Bill. These
changes include removing the payment limitation for the Emergency
Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees, and Farm-raised Fish Program
(ELAP), and increasing the payment rate for beginning and veteran
farmers and ranchers in both ELAP and the Tree Assistance Program
(TAP). Under changes made by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 there is
also no longer a program year per person and legal entity payment
limitation for TAP and growers are eligible to be partly reimbursed for
losses on up to 1,000 acres per grower. This is double the initial
acreage cap of 500 acres that was first set for the program in 2014.
ELAP has paid out over $170 million to producers since program year
2019, while TAP has provided over $8 million in much-needed relief.
Dairy Programs
The 2018 Farm Bill replaced the Margin Protection Program with
Dairy Margin Coverage (DMC) to ensure that dairy farmers can protect
themselves against financial catastrophe and market fluctuations. DMC
is a voluntary program that provides dairy operations with risk
management coverage that offers protection against low milk prices,
high feed costs, or some combination of both and pays participating
producers when the difference (the margin) between the national price
of milk and the average cost of feed when it falls below a certain
level selected by the producer. As of January 18, 2022, DMC indemnity
payments since the 2018 Farm Bill total over $1.64 billion, of which
$1.19 billion was from 2021 alone when the program provided vital
support to dairy farms, particularly for small- and mid-sized
operations, navigating low milk prices and high feed prices in 2021.
As part of a subsequent effort by Congress to help the dairy
industry respond to the pandemic and other challenges, the Consolidated
Appropriations Act established Supplemental Dairy Margin Coverage
Payments for calendar years 2021-2023. These payments are limited to
farms enrolled in DMC with a production history of less than 5,000,000
pounds, reflect increases in their production since 2014. In a December
2021 rule, FSA implemented those changes that expanded DMC allowing
producers to enroll supplemental production that will provide an
estimated $644.52 million to better help small- and mid-sized dairy
operations. In line with 2022 DMC sign-up, enrollment for this
Supplemental Dairy Margin Coverage Payment opened on December 13,
20201, and will remain open through February 25, 2022. As of January
18, 2022, approximately $20.6 million was disbursed for 2,369
operations with established supplemental production history.
Additionally, the 2018 Farm Bill directed USDA's National
Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) to begin collecting data on
premium alfalfa prices for the first time. Using that new NASS data, in
the December 2021 rule USDA changed the DMC feed cost formula to better
reflect the actual cost dairy farmers pay for high-quality alfalfa hay.
FSA is now calculating payments using 100% premium alfalfa hay rather
than 50%. Approximately $100 million in DMC payments have been
disbursed due to changes in feed cost formula to better reflect the
actual cost fairy farmers pay for high-quality alfalfa hay. In that
same December 2021 rule, USDA also amended Dairy Indemnity Payment
Program regulations to compensate dairy producers for the loss of cows
due to contamination, including from per- and polyfluoroalkyl
substances.
Farm Loan Programs
The 2018 Farm Bill doubled the Direct Farm Ownership (FO) loan
limit from $300,000 to $600,000 and Guaranteed FO loan limit increased
from $700,000 to $1,750,000, which then increased to $1,825,000 on
October 1, 2021. The Direct Operating Loan (OL) limit was raised from
$300,000 to $400,000 and the Guaranteed OL limit from $700,000 to
$1,750,000, which, again, was increased to $1,825,000 on October 1,
2021. FSA has seen a significant increase in the average loan amount
since the enactment of the increased loan limits. Providing much needed
financial assistance to our borrowers.
While this authority has been helpful to farm loan borrowers, the
increased loan limits put demand on the total loan levels provided.
USDA continues to monitor this situation and uses the annual
appropriation's authority to increase negative subsidy rate loan levels
by 25 percent when needed. This has been beneficial to meet borrowers'
needs, especially during CRs and within the constraints of our
targeting requirements.
Through an amendment to the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development
Act (CONACT), the 2018 Farm Bill increased the percent of the FSA
guarantee for Guaranteed FO and OL from 90 to 95 percent for a
qualified Beginning or Socially Disadvantaged (SDA) farmer.
Previously, lenders could only receive a 95 percent guarantee under
limited circumstances such as refinancing FSA direct loan debt or
participating in the Direct FO Down Payment Loan Program. The increase
in the guaranteed loan percentage provides lenders more incentive to
extend credit to these farmers, a traditionally underserved group.
Guaranteed operating loan activity has varied since this change was
implemented. Guaranteed FO activity has increased in the last several
years but declined in Fiscal Year (FY) 2019.
Prior to the 2018 Farm Bill, borrowers who received debt
forgiveness were ineligible for emergency loans; however, a 2018 Farm
Bill amendment to CONACT allows borrowers who have received debt
restructuring with a write down to maintain eligibility for emergency
loans. This change addresses the concern that borrowers who have
experienced a disaster, through no fault of their own, are suddenly
unable to receive financial assistance and continue their operations.
Borrowers who have received prior debt forgiveness through
restructuring with a write down still have viable operations and FSA
can now extend assistance in the form of emergency loans to those
current and past borrowers who have suffered from a disaster. While
there are other ways debt forgiveness can be obtained through FSA, the
2018 Farm Bill expanded emergency loan eligibility only to those whose
debt forgiveness was in conjunction with an approved debt restructuring
plan. FSA has made 213 emergency loans to 96 borrowers who previously
received a debt write down as a component of loan restructuring.
On August 9, 2021, the final rule of the Heirs' Property Relending
Program (HPRP) was published in the Federal Register outlining the
availability of competitive loan funds to help agricultural producers
and landowners resolve heirs' property land ownership and succession
issues. Intermediary lenders--cooperatives, credit unions, and
nonprofit organizations certified as a community development financial
institution--can receive up to $5 million at one percent interest for
relending to heirs to resolve property issues. This includes the costs
of remedying clouded title issues or buying out partial property
interests of other heirs.
The first application period closed on October 29, 2021, and FSA
received three loan applications totaling $12,000,000. Selection of
successful eligible intermediary lenders is expected to be announced in
early 2022. As part of its efforts to expand intermediary lender
participation and assist heirs, prior to the next application period
FSA will undertake an assessment of potential barriers to participation
and identify what outreach and technical assistance it can provide to
increase program interest. The program has a positive subsidy rate and
unused funds carryover to the next fiscal year. Currently, FSA has
approximately $128 million available.
Beginning Farmers and Ranchers
Beginning farmers and ranchers represent more than \1/4\ of the
farming population and our work in this space builds on previous
successes and lessons learned while looking ahead to emerging issues in
agriculture. The 2018 Farm Bill contained several key provisions that
USDA has leveraged in support of the next generation of farmers and
ranchers.
In implementing the provisions of the 2018 Farm Bill, the Beginning
Farmer and Rancher Coordinator responsibilities were delegated to FSA
who has since hired a full time National Coordinator to lead efforts
across the department and support agencies with new farmer-focused
program delivery at the local level. For example, the National
Coordinator partnered with FSA's Farm Loan Program staff to increase
and improve lending through the Direct and Guaranteed lending programs.
We hosted a Beginning Farmer and Rancher Lending Summit that resulted
in an ongoing collaboration between FSA and our commercial lending
partners. FSA is also working with a variety of commercial lending
stakeholders to identify process and policy enhancements that will
improve guaranteed lending to beginning farmers.
The Beginning Farmer State Coordinator implementation began in 2019
and was fully implemented in 2020. As outlined in the 2018 Farm Bill,
each state has a collateral duty coordinator from one of the FPAC
agencies or through USDA Rural Development. Each state has an annual
Beginning Farmer plan and reports quarterly on the goals and metrics
they identified for prioritization based on the needs of new farmers in
their state. State coordinators have been instrumental in helping
beginning farmers access and navigate USDA programs.
USDA hosted a listening session in May 2021 for beginning farmers
to share how the pandemic has disrupted and impacted their operations
as well as provide general feedback on how our programs could better
serve them. The participants made recommendations on how our programs
could be improved and communicated the value of having local staff who
can work with them directly. We are using this feedback to continue to
improve the delivery of programs during this difficult time.
The Farm Bill of 2018 laid a firm foundation for success, and FPAC
utilized the tools provided by Congress to meet the unique needs of
producers since its passage. While no one wrote the farm bill with an
upcoming pandemic in mind, we were well positioned to meet the
challenges of this once in a generation challenge.
Pandemic Assistance
As the Committee well knows, agriculture is an inherently risky
business, complicated further by the impacts of the ongoing COVID-19
pandemic. In response, USDA initially rolled out the Coronavirus Food
Assistance Program (CFAP) to provide financial assistance to producers
of agricultural commodities who suffered certain price declines or who
had losses due to market supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19.
To address gaps and disparities in previous rounds of aid, this
Administration provided $6 billion in funds through the Pandemic
Assistance for Producers Initiative, a suite of pandemic and disaster
assistance programs designed to help producers absorb increased
marketing costs, with greater emphasis on outreach to small and
socially disadvantaged producers, specialty crop and organic producers,
and timber harvesters.
Pandemic Assistance for Producers provided approximately $280
million in payments to contract producers of eligible livestock and
poultry. This is in addition to financial assistance provided through
the Pandemic Livestock Indemnity Program to support producers of
eligible swine, chickens, and turkeys as a result of insufficient
access to processing facilities, and up to $50 million in Spot Market
Hog Pandemic Program funds to support producers who sold hogs through a
spot market sale.
Timber harvesters and haulers, who experienced losses of at least
ten percent gross revenue in 2020 in comparison to 2019, received $200
million in relief as part of the Pandemic Assistance for Timber
Harvester and Haulers program.
Organic and transitioning organic producers are receiving up to $20
million in assistance under the Organic and Transitional Education and
Certification Program to cover eligible certification and education
expenses.
Through the Pandemic Cover Crop Program, RMA distributed almost $60
million in crop insurance premium support, covering over 12 million
acres, to producers who insured their spring crop with most insurance
policies and planted a qualifying cover crop during the 2021 crop year.
Since January 2021, we also suspended past-due debt collections and
foreclosures for distressed borrowers under the Farm Storage Facility
Loan and the Direct Farm Loan programs until further notice due to the
pandemic. FSA also extended deadlines for producers to respond to loan
servicing actions, including loan deferral consideration for
financially distressed and delinquent borrowers. Where possible, we
made flexibilities available to lenders through our Guaranteed Loan
program to assist in servicing their customers. Additionally, the
Department suspended non-judicial foreclosures, debt offsets or wage
garnishments, referring foreclosures to the Department of Justice
(DOJ); and is working with the U.S. Attorney's Office to stop judicial
foreclosures and evictions on accounts that were previously referred to
the DOJ.
Disaster Assistance
On top of the monumental effort of supporting America's producers
during this historic pandemic, this Administration has, time and again,
responded to the immediate needs of producers in the wake of natural
disasters.
FSA made important changes to the ELAP. First, in response to the
winter storms that hit states along the Gulf Coast in early 2021, we
made food fish and other aquatic species eligible for assistance.
Second, in response to the severe drought in the West and Great Plains,
we lowered the drought intensity threshold to trigger assistance for
water hauling expenses and began accepting applications to cover the
cost of transporting feed for livestock that rely on grazing. FSA also
made available an online tool to help ranchers document and estimate
payments to cover feed transportation costs resulting from the drought.
To further mitigate the impact of the drought in the West, FSA
invested $15 million in a block grant in August 2021 to provide
payments to producers in the Klamath Basin to reduce irrigation demand
in parts of California and Oregon.
FSA is also issuing $1.8 billion in payments to producers who
enrolled in the ARC and PLC programs, distributed more than $292
million through the Quality Loss Adjustment Program, and $3.1 billion
under the Wildfire and Hurricane Indemnity Program Plus as appropriated
through the Additional Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Relief
Act, 2019.
In addition, Congress called upon our Mission Area again to deliver
$10 billion in disaster assistance for 2020 and 2021 losses funded
through the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency
Assistance Act, 2021. Internally we are moving quickly to put programs
in place to support farmers and ranchers and we understand the
importance of this assistance.
RMA worked with crop insurance companies to streamline and
accelerate the adjustment of losses and issuance of indemnity payments
to crop insurance policyholders in areas impacted by the 2021 drought
as well as authorizing Approved Insurance Providers to extend deadlines
for premium and administrative fee payments and defer and waive the
resulting interest accrual as well as providing flexibilities under LRP
for producers who had to sell livestock earlier than expected. Over $7
billion in indemnities have been paid to date for the 2021 crop year
with over $5 billion resulting from drought.
Through RMA's HIP-WI, producers have received more than $270
million in indemnity payments in addition to coverage provided through
underlying policies.
I would like to recognize our staff for all the great work they
accomplished to provide this much-needed disaster assistance, as well
as pandemic assistance. I recognize that it is critical to have our
offices staffed to administer programs and get dollars out the door
during difficult times like these, so expanding our staffing capacity
remains a top priority for this Administration.
Climate-Smart Agriculture & Forestry
Farmers, ranchers, forest landowners, and land managers are on the
front-lines of climate change. Now more than ever we need to ensure
they have access to the tools, incentives, and support to build and
enhance resilient operations and continue to play a critical role in
addressing the climate crisis.
While USDA has not historically been at the center of the public
conversation on Federal climate policy, it has enormous and
underappreciated discretionary financial resources and agency
expertise. This Administration seeks to harness these resources and
expertise to partner with farmers, ranchers, and forest owners to
reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases through carbon sequestration and
emissions reductions and bolster the resilience of private working
lands and public forests and grasslands to the effects of climate
change.
To that end, USDA has developed an ambitious department-wide plan
for climate action, focused on partnering with agriculture, forestry,
tribes, businesses and communities. Our efforts are based on voluntary,
incentive-based approaches. Our plan centers on leveraging our existing
programs, on creating new opportunities and markets for climate-smart
agriculture and forestry, on ensuring rural America plays a key role in
our transition to cleaner sources of energy, and helping producers and
communities adapt to the impacts of climate change--adverse weather,
increasingly severe drought, storms, and flooding. We've developed an
Action Plan for Climate Adaptation and Resilience that identifies the
most significant risks that climate change poses to the agriculture and
forestry sectors and lays out Department-scale actions to best prepare
our stakeholders to address these current and future climate change
threats. We're also investing in research and development to make sure
that we have the innovative technologies, data and quantification tools
required to best position producers in this effort.
As an important component of this comprehensive climate strategy,
USDA has been working to prepare Partnerships for Climate-Smart
Commodities to finance the deployment of climate-smart farming and
forestry practices to aid in the marketing of climate-smart
agricultural commodities. In response to public and stakeholder
feedback, this opportunity will finance the production of climate-smart
commodities through a series of partner-led large-scale pilots. Project
partners will support producers to grow agricultural commodities using
climate-smart practices, implement a plan to market these commodities,
and measure and validate the resulting climate benefits. It is critical
that a wide cross-section of agriculture is involved in this effort,
including small, medium, and historically underserved producers.
In FY 2020 and 2021 NRCS provided the following:
$330 million through the Regional Conservation Partnership
Program (RCPP) and an additional $75 million in RCPP
Alternative Funding Arrangements, with 75% of these investments
supporting activities that advance the Department's Climate-
Smart Agriculture and Forestry priorities;
$41.8 million through the Environmental Quality Incentive
Program to help agricultural producers in the West mitigating
impacts from climate change by implementing practices to
alleviate the immediate impacts of drought and other natural
resource challenges on working lands;
$21 million as part of a collaboration with the Department
of [the] Interior's WaterSMART Initiative to improve our water
conservation and drought resilience;
More than $46 million through the Joint Chiefs' Landscape
Restoration Partnership for projects that mitigate wildfire
risk, improve water quality, and restore healthy forest
ecosystems on public and private lands;
$15 million through the Conservation Innovation Grants
program to support the development of new tools, approaches,
practices, and technologies to further natural resource
conservation with a focus on climate-smart strategies and $25
million for On-Farm Conservation Innovation Trials.
To target climate impacts, FSA has made several improvements to the
Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), including providing higher rental
rates to increase producer interest and enrollment; establishing a new
Climate-Smart Practice Incentive for CRP general and continuous signups
to increase carbon sequestration and reduce greenhouse gas emissions;
and rolling out a CRP Climate Change Mitigation Assessment Initiative
to measure program climate impacts and increase climate outcomes over
time.
These changes paid off. In 2021, producers enrolled more than 5.3
million acres in CRP through the General, Continuous, and Grassland
signups, surpassing USDA's 4 million acre goal.
One of the most important strategies for farmers to increase
climate resilience is improving soil health, and this Administration
has made critical investments to support that goal. Earlier this year,
NRCS announced a new partnership with Farmers for Soil Health to
advance the use of soil health practices--especially cover crops--on
corn and soybean farms. To complement the new partnership, NRCS is
investing $38 million through a new targeted Cover Crop Initiative to
help agricultural producers mitigate climate change through the
widespread adoption of cover crops.
Additionally, NRCS' Soil Health Demonstration Trial, part of the
Conservation Innovation Grants On-Farm Conservation Innovation Trials,
focuses extensively on implementation of conservation practices and
systems that improve soil health.
Early this year, RMA implemented the Post Application Coverage
Endorsement that provides coverage to producers in select counties in
the Midwest who ``split apply'' nitrogen, added flexibility for
producers to hay, graze, or chop cover crops and still receive 100% of
the prevented planting payment, and provided a $5 per acre premium
benefit for producers who planted cover crops.
Equity
Equity is a vital consideration in all we do at USDA. We must
ensure that the programs we support and the investments we make are
available to everyone and that we take special steps to ensure that
historically underserved and small- and medium-sized farmers are able
to participate and prosper from our work.
President Biden issued an Executive Order On Advancing Racial
Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal
Government \1\ and committed to creating an Equity Commission as part
of his rural agenda and commitment to closing the racial wealth gap and
addressing longstanding inequities in agriculture. USDA is in the
process of standing up an independent Equity Commission to reduce
barriers to access, in which FPAC will be highly involved with the
subcommittee on Agriculture. The Commission will provide
recommendations to the Secretary on policies, programs, and actions
needed to address racial equity issues within the Department of
Agriculture and its programs, including strengthening accountability at
USDA and to provide recommendations to the Secretary on broader more
systematic equity issues at USDA.
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\1\ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/
2021/01/20/executive-order-advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-
underserved-communities-through-the-federal-government/.
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FPAC was also active in USDA's first-ever Racial Justice and Equity
Internal Working Group to identify gaps and inadequacies in the
Department's systems and processes.
With the over $1 billion provided from the American Rescue Plan
Act, the Department will focus on creating opportunities for
historically underserved producers through technical assistance and
capacity building, access to land and credit, and access to markets and
market development and FPAC will be crucial for that work.
We currently provide approximately $75 million to 20 organizations
to provide technical assistance to connect underserved producers with
USDA programs and services, $50 million in cooperative agreements to
support historically underserved farmers and ranchers with climate-
smart agriculture, $4.7 million in cooperative agreements for FSA
outreach and education, $6.6 million in urban agriculture grants and
cooperative agreements, and $2 million in cooperative agreements for
risk management education and training programs that support
historically underserved producers and small-scale farmers.
Conclusion
It is clear that when Congress, FPAC, and producers work together,
we can accomplish great things. The 2018 Farm Bill created a foundation
that allowed us to strengthen and adapt our programs to meet the
dynamic needs of our producers. The FPAC workforce took the tools
provided by Congress, listened to producers, and implemented and
adapted our programs to meet their needs. We have overcome significant
challenges and will continue to do so.
I look forward to working with this Subcommittee, the Committee,
and Congress at large to ensure America's producers can weather any
challenges they face--whether it be a once-in-a-lifetime global
pandemic, or the annual challenges faced as the result of a changing
climate--to build back a better food system.
The Chair. All right. Thank you very much, Under Secretary
Bonnie.
At this time, Members will be recognized for questions in
order of seniority, alternating between the Majority and the
Minority. What we will do is you will each be recognized for 5
minutes in order to allow us to be able to get to as many
questions as possible. As a reminder, please keep your
microphones muted until you are recognized so we can keep down
the background noise.
So, I am going to start by recognizing myself for 5
minutes.
Under Secretary Bonnie, yesterday Secretary Vilsack
announced a new Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities. You
just talked about that. I appreciate the thoughtful approach
that USDA has taken by first seeking formal input from
stakeholders last fall about what such an initiative could look
like, and taking that input in creating this initiative. The
Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, which is chaired by the
American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Farmers Union,
Environmental Defense Fund, and National Council of Farmer
Cooperatives, and dozens of other stakeholder organizations as
participants have put out a statement commending USDA on this
announcement and said they were pleased the program is
structured in a manner consistent with the recommendations. It
is obvious that a wide variety of stakeholders were asking for
this sort of initiative.
As this will use funding from the CCC, Under Secretary
Bonnie, can you please talk about the authorities that are
being used for this?
Mr. Bonnie. The Commodity Credit Corporation, part of the
role of the CCC is to promote domestic consumption of domestic
agricultural products by helping to expand markets, including
the creation of new markets. And that is essentially what we
are doing with this program. This is a commodity program. This
is a program on working lands to link climate-smart practices,
to incentivize climate-smart practices as part of commodity
production, and then to measure and monitor that. So, we think
we have a very strong link to the CCC, and as you say, we have
spent a lot of time with agriculture trying to design something
that we believe will work for both agriculture and forestry.
The Chair. So, the last Administration used CCC Section 5
authority to spend $23 billion over 2 years on direct payment
programs to producers called the Market Facilitation Program to
offset the impacts of retaliatory tariffs, a program which
essentially paid out to producers based on the level of price
drops of each commodity. For the Climate-Smart Commodities
Initiative that Secretary Vilsack rolled out yesterday, can you
clarify how much is being spent and is it fair to say that this
initiative will help to build new marketing opportunities for
farmers and add value to their products?
Mr. Bonnie. So, we have committed $1 billion to this, and
as the Secretary noted yesterday, these are pilot projects. We
are very confident we will be able to deliver on all the things
the CCC needs to be able to deliver on as we move forward. And
yes, the idea there is emerging interest in greening company
supply chains, looking at the opportunity for agriculture and
forestry to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We are hoping to
spur private investment in that to de-risk this in a way that
the private-sector and agriculture can partner together on this
important issue.
The Chair. All right, thank you.
During last month's hearing with Secretary Vilsack, he
indicated that RMA would roll out another round of Pandemic
Cover Crop Program for the 2022 season soon, and it appears
that a final rule on the program has been sent to OMB for
review.
My home State of Illinois has a pilot project that also
provides premium discount support for the planting of cover
crops, which was complimented by PCCP last summer. It is a very
popular program for producers back home, and I am wondering if
you have any sense of when that program will be rolled out for
2022?
Mr. Bonnie. Well, we are moving as quickly as we can. We
know producers need to make those decisions quickly, and so, I
will commit to you that we are, we are moving as quickly as we
can.
We were actually surprised by the amount of interest. We
had originally thought we would be around 5 million acres, as I
noted in my testimony, it is close to 12 million acres. And I
know we learned something from Illinois, which is why we
thought about this program in the first place.
The Chair. All right, very good.
I am going to try to squeeze in one more question.
I am co-chair of the Congressional Crop Insurance Caucus,
and I understand the critical importance that the Federal Crop
Insurance Program plays in making sure that we are helping
farmers manage their risk. Would you take the remaining time
that I have to talk about efforts that USDA has to expand the
availability of crop insurance products for commodities, and
for more regions in the country?
Mr. Bonnie. Crop insurance is absolutely critical, and you
know, over the last several years, RMA has worked to create new
policies, new opportunities for producers in all types of crops
and livestock, and in different regions of the country,
different types of operations, whole farm, micro farm, and
others. We will continue that effort, look for those gaps,
continue to look for ways that we can expand this vital tool.
The Chair. All right, very good. Thank you, Under Secretary
Bonnie. My time has expired.
I now recognize the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Austin
Scott, our Ranking Member.
Mr. Austin Scott of Georgia. Thank you, Chair Bustos and
Under Secretary Bonnie.
Are you familiar with The New York Times op-ed video series
on America's food supply that they have titled, Meet the People
Getting Paid to Kill Our Planet?
Mr. Bonnie. I am.
Mr. Austin Scott of Georgia. And it goes on to say American
agriculture is ravaging the air, soil, and water, and then goes
to a pretty great length to demonize America's farm families.
What are your thoughts on those comments in that video
series demonizing America's farm families?
Mr. Bonnie. I thought it was a horrible video. I think
farmers, ranchers, and forest owners are great stewards of our
land. I think they all depend on the productivity of the land
which comes from stewardship. Agriculture has the opportunity
to be a critically important partner; in fact, it is already
stepping out in climate, water quality, wildlife, and other
ways. I was very disappointed with the video.
Mr. Austin Scott of Georgia. I, for one, want to thank you
for your comments.
I am very disappointed in it, too, and in fact, it is
outright--it is just flat out lying about the American farm
families. If we don't take care of the land, the land won't
take care of us, and people work very hard to put that food
supply on the shelves for Americans to enjoy on a daily basis.
And American farm families are facing unprecedented challenges
right now. Commodity prices are better, but look at the price
of diesel. Look at the price of inputs. And I am very concerned
about the continued attacks from the extreme left, and I don't
expect you to comment on this because it is not fair to ask you
to comment on this. But when you see someone like Senator Cory
Booker, who if I am not mistaken, sits on the Agriculture,
Nutrition, and Forestry Committee in the U.S. Senate, making
the statements that he has about America's farm families, that
is very disappointing to me that somebody in the U.S. Senate
would become an extremist opposing America's farm families. So,
I won't ask you to comment on that, but I did want to get that
out. I hope that the Members of the Committee will take the
opportunity to watch that video, and please do it when you are
not in a bad mood so that you don't break something.
Under Secretary, the concern I have right now with
America's producers is two-fold. I understand that the raw
materials to make the chemicals are here that we need in our
crop protection products to get the yields that we have, but
even if we get the yields that we have and commodity prices are
strong, the input costs are so high, and as you said, most of
our safety nets are based on the actual commodity price. And
so, commodity prices may be very good and farmers still lose
tremendous sums of money.
What safety nets are out there today that protect the
farmers in those scenarios under which commodity prices are
good, but the input costs are so high that they still lose
money, in many cases, more money?
Mr. Bonnie. Yes. I mean, you are exactly right. Most of our
commodity programs are based on yield and prices. The one
exception is the Dairy Margin Program, which takes into account
the costs of feed. I think the best thing we can do right now
is make sure we move quickly on disaster; move quickly on the
programs we have, to make sure agriculture is in as good a
situation as it can be to address this.
Mr. Austin Scott of Georgia. Well, one of the things I
would point out to the Committee is if you are not farming
today, you are not going to be farming tomorrow. You might be
one of those producers that is putting $1,000 worth of produce
on the shelf or $10,000 worth of produce on the shelf, but if
you are not part of that \1/10\ of 1 percent that is putting 85
percent of America's groceries on the shelf today, you are
probably not going to be in that number a year from now or 10
years from now. And so, I am very concerned about the false
narrative from the extreme left, and even Members of Congress
that are attacking those farm families that are responsible for
our food supply.
And so, Under Secretary, I look forward to working with
you. I do think that we are going to have some things that we
are going to have to do in the future that maybe we haven't had
to do. And when I say future, I mean short future where we have
good commodity prices, but the input costs are so high that the
farmers and our farm families lose tremendous sums of money.
And so, I look forward to working with you on those solutions.
And with that, Madam Chair, I will yield the last 10
seconds and ask people to take a look at what the extremists
had to say in that video.*
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* Editor's note: the video referred to is retained in Committee
file, and is available at https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/
100000008091680/climate-sustainability-agriculture-lobby.html.
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The Chair. Thank you, Mr. Scott.
I now recognize the gentlewoman from Minnesota, Ms. Craig,
for 5 minutes.
Ms. Craig. Well, thank you so much, Chair Bustos and
Ranking Member Scott, for the focus of today's hearing. Thank
you, Under Secretary. I appreciate you being here today, and
especially for your leadership within USDA.
As conversations around the next farm bill ramp up, I am
hearing from farmers and ranchers in my district about a couple
of key topics, including risk management, cover crop and
conservation programs, as well as commodity programs. With
those topics in mind, I am going to dive right into those
questions.
First on risk management. I consistently hear from
producers that Federal crop insurance works. It works well for
them, and that the program does not need major changes. Given
the significant amount of ad hoc disaster relief funding that
has been made available to producers in recent years, can you
talk a little bit about the role crop insurance agents have
played in helping to deliver that assistance, as well as
efforts USDA has undertaken to expand coverage options in the
crop insurance program?
Mr. Bonnie. Crop insurance is a public-private partnership.
We partner with the agents, the insurance companies to deliver
it, and maintaining that partnership is critically important.
And I think as we look at the future of crop insurance, as I
noted earlier, we have developed a lot of programs,
opportunities for producers. We will continue to look at ways
that we can refine and improve those, and we will continue to
look at gaps in coverage where we can create new products or
new opportunities in partnership with agriculture.
So, crop insurance remains absolutely vital, and as we
think about disaster programs, one of the things we are doing
as we roll out the disaster assistance, this $10 billion, is we
are linking Phase 1 to participation in crop insurance,
participation in NAP, participation in Livestock Forage
Program, so that producers have an incentive to go to those
programs and utilize those programs. I think that is one of the
best ways that we can encourage folks to use those existing
programs.
Ms. Craig. Second, thank you so much for that. Related to
crop insurance a little bit more, I was encouraged to see RMA's
recent announcement on PACE. Is USDA currently evaluating any
other crop insurance policies, and do any of those evaluations
include a similar sustainability angle?
Mr. Bonnie. I can get back to you on precisely the policies
we are looking at right now. One of the things that was
attractive about the PACE that split-application nitrogen
brought forward with support from corn growers, along with
others--I think we look for opportunities to create those new
products that will create incentives, whether it is for
sustainability, climate, or otherwise. I think that in all
those cases this has to work for agriculture. We have to
develop tools that work for agriculture that folks can embed
into their existing operations. So, I think that is going to be
an important filter for all these efforts.
Ms. Craig. Finally, I really appreciate the work the
Department has taken on to ensure that farmers utilize the
commodity programs, that they are a part of the solution to
addressing climate change.
Two brief questions on these programs. First, how does USDA
plan to continue to support these programs within the context
of the circular economy that Secretary Vilsack mentioned last
month, and then second, different crops, of course, involve
different growing practices. Minnesota, of course, is the
number one state in the country for sugar beet production, and
we are proud of it. How does USDA plan to ensure that a wide
range of commodity production systems and crops, like sugar
beets, are included in climate efforts at the Department?
Mr. Bonnie. When it comes to climate change, we want to be
outcome oriented and we don't want to dictate practices. We
want this to be producer-led. We want to allow different
cropping systems, different types of agriculture, livestock,
and allow for creativity and innovation. And so, I think as we
think about climate, what is going to be really, really
important is to allow everybody to participate: small, medium,
large, historically underserved. I think that that is going to
be of critical importance to how we design these programs.
Ms. Craig. Mr. Under Secretary, thank you so much. We got
through a lot in a very short period of time.
So, with that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you, Ms. Craig.
I now recognize the Ranking Member of our full House
Agriculture Committee, Mr. G.T. Thompson from the State of
Pennsylvania.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. GLENN THOMPSON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM PENNSYLVANIA
Mr. Thompson. Madam Chair, thank you so much. I apologize,
I had some technical difficulties getting on here. Technology
is wonderful. I am so looking forward to getting back to all of
our hearings in person because it just can be a challenge
sitting in your office in Washington, D.C.
But thank you for this hearing. Thank you and the Ranking
Member.
Under Secretary Bonnie, thank you for Zooming in with us
today. It has been 23 months since the pandemic lockdowns
began, and across America, particularly in rural America,
producers are operating business as usual, and thank God for
that, because of how they provide us our food, our fiber, a lot
of energy resources, and building materials.
Yet, USDA is still limiting FSA offices to just 25 percent
of their personnel, and limiting or even preventing farmers
from going in to the physical office. I hear from farmers, not
just in my Congressional district, quite frankly, all across
the country, that this has had a negative impact on their
ability to sign up for programs and get information, and they
have had enough. When can we expect FSA offices to return to
their full staffing capacity?
Mr. Bonnie. So, we have an incident command team that is
tracking daily levels of COVID by county. Yesterday, we moved
804 offices from 25 percent to 50 percent staffing. As omicron
abates, we expect to be able to move very quickly as the data
changes.
I understand the challenges here. We hear the same thing
you do, and we will work to move as quickly as we can to
reopen.
Mr. Thompson. Well, Mr. Secretary, you do understand
Americans will be starving to death if the good, hardworking
folks that work the fields, the farms, the forests, if they had
that same philosophy. It is time to go back to work.
Yesterday, USDA announced $1 billion for what the
Department calls Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities to
be funded by the CCC, and I have to say, first of all, I did
have a conversation with the Secretary on Friday, expressed my
frustrations with the Department for basically working as a
lone wolf, working as a maverick. That is not the way we do
things in agriculture. We use a farm team and to be kept in the
dark, basically 48, 72 hours before this announcement and yes,
he had given me a heads up before that they were working on
this, but between it was just absolute radio silence as opposed
to engaging the Legislative Branch. We are the ones that
authorize programs. You all are the ones that execute those. I
am not sure some of you folks recognize that line, the
leadership.
Now, the Secretary reiterated his authority to use CCC
funds is because the program is focused on U.S. commodities'
market expansion, and that is a legitimate use. In yesterday's
announcement, however, the Department reiterated this point,
stating, and I quote, ``All projects must be tied to the
development of markets and the promotion of climate-smart
commodities.'' The Secretary also noted how this program could
lead to a USDA climate-smart label, which is, again, something
we would want to be working with you on, not having you do this
alone.
Mr. Under Secretary, what the Secretary has described is a
commodity marketing program. That is why I am somewhat confused
to learn the NRCS was the agency issuing the notice of funding
availability. It seems like the Department is trying to fit a
square peg into a round hole to avail yourselves of the CCC
authorities and funds. And frankly, to me, this looks like a
conservation program dressed up as a marketing program.
Now, as I continue to question USDA's authority to do this
absent Congressional action, I am also very concerned that this
money will not directly benefit producers. And in the end, I
think hopefully we are all in agreement that whatever we do in
a climate space should primarily and right up-front benefit our
farmers, our ranchers, and our foresters.
But we haven't had the opportunity to really weigh in on
what you all announced just a couple days ago. These and many
other concerns are going to lead this Committee to engage in
extensive oversight of this program, its funding stream, its
implementation, its operation. I just wish we would have
engaged earlier. I am not expecting any kind of a comment or
response, I just wanted to lay out my disappointments in how
this was done.
And with that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you, Ranking Member Thompson.
Under Secretary Bonnie, if you would like to respond to
that, we will give you some time before we turn to our next
Member.
Mr. Bonnie. Yes. This is a commodity program. It is
specifically linked to commodity production, and that is
important. And while it does sit in NRCS, we will draw on
expertise from across the Department, the Office of the Chief
Economist, FSA, and others as we move forward on this, and
welcome a conversation with everybody. We have tried to listen
to agriculture as much as we can. We welcome the conversation,
going forward.
Mr. Thompson. Well, Mr. Under Secretary, and I expressed
this to the Secretary, too, and I hope you will take this in a
sincere way. I also am hoping that what you have announced
doesn't undermine the fact that the state of American
agriculture today with our productivity, our application of
technology, innovation, and science, they are already climate
heroes. I am afraid that perhaps that was the other thing that
was miscommunicated that only the folks, that it is in the
future that agriculture will be the climate heroes, when quite
frankly, they are the leading force for good. American
agriculture is really a force for good around the world in
terms of a healthier environment and climate.
So, thank you so much.
The Chair. All right. I now recognize the gentleman from
California, Mr. Carbajal, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties in my district
are home to a wide array of specialty crop production, from
wine grapes to strawberries, broccoli, and other fresh fruits
and vegetables. An increasing number of producers in my region
are participating in the crop insurance program, but I still
hear from many of them who find it challenging to take
advantage of the existing programs for a variety of reasons.
Under Secretary Bonnie, can you please discuss the crop
insurance products that are available for specialty crop
producers, and share an overview of any newer products that
recently have become available for producers like those in my
district?
Mr. Bonnie. So, probably I think as we think about crop
insurance, we are always in a dialogue with agriculture, sort
of turning the knobs, to make them work better for agriculture.
We are developing specific products for specialty crops. For
example, apples right now, we are in conversations with folks
in the apple industry about developing a product that will work
for them. We have developed Whole Farm and lots of other
efforts that work for specialty crops.
But we recognize the need to continue to listen to take
account of where users are. I mentioned earlier, this is a
partnership between the agent and the agency. It is also a
partnership with agriculture, and so, we welcome your input and
producers' input to make sure that we are offering the products
that agriculture needs.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you.
My district on the Central Coast of California has been
severely impacted by year-round wildfires as a result of
climate change. This new reality has a significant impact on my
local producers through direct crop losses, smoke taint of wine
grapes, and the inability for workers to safely harvest crops
due to poor air quality conditions.
To help address those losses in communities such as mine,
this Committee passed legislation to respond to agricultural
losses due to natural disasters in 2020 and 2021, last summer.
Congress provided $10 billion in funding for that purpose later
in the year. When do you anticipate details regarding the
distribution of that assistance will be announced?
Mr. Bonnie. We are trying to move as quickly as we can. Our
expectation is we will have more detail for you this spring. As
I noted, we are moving with livestock in March. We are going to
try to make this as easy as possible for producers. We are
going to try to use existing data, crop insurance, NAP, and
other programs so that producers don't have to come back in. We
will then have a second round where we have gaps that we can
work with producers to fill those gaps. Our plan is to move
here as quickly as we can.
Mr. Carbajal. Great.
To that end, can you also touch on what lessons were
learned from the 2018/2019 WHIP+ implementation that you have
used to help guide the distribution of disaster assistance for
the 2020/2021 losses?
Mr. Bonnie. Yes. I think WHIP worked well. I think part of
our effort here to streamline this is lessons learned. How do
we make this as easy as we can for producers? So, that was part
of the lesson learned here, and then as I say, we will have two
phases both on the livestock and the crop side with the hope
that we can answer any significant gaps in the second phase.
Mr. Carbajal. Thank you, Under Secretary Bonnie. I really
appreciate your leadership and your good work.
With that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you, Mr. Carbajal.
I now recognize the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Allen, for
5 minutes.
Mr. Allen. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr.
Bonnie, for joining us today.
Obviously, we had a great hearing last week from NRCS Chief
Cosby and FSA Administrator Ducheneaux, as we conduct a review
of the farm bill conservation programs. We are obviously very
focused, or at least, this Administration is totally focused on
climate change, and this is at odds from what I am hearing at
home. I don't hear about climate change. All I am hearing from
my constituents is this Administration's war on fossil fuel,
which is causing input costs to rise at unprecedented levels,
meaning fuel, fertilizer, and so on. They tell me about the
constant dumping of foreign commodities such as blueberries in
our domestic markets. And overwhelmingly, I hear about supply
chain disruptions made worse by the Administration's vaccine
mandates, school closures leaving parents unable to go to work,
decreased meat packing line speeds, and countless other agency-
level decisions made by unelected officials. They walk in the
grocery store, they see empty shelves and the price of food is
unprecedented.
Mr. Secretary, obviously this Administration took office a
little more than a year ago. You talked about being outcome-
based, can you tell me how many dollars has USDA, as far as
your responsibility, has redirected toward climate change in
rural America?
Mr. Bonnie. So, first, I am not sure I can give you an
exact number, and I will tell you why.
A lot of the climate practices, climate-smart practices
that we think about are actually things like timber stand
improvement, nutrient management, cover crops, soil health.
They are things that have broad other environmental and
conservation gains. Things that improve productivity of
agriculture are good for climate, because we can grow more,
more efficiently. That is really good for climate.
Our hope here is to prioritize climate practices where we
can, but to do it in a way that works for agriculture that
creates new opportunities. So, we will continue to look for
ways in the conservation programs to do that, and of course,
with the partnership initiative that we talked about yesterday.
Mr. Allen. So, let me get this straight. These are
practices that we have always done, and obviously, rural
America is one of the great climate change advocates, and have
been, because that is how they make their living. So, why all
this emphasis, and again, I don't know where we are moving
money or whether we are taking our eye off the ball here, but
we have other problems we got to deal with, and I want to know
why are we taking our eye off the ball on feeding America in
the most efficient and the safest ways, and all of this noise
about climate change? Like I said, my people are not talking
about climate change. They are very concerned, so what are we
doing to address these issues?
Mr. Bonnie. When I go out in the countryside, I hear about
drought, I hear about wildfire, I hear about extreme weather
events. And part of our effort to address those things is about
climate change as well, and it is making U.S. agriculture more
resilient. And investments in that is, as I noted, is going to
actually----
Mr. Allen. Sir, you already talked about everything we are
doing to deal with climate change.
Let me ask you this. With everything we are doing with
climate change, how much are we going to lower the temperature
of this planet?
Mr. Bonnie. Well, I don't think----
Mr. Allen. You are outcome-based. Tell me how much we are
going to actually reduce the temperature of the planet and all
of a sudden the weather is totally calm?
Mr. Bonnie. Well, I am not a climate----
Mr. Allen. And no more droughts.
Mr. Bonnie. I am not a climate modeler, but I know that
U.S. agriculture is prepared to do a lot of good and to create
new markets and new opportunities while they do it.
Mr. Allen. Well, again, I think we better keep our eye on
the ball. We need to address these issues because like I said,
for our farmers, this input cost is a real problem, and with
that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
The Chair. I now recognize the gentleman from Georgia, Mr.
Bishop, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Bishop. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr.
Bonnie for sharing with us today.
Let me first associate myself with the comments from
Congressman Austin Scott, as well as yours regarding the
attacks on farm families as evidenced through The New York
Times piece. It obviously reflects a lack of understanding of
the great difficulty that our farm families have providing the
food and fiber for all of Americans which they are doing so
well under difficult circumstances. So, we have a real job in
educating the public as well as some of our Members of
Congress. But I want to associate myself with those remarks,
because our farm families deserve better.
Let me address you, Mr. Bonnie. Prior to the global
pandemic--and I am speaking as an appropriator--USDA staff
retirements and attrition had reached an all-time high, leaving
the Department with fewer staff and less experienced staff all
across the 29 agencies. This seems to be pronounced at the
local level in the FSA county offices. In my district, there
have been anecdotal reports of timeliness issues when
responding to customer service requests from county to county.
With the increased workload from several ad hoc programs like
payments to offset the 2018 trade war, ad hoc disaster
assistance, the pandemic relief, has staffing been a concern
within the Farm Production and Conservation mission area? Given
the crucial assistance that FSA provides, do you have any
suggestions for us as to what additional authorities or what
additional resources the Department needs to address these
challenges, particularly in our rural counties, that we should
consider in the next farm bill? How do you anticipate that the
Fiscal Year 2023 budget requests will address staffing needs,
and are there staffing needs that go beyond the current
Administration's priorities? Basically, do you have enough
people to do the core work?
Mr. Bonnie. We need more people, and we need both on the
NRCS side and FSA. And you are right about staff attrition, and
we are looking at things like direct hiring authority to be
able to streamline that process. And it is critically important
as you all think about the 2023 Farm Bill, thinking about
things like technical assistance for NRCS, the ability for us
to have the boots on the ground to provide sound technical
assistance, to do the outreach we need to small producers,
medium-sized producers, historically underserved, another
important issue here. So, yes, there is a challenge and we are
moving to hire as quickly as we can.
Mr. Bishop. Thank you.
Now, over the years, Mr. Bonnie, farmers of color have
experienced historic discrimination in the loan process from
the county offices, and in my district, there have been some
anecdotal reports of the lack of consistency in services
provided from county to county. For example, I had a farmer
that was told that he needed to have irrigated crops in order
to participate in the non-insured crop disaster assistance,
which is simply not true.
I know it is difficult to standardize processes across
geographic regions and not everything can be uniform, but
timeliness, the level of customer service, honesty, and the
appeals process are examples of standards that should be
consistently applied from county to county. What additional
efforts is USDA making to ensure that the same quality of
service occurs from county to county, and that equity and other
challenges in rural counties can be accommodated, and is there
something that we need to include in the next farm bill in that
regard?
Mr. Bonnie. This is a critically important issue that USDA
programs are available to everybody. On the loan side, we think
there is more we can do in loan servicing, but we have to make
sure our staff is able to do that, and we will continue to work
to do that.
On our programs more generally, making sure we have
outreach partnerships, both in FSA, RMA, we just moved $50
million in NRCS to create some partnerships with folks on the
ground to make sure we can reach everybody. This is critically
important. It was critically important in our announcement
yesterday when we talked about the importance of being able to
reach all farmers. So, this remains a very high priority for
us.
Mr. Bishop. I think my time has expired. I yield back,
Madam Chair.
The Chair. Thank you, Mr. Bishop.
I now recognize the gentleman from Arkansas, Mr. Crawford,
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Crawford. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Mr. Bonnie, the 2018 Farm Bill bipartisanship, which is why
I'm troubled by this example of USDA ignoring not just
Congressional intent [inaudible] beginning farmers who are
frustrated, being outbid by the Federal Government in their
effort to access land to get into farming.
Last month, USDA again announced it is offering a ten
percent inflationary adjustment that is likely to exceed the
cap set in law. So, my question is what legal authority did
USDA use to go beyond the caps Congress expressly set in the
law, and will USDA assess the impact that its decision has on
beginning farmers and purchase affordability in farm country?
Mr. Bonnie. Well, CRP is obviously a very important
program. We talked about that. We have talked about how
important it is for hunting and fishing and conservation more
broadly. We work closely with OGC as we developed the new
incentives last year that we worked on, and are very confident
that we are on solid ground there.
I think one of the most important issues is to make sure we
get the best acres into CRP, marginal acres, flood prone acres,
and I think if we do that, we can find a balance with
agriculture where the folks that are concerned about taking
land out of production, that we can strike the right balance.
Mr. Crawford. Well, Madam Chair, I think we should take a
hard look at this issue as we craft the next farm bill. It is
troubling to me that Congress can set a clear cap with clear
intent only to see its bipartisan work ignored.
Let me follow up with consumer-packaged goods. Companies
are always looking to set their products apart in the grocery
store and restaurants, and now looking to incentivize
production of low carbon grains to show environmental
distinction about final products. It is my understanding that
growers that sell in these markets can see a premium price.
Isn't that an example of the private-sector being a leader, and
what we see from this Administration is the government trying
to play catch up?
Mr. Bonnie. There is no doubt that there are already folks
in the market. There are emerging markets for both. If you look
what cotton producers are doing, if you look at what some other
companies are doing in this space, there is no doubt that these
markets are emerging.
The question is can we do more to scale more quickly, and
can we de-risk this for producers by providing incentives, both
on the deployment of climate-smart practices, as well as the
measurement and monitoring? We think that is a good place for
us to be.
Mr. Crawford. Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back.
The Chair. All right, thank you very much.
I now recognize Mr. O'Halleran from the State of Arizona
for 5 minutes.
Mr. O'Halleran. Thank you, Madam Chair, and Under Secretary
Bonnie, I appreciate your testimony. Thank you for spending
your time with our Committee this morning.
In your testimony, you certainly are explaining new and
innovative ways that USDA is working with farmers to ensure
that they can access critical programs that this Committee
worked on in the 2018 Farm Bill. Programs administered through
the Farm Service Agency and the Risk Management Agency have
become of particular importance to Arizona over the past few
years. The entire Southwest is experiencing significant
drought, which has worsened wildfires. When people need to
access these farm programs that we are discussing today, it is
because they are struggling. And when farmers struggle, rural
economies suffer. This is why it is important to be sure that
in this coming farm bill process, we get these programs right
and we are able to provide strong programs to support our
farmers.
Mr. Bonnie, as you highlighted, USDA has done quite a bit
to expand the availability of different specialty crop
insurance products for its stakeholders. However, I am very
concerned regarding the infrastructure of USDA, and whether
Congress has devoted enough resources to make the experience
better for stakeholders when accessing USDA programs. When
people need to rely on crop insurance programs, it is often
because something has gone wrong. In Arizona, many of my
constituents rely on these USDA programs in response to
dangerous wildfires. Can you talk about how you are evaluating
staffing needs? I know we talked about this already. I want to
know what is going to be done, are you going to request more
money? What are you going to do about IT infrastructure and
other internal processes to make the experience better for the
farmer utilizing one of the programs administered through the
Farm Service Agency or the Risk Management Agency? And are you
going to actually ask Congress for it and get it through the
Secretary and the Administration to get it down to the people
that we all serve?
Mr. Bonnie. As I noted earlier, you are exactly right.
Staffing is a critically important issue, and we will use our
authorities to the maximum extent practical to help on that.
I am glad you brought IT up, because that is an important
part of the equation as well. We have to be able to allow for
folks to access things like farm loans online to make it easy,
and so, looking for ways that we can use IT to both reduce
staff burden, but to open up programs to more people I think is
really, really important.
You can imagine, I probably don't want to scoop OMB or the
Secretary on budget issues, but just know that the staffing
issues are really, really important. We need the boots on the
ground, whether it is safety net or conservation programs, to
be able to deliver these programs to producers.
Mr. O'Halleran. The staffing issues are not new. They have
been there for quite some time, and it is not new to this
Administration or the previous Administration. It appears like
something has to be done, and it has to be done so that we keep
the family farms up and going, and make sure farming in America
continues in the direction it needs to.
Thank you for giving us the overview of the workload of the
Farm Service Agency, but in the past few years, given several
ad hoc programs along with the regular farm bill programs they
delivered, and what sort of workload do you anticipate delivery
of disaster assistance for 2020 and 2021 will place on county
FSA offices, and how has the pandemic impacted that workload?
Mr. Bonnie. I should take this opportunity just to thank
the folks in FSA. We have asked them to do a lot. We have put a
lot of work, the pandemic assistance, our regular programs,
disaster, and they have delivered. As we were thinking about
the experience with WHIP and with other programs and the
disaster program that we are rolling out this spring, staff
capacity is really important. We want to be accountable. We
want to make sure we spend the taxpayers' money well, but at
the same time, we want to both reduce the burden on producers
as well as FSA staff.
Our hope is that once we get on the other side of disaster
and pandemic assistance, things will calm a little bit, but
even despite us asking more of those staff, and in a pandemic
where staffing levels are down, our FSA team has delivered
beyond expectations.
Mr. O'Halleran. Thank you, Under Secretary.
I just want to mention quickly that you can have the best
product in the world, the best program in the world. If we
can't get it to the people, it is not going to work. So, let's
get it to the people that need it.
Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you, Mr. O'Halleran.
I now recognize the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Lawson, for
5 minutes.
Mr. Lawson. Thank you, Madam Chair, and Mr. Bonnie, welcome
to the Committee.
During the winter months Florida is responsible for about
half of the produce consumed by America. Over the last couple
of weeks, produce in my state has been experiencing extreme
winter weather conditions with temperatures dropping below
freezing in some areas. My question is can you give us an
overview of what you have been gathering from farmers impacted
in the Southeast by the weather, and what resources are
currently available to help producers who have been
experiencing this impact?
Mr. Bonnie. Yes. We have obviously heard from producers as
well, and you know, we have traditional programs there, crop
insurance and other programs. The disaster program that you all
provided resources for is tied to 2020 and 2021, so we can't
access those for efforts in Florida. So, we will rely on our
traditional disaster programs and crop insurance to help your
producers.
Mr. Lawson. Okay, thank you.
Mr. Secretary, after Hurricane Michael made landfall in the
panhandle where I am in 2018, over 16,000 forestland owners
reported damage to their timber, with more than $1.3 billion in
losses. What are the lessons learned from the 2018/2019
Wildfire Hurricane Indemnity Program that you have used to help
guide the implementation of disaster assistance for 2020 and
2021 losses, especially as it related to state block grants
like the one used for timber losses?
Mr. Bonnie. Yes, I think we saw significant timber losses,
and of course, when timber is down on the ground, it tends to
increase supply very quickly and prices drop, which only makes
salvaging the timber more difficult. And so, there were
resources provided in WHIP for that. Again, this is an area of
concern. We are limited in the number of tools we have there.
We tend to have more tools on the agriculture and livestock
side, but clearly, it is a significant challenge and one that
deserves some discussion going into the 2023 Farm Bill.
Mr. Lawson. Real quick before my time ends. Mr. Secretary,
are we importing more timber into this country?
Mr. Bonnie. We do import timber, but you and Mr. Scott, you
both know your part of the world produces a lot of timber, and
exports a lot of timber. The U.S. is a significant carbon sink,
and part of it is because people have invested in timber,
forestland ownership, and in places like Florida and Georgia in
the South and other parts of the country.
Mr. Lawson. Okay. With that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
The Chair. All right. Thank you very much, Mr. Lawson.
I now recognize the gentleman from South Dakota, Mr.
Johnson, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate that.
Mr. Under Secretary, I think the crop insurance system we
got has done a really good job from a customer service
perspective, as well as making sure those indemnities get out
in the field as quickly as possible. I know some have proposed
eliminating the private-sector-based delivery system. Any
observations on that?
Mr. Bonnie. I think the public-private partnership is a
great delivery mechanism. As you point out, we can move
quickly. You can turn on assistance very quickly, and that is
very attractive.
Mr. Johnson. Yes, I would just, first, I agree with you;
and second, I would just urge you, as I am sure you would even
if I didn't say anything, push back on any of those proposals,
because I think you said it right. The public-private
partnership has delivered a tremendous amount of value.
Now I want to look towards some of these--and I will admit
up front, South Dakota by and large has been early adopting as
a state with regard to things like no-till. Granted, it is
still a checkerboard, right? I mean, different producers can
make different decisions, and even within their own property
they may make a different decision on one section versus
another section. But as we look toward smart stewardship
practices of the future, how do we balance being fair to early
adopters while also trying to target scarce resources toward
getting a change in behavior? Give us some sense of how you do
that, going forward?
Mr. Bonnie. This is a critically important issue, the issue
of early adopters as we think about particularly with respect
to climate change. If all you did was tie the benefits from
adopting climate-smart practices to carbon, some of those folks
that have been doing these things for a long, long time might
not be able to increase their carbon stores by that much. And
so, looking for ways to incentivize practices, looking for
ways, part of the thought yesterday with climate-smart
commodities is that by linking it to commodities that we can
maintain and enhance incentives for those early adopters. This
is a critically important issue. You don't want to create
perverse incentives for folks to come out of conservation
tillage or come out of other things they do so they can get
back into these programs. This issue is vitally important as we
think about whatever it is, wildlife, whatever it is, climate.
We have to have a response that both recognizes the
contribution that many in agriculture have already made and
rewards them for it.
Mr. Johnson. Do we have a sense of operationally what is
the best way to do that? I mean, obviously you could do it by
having a further look back in setting your baseline. There are
other mechanisms. Do you have a favorite?
Mr. Bonnie. Yes. You are exactly right, and there are folks
out there on the ground that are thinking about a look back,
could we look back 5 years, 10 years. Obviously it requires
some modeling or some other work to do that.
You can also think about if you are producing a climate-
smart wheat or you are producing a climate-smart soybean, where
the benefit is tied to the practices and the work being done to
make sure that those commodities are produced in a climate-
smart way. We can design incentives there that actually
maintain the reward system for those early adopters.
Mr. Johnson. Then one last question, sir. I mean, as this
Committee continues its movement toward the next farm bill,
what would you most want us to keep our eye on? What is the
area most ripe for improvement?
Mr. Bonnie. Well, with this pilot program that we rolled
out yesterday, we hope that there will actually be some
learning that will create some conversation, both on the
incentives side of the equation as well as on the measurement
and monitoring verification. It is going to be important for us
to prove up these practices, to demonstrate that agriculture
has an important role to play, both so that we maintain public
confidence in making investments in conservation and other
things for producers, but also so that the private market will
continue to have confidence to invest in agriculture and invest
in forestry.
So, one of the things we need to think about is how do we
invest in inventory and other things that will provide the
tools, the models, the help that producers need to be able to
make those decisions. So, we often think about the incentives
side. There is an infrastructure of research and inventory that
backs that up that is really important.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you very much, sir, and thank you, Madam
Chair. I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you, Mr. Johnson.
I now recognize the gentlewoman from Washington, Ms.
Schrier.
Ms. Schrier. Thank you, Madam Chair, and welcome, Under
Secretary Bonnie.
I would like to touch on a few issues really quickly, and I
am enjoying this conversation. First, my colleague, Chellie
Pingree, and I are co-leading an Agriculture Task Force as part
of the House's Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition,
and with this taskforce, we want to build on increasing
engagement of American farmers on climate change issues in a
lead up to the reauthorization of the farm bill. We just held
our first meeting identifying some shared priorities and the
direction that we would like to go. But one thing we decided
would be really helpful was to meet with experts in the field
so that we make sure that we are really getting the most bang
for the buck.
So, I want to invite you. We would love to have you join
our conversation, to come meet with our group, and give us some
direction on how we can recognize, celebrate, amplify the
contributions of our farmers who engage in climate friendly
practices, and get your take on what will have the most impact
on either reducing or sequestering greenhouse gases.
Mr. Bonnie. Of course, I am happy to join.
Ms. Schrier. Thank you. We are very excited to have you.
Next, I want to just ask you, Mr. Under Secretary, about
the Sustainable Farms and Fields Program in Washington State,
which does exactly what you were just talking with Dusty
Johnson about. It rewards the practices, not just the carbon.
It is bipartisan. It is voluntary, supports farmers and
innovation, simply rewards the practices, and it gives
different options for participation so the funds can be used
for site specific consultations, or the purchase of goods that
they might need like seed drills, and even direct payments, in
some cases, for carbon storage. So, this program is
particularly well-suited for small- and medium-sized farms, as
well as first-time, low-income minority farmers because you
don't have to enter a carbon market to be compensated for doing
the right practices.
And so, I first just want to thank you for taking the time
to meet with Michael Crowder from the National Association of
Conservation Districts, and Kirk Robinson from the Washington
State Conservation Commission. We are very, very grateful and
just ask for your continued engagement and support. And I was
wondering if you could just quickly comment on how this
particular Washington program fits into yesterday's
announcement that the USDA is investing $1 billion in
partnerships to support America's climate-smart farmers,
ranchers, and forestland owners?
Mr. Bonnie. Part of our, as I mentioned earlier, part of
the recognition yesterday is that there is a lot of really good
work already going on. Still, there are risks for producers
that when they undertake some of these practices, and certainly
when they lay money out to measure, monitor, and on the back
side. And that is why we think there is an interesting role for
USDA. We fully expect that folks are going to have projects
already in development or underway where they may be able to
partner with USDA to scale out those projects, and we will look
for those opportunities. And whether they are interested in a
climate-smart commodity or a greenhouse gas reduction or
whatever it is, we think we can structure this in a way that
works.
So, part of the idea here is to tap into many of those
existing things, and to allow whether it is a state, a company,
a nonprofit, a conservation district, a commodity group, all
those folks to come forward to build those partnerships and
develop those locally-led programs.
So, part of it is to allow 1,000 flowers bloom and to draw
on that experience, and to learn from it. So, we expect
Washington and other folks to take a close look at this and
hopefully we will generate a lot of interest.
Ms. Schrier. That is great, 1,000 flowers all different,
and then roll out what we have learned nationally.
Last, I have very little time, but I just wanted to touch
on a piece of legislation I am working on to modernize the
Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, or the SARE
Program. This program has funded nearly 200 projects in
Washington State, focusing on a broad range of topics like
cover crops and tree fruit pests and sustainable grazing
practices, and producers and stakeholders in my district
absolutely love this program because it funds research that
suits their specific needs. It is farmer-led and farmer-driven,
and we just need to update this program to ensure it is working
as effectively as possible to meet the needs of agriculture in
the 21st century. So, I look forward to working with you and
your staff on this, and I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you, Ms. Schrier.
I now recognize the gentleman from Kansas, Mr. Mann, for 5
minutes.
Mr. Mann. Chair Bustos, thank you for having this hearing
and Under Secretary Bonnie, thank you for joining us today.
As we all know, it is important that we get farm programs
right in advance of the next farm bill. During your
confirmation hearing last summer, several Senators asked you
about the Conservation Reserve Program, the CRP Program. You
often answered that it is vitally important that we get the
right lands in the program. We don't want to take highly
productive lands out of the program, or we don't want to put
highly productive lands into the program, and I agree with that
focus. According to USDA's most recent natural resources
inventory, at least 1 out of every 4 acres of land in CRP is
considered to be prime farmland. In your mind, why is so much
good productive farmland ending up in CRP, and what is USDA
doing to achieve the shared goal of reserving CRP for the most
environmentally sensitive acres that need to be in the program?
Mr. Bonnie. So, the concern you would have if you have
really productive land coming in is that you are taking out
highly productive land that is obviously an economic
consideration as well, and that this program was designed for
more marginal lands, obviously. It is a voluntary program.
Landowners are going to enroll what they are going to enroll,
but we can do things through targeted enrollments, continuous
enrollments, partnerships through CREP, that can make sure we
get those lands that are really environmentally sensitive.
Maybe they are environmentally sensitive because they are in a
riparian area, or maybe there are efforts to deal with water
issues, like the Republican River in Colorado, or there are
targeted uses here. And I think that is really important.
There, of course, are lands that may be drought sensitive
or otherwise that will come in through the general signup.
Those remain really, really important, but there are ways that
we can both incentivize and think about continuous enrollments
and others to make sure that we get the right mix of lands into
the program.
Mr. Mann. Thank you. I think the issue needs to be
addressed before any discussions about raising CRP's acreage
cap really come to bear. We are going to have limited
resources, as we all know, in the next farm bill, and limited
land on which we are farming. And this Committee, we need to
prioritize the working lands programs and make sure that the
right acres are going into the CRP Program. So, thank you.
Second question: As farmers are gearing up for the 2022
growing season, many are having difficulty getting fertilizer.
We know that many times fertilizer costs three or four times or
more than it did last year. We are also having challenges
getting key chemicals that may not even be available for crop
protection due to regulatory and supply chain issues. If these
challenges ultimately result in lower yields, in your mind,
what risk is there to the crop insurance industry, and in
particular, to the private-sector delivery system that is
currently in place as these claims come forward?
Mr. Bonnie. I mean, I guess it is hard for me to estimate
what the risk is. There obviously is one there and we are
sensitive to the fact that folks are looking at higher inputs
costs.
As I noted before, the set of tools we have is relatively
limited. We are thinking about: are there ways that we can help
on the supply chain side. With the work we have done so far, it
has sort of been on thinking about export, the partnership in
the Port of Oakland, but we are open to looking at ways that we
can address this. Our challenge is that our toolbox is
relatively limited.
Mr. Mann. Yes, great.
One more quick question. I know I have just a little over a
minute, but my family farm is in Gove County, in northwestern
Kansas. And the FSA office, the workers there constantly are
talking to my dad and I hear this repeatedly from other
offices, just the antiquated computer systems, the
inefficiencies, the amount of time it takes to log in and log
off. What is being done there, and what do you think needs to
be done here moving forward? And forgive me if you covered this
earlier in the hearing.
Mr. Bonnie. No. IT across FSA and across FPAC is a really,
really important issue, and we have just adopted an updated
strategic plan, but frankly, there is more to do there. And it
involves both the public facing side--I mentioned farm loans
earlier, but making enrollment easier, updating that to make
sure we have better tools than we have now, and as you point
out, kind of the office side of it was to make sure our folks
have the best technology.
We have work to do. This is going to be an important area
of investment. We have to think about how we balance the
workforce we have, how we build the workforce. There is work to
do there, and I think we will do it in consultation with
Congress.
Mr. Mann. Great. Thank you, Mr. Under Secretary, and Chair
Bustos, I yield back.
The Chair. All right, thank you, Mr. Mann.
I now recognize the gentlewoman from Maine, Ms. Pingree,
for 5 minutes.
Ms. Pingree. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thank you
for holding this hearing, and Under Secretary Bonnie, thank you
for being with us here today. We appreciate your time.
I, for one, was very excited to see Secretary Vilsack
announce more details about the Partnerships for Climate-Smart
Commodities Initiatives yesterday, so consider me a strong
supporter, and I think it is a great idea. And I know some of
my colleagues have been expressing some skepticism about
spending $1 billion from the CCC to help farmers mitigate
climate change, but I think we should all remember that last
September, Congress had to pass $10 billion just in ad hoc
disaster relief for agriculture, and that is on top of the
support we already provide through the farm bill. So, while
some of my colleagues say well, we don't hear about climate
change from farmers--and it is often true. They don't mention
climate change directly, but they certainly talk about the
economic impact of the adverse weather effects and other things
that are directly related to climate change. So, I would prefer
to invest in helping farmers reduce their emissions and
sequester more carbon in the soil, increase their resilience to
extreme weather events, than have to pay it out in disaster or
to see the damage and heartbreak that happens on so many farms
across the country because of the experiences that we are
having that are likely to only get worse.
So, let me ask a question about the new initiative. One the
goals of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities is to
test different monitoring and verification methodologies so
that USDA is not dictating how the recipients of this funding
should go about doing that. Monitoring and verification is
really important for us to know what the real impact of these
projects will be, and that is something that I hear about all
the time. So, could you just tell us a little bit more about
how USDA will ensure that the monitoring and verification
methods these projects will use are both farmer-friendly and
scientifically-sound?
Mr. Bonnie. Yes. So, we are going to ask every project that
comes in to have a monitoring verification program as part of
the project, and we will look at those and score projects based
on that.
The last point you made is a really important one. As I
noted earlier, we want to maintain public confidence. We want
to demonstrate that agriculture and forestry have an important
role to play, and that these voluntary efforts work and will
reduce greenhouse gases. And that is public facing. The market
is going to take that into account as well, and make
investments accordingly. At USDA, we need to, in parallel to
the efforts going on with the announcement yesterday, we need
to invest in more resources here to have a better understanding
of where are producers doing conservation tillage? What
practices are they doing? How do we measure nitrous oxide
emissions reductions, methane, and all those things? It is
critically important. We hope we will learn some things from
the pilots, and we hope we will get some new technologies in.
And as you know, there are a lot out there that could
potentially lower the cost and increase the accuracy of those
measurements. It is a critically important issue.
Ms. Pingree. Thank you for that. I will really look forward
to following that with you, because as you said, it is
critically important. We need to make sure that if commodities
are identified in this way, that the public has trust in that.
And actually, I thought Representative Johnson of South Dakota
made a really good point that I hear often is what about the
early adopters? The organic farmers who have been worrying
about soil and carbon in their soil for a very long time? They
say to me am I going to be left behind, because I am not a
newcomer?
So, let me just quickly switch to another topic with the
time I have available. That is about the Dairy Indemnity
Program, and the recent updated rules. So, they provide
additional options for dairy farms dealing with PFAS
contamination, which unfortunately is a growing issue in my
state, and I know we are going to hear about it everywhere.
But I do hear some concerns that the new structure of the
program may not provide producers with enough time to gather
the information they need to make a decision about the best
path forward on their farm. While Farm Service Agency can
extend monthly milk indemnity payments on a case-by-case basis,
3 months isn't really a lot of time to get soil and water
testing done, for example. So, I am just going to ask you if
you could commit that the FSA will work with producers affected
by PFAS contamination so that these farmers have enough time to
figure out their options and make an informed decision, which
as we know, is sometimes the question of can you mitigate, or
do you have to abandon? So, just quickly.
Mr. Bonnie. Yes, I am absolutely happy to work with you.
Ms. Pingree. Great. Well, thank you for moving forward on
that, and again, I think that is a growing problem, really
critical in my state, and I am looking forward to working with
you.
So, with that, I will yield back my 12 seconds and thank
you so much for being with us today.
The Chair. Thank you, Ms. Pingree.
I now recognize the gentleman from California, Mr. LaMalfa,
for 5 minutes.
Mr. LaMalfa. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Under
Secretary, for being here.
As a farmer, our family has been farming where we are for
90 years, and of course, I have a lot of neighbors and other
colleagues. Agriculture is an extremely important part of the
fiber of this country, obviously, and so, when we see our
shelves are empty, our food commodity prices are higher and
higher for public, yet the farmers are receiving less and less,
now we get a curveball of saying hey, you need to do things
climate-smart. So, can we figure out how is it you grow
something climate-smart versus not smart at the field level?
Because, growers are already looking for the most efficient
ways to grow crops using all the technology with water savings
and the least amount of chemicals, leveling land and all that.
And so, how is this not going to throw another curveball at
people in agriculture, having to deal with yet another thing in
addition to being out of water in California, losing the
materials we have to control pests with, higher cost of fuel,
fertilizer is going to double. How is a farmer supposed to look
and say great, here is another program for us to jump through
because somebody wants to worry about carbon? Under Secretary,
how is a farmer going to look at this?
Mr. Bonnie. This is voluntary, and farmers can decide for
themselves whether it fits into their own production, and
whether it provides value. Our interest here is actually
providing value, creating new markets, new opportunities, new
sources of income, and to de-risk it in a way that allows
producers to step into that.
It won't work for everybody, but we think it will work for
a potentially large slice of agriculture.
Mr. LaMalfa. Sir, how is shifting $1 billion away from CCC,
which is supposed to be helping promote domestic farm and price
supports, and keeping farmers alive in disaster after disaster
or low prices, what have you, $1 billion being shifted away
from CCC into something that might be more looked at as a new
program? I mean, that at the same time, the EQIP Program, which
is a great program that farmers voluntarily use in order, the
Environmental Quality Incentive Program. It does a lot of good
work on that. We have participated and all my neighbors
participate in it, many across the country. So, that improves
conservation in an existing program, yet EQIP has only been
funded by about 27 percent of people that applied and asked to
be part of that. So, now $1 billion is being shifted away from
things that are already promoting the commodities or the
conservation programs. How is a $1 billion program even being
defined as a pilot program? That is a lot of money.
Mr. Bonnie. This is $1 billion that will go to folks in
agriculture, both to deploy climate-smart practices as well as
measure----
Mr. LaMalfa. Let me give you the list here, because it is
not even eligible for individuals. If you are a city or county
or local government, you can get it. A state government can get
it, for-profit organizations can get it, nonprofit
organizations get it, 501(c)(3) or not 501(c)(3), private
institutions of higher education, meaning colleges which
already receive lots of other different types of money, and
public and state-controlled institutions of higher education as
it is listed too. So, everybody but an individual is going to
see this money.
Mr. Bonnie. No, the way it is designed is to have those
institutions, whether a commodity organization or otherwise,
aggregate those individuals. That will lower the cost for them
and make it easier for them to participate, and easier for them
to earn additional resources through this.
Mr. LaMalfa. What makes a commodity climate-smart versus
not climate-smart?
Mr. Bonnie. So, there are a number of practices. In this
case, what we are interested in is reduced greenhouse gas
emissions or carbon sequestration. There are a lot----
Mr. LaMalfa. Is carbon dioxide considered a greenhouse gas?
Mr. Bonnie. Carbon dioxide is, yes.
Mr. LaMalfa. Okay, versus methane coming out of other
byproducts?
Mr. Bonnie. Another greenhouse gas.
Mr. LaMalfa. So, what percentage of carbon dioxide is in
our atmosphere?
Mr. Bonnie. I have no idea.
Mr. LaMalfa. Take a wild guess, sir.
Mr. Bonnie. I won't even guess.
Mr. LaMalfa. Okay. When I ask people this question, they
will say oh, man, so much CO2. It must be 30, 40, 50
percent of our atmosphere. I will say no, go lower. Well, how
about four percent? No, go lower than that. How about .4
percent? No, it is lower than that. It is .04 percent of our
atmosphere is CO2. If you put it on a pie chart, the
pie sliver is so small you can't even do it with your pen. So,
the number used to be .03, so the number is creeping up a
little bit. But we are blaming everything on CO2, to
weather change and all that. So, the direction of all this is
very disturbing that we haven't even talked about forest
practices underneath USDA. I had a million-acre fire, just one
of my many fires that happens every year in the district.
Million acres allotted out in USDA lands. So, we want to talk
about CO2 and emissions. What are the practices that
are going to make our forests safer and not burn to the ground
every year? 140 million dead trees are in the inventory of the
Forest Service just in California, and so, hardly anything is
getting done to promote things in forestry, which would
actually make a big impact. Because more CO2 comes
off these fires than is--like that million-acre fire--I forget
the stats, but 10 years' worth of car driving in L.A.
The Chair. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. LaMalfa. Okay. So, we are talking----
The Chair. I now recognize the gentlewoman from Virginia,
Ms. Spanberger, for 5 minutes.
Ms. Spanberger. Thank you so very much, Madam Chair. I
appreciate the ongoing discussion, and certainly, when we look
at the complications caused by CO2 within the
atmosphere, the amount is not the central focal point. It is,
in fact, the impact of said amount. A little bit of poison is
still poison, and so, making sure that we are looking at the
impact, is the value of the conservation programs to mitigate
the impact of said CO2 and our focus on sequestering
it.
But Under Secretary Bonnie, I am really appreciative of
your presence with us today. I chair the Conservation and
Forestry Subcommittee, and I have been encouraged by how USDA
has really prioritized engaging farmers on climate change and
climate solutions over the last year to the benefit of the
environment, and certainly to the benefit of the farmers.
And as you mentioned in your testimony, climate-smart
farming practices are not just good for the planet, but for the
bottom lines of farmers and ranchers who want to compete
internationally, improve their crop quality and yields, and
certainly lower the costs of their inputs. I am really
particularly excited by yesterday's announcement of the $1
billion in funding to facilitate markets for environmentally
sustainable commodities through the Partnerships for Climate-
Smart Commodities Program. This program will help ensure
America's farmers, ranchers, and forestland owners can remain
competitive internationally, certainly as demand for climate
conscious products continue to grow, both at home and abroad.
However, it is important to note that over the past decade,
we have seen that as new markets emerge around climate-smart
agriculture, they are not just for the commodities produced
within these practices, but also for the carbon sequestered by
these practices. And this has led to the proliferation of
voluntary carbon markets that, while well intentioned, can be
confusing to the public and growers and producers alike,
particularly smaller family farmers and foresters. And that is
why I was proud to introduce the bipartisan Growing Climate
Solutions Act (H.R. 2820) alongside my colleague, Congressman
Don Bacon of Nebraska. This legislation would empower USDA to
help farmers navigate voluntary private carbon markets with
confidence, and USDA's help will enable farmers to choose to
participate, and whether they would choose to participate.
Whether they would, in fact, collect a new stream of revenue
for their work to sequester carbon, protect their land, reduce
emissions, and most importantly, ensure that these practices
are beneficial in our efforts to mitigate climate change. It
would also create a certification program at USDA to ensure
that those working in these markets are actually providing the
support that farmers need to secure meaningful carbon
reductions. The bill is almost universally endorsed by national
farm groups and supported by dozens of prominent environmental
groups and Fortune 500 companies, and last year, it actually
passed the United States Senate with a vote of 92 to 8. So, we
continue to ring the bell of this piece of legislation here in
the House. Certainly, I think it is clear that it should move
forward and towards a vote.
But, Under Secretary Bonnie, I would want to ask, would
passing legislation like the Growing Climate Solutions Act
strengthen, from your perspective, the work that USDA is doing
on climate-smart agriculture and forestry, particularly in the
market facilitation space?
Mr. Bonnie. Yes, and I want to thank you for your
leadership on this. It is really important, and it is an area
of work that is really important as we think about climate-
smart practices, carbon, greenhouse gases. Producers need good
information, and you are exactly right. There is a lot of
information out there. They don't always know how to sort
through it, and less chaos out there is really important. And
USDA potentially has a role, as your legislation points out, in
helping producers sort through that, and thinking about
certifying technical service providers and others.
And, as we think about what the Secretary announced
yesterday, there is actually an interesting fit there to help
provide better technical assistance, better data, better
information. So, yes, I think we recognize that your
legislation fills a really important gap----
Ms. Spanberger. Thank you.
Mr. Bonnie.--and I think, one, that there will be more and
more interest going forward around this issue of
standardization of methodologies, of measurement, all that
stuff is really important, and it is an area that I think USDA
will move increasingly into.
Ms. Spanberger. And just based on what it is you just said,
I think that could have determined for the purposes of the rest
of the Committee as well, if we are increasing transparency
over our voluntary carbon markets, it seems to me that that
could really serve to incentivize farmers to make use of the
existing, again, voluntary conservation programs like EQIP,
like RCPP, because those are going to be the climate-smart
practices that are going to have the benefits and allow them to
enter into these voluntary carbon markets. Would you agree with
that assertion?
Mr. Bonnie. Absolutely.
Ms. Spanberger. Okay. Thank you so much, Under Secretary
Bonnie.
Madam Chairwoman, I yield back.
The Chair. Thank you, Ms. Spanberger.
Before we adjourn today, I want to invite the Ranking
Member to share any closing comments that he may have.
Mr. Austin Scott of Georgia. Thank you, Chair Bustos.
Again, Under Secretary Bonnie, I want to thank you for your
candor and the work you are doing. I look forward to working
together to write a new farm bill that works for America's
producers, and the people that are enjoying the food.
I do want to mention just very briefly on the environment,
we can and should do a better job of taking care of the
environment. But when we talk about the environment, it is not
just CO2. It is our forestlands and our wildlife
habitat. It is our watersheds. There is a lot more to taking
care of the environment than simply talking about greenhouse
gas emissions. And certainly, good soil health is good for the
farmer. No-till and other things that we have supported in the
past need to continue to be a part of the discussion as we talk
about the environmental practices and taking care of the
environment as a whole.
So, Chair Bustos, thank you for having the hearing, and
again, Under Secretary, I want to thank you for your honesty,
your candor, and I look forward to working with you.
The Chair. Thank you to our Ranking Member, Mr. Scott, for
joining me, and thank you to all of our Members who were on the
hearing.
Under Secretary Bonnie, thank you so much for being here
today. We have learned a lot. It was a good discussion, good
questions, good answers, and you know, obviously really, really
critical for our Subcommittee and our oversight work.
So, our goal as we move forward, we will continue to seek
out regular input from our producers about what is happening on
the ground. We look forward to having really what would be an
open dialogue, I hope, with Mr. Bonnie and our colleagues here,
along with your colleagues at the USDA about what the needs are
in the countryside.
Let me see. So, let me say the official stuff here. Under
the Rules of the Committee, the record of today's hearing will
remain open for 10 calendar days to receive additional material
and supplementary written responses from the witness to any
questions that have been posed by a Member.
This hearing of the Subcommittee on General Farm
Commodities and Risk Management is adjourned. Thanks everybody.
[Whereupon, at 11:38 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
[Material submitted for inclusion in the record follows:]
Submitted Questions
Response from Hon. Robert Bonnie Under Secretary, Farm Production and
Conservation, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Questions Submitted by Hon. Cheri Bustos, a Representative in Congress
from Illinois
Question 1. USDA's Risk Management Agency recently approved a new
crop insurance policy for corn farmers to incentivize the adoption of
split application of nitrogen, which will reduce nitrate pollution in
our streams and rivers--a policy championed by the Illinois Corn
Growers. Do you see further opportunities for USDA to use crop
insurance to help farmers incorporate better conservation practices?
Answer. Federal crop insurance is piloting the Post Application
Coverage Endorsement, known as PACE, in 2022 to insure against the
inability to make an in-season nitrogen application. The pilot should
provide ample feedback to further refine PACE and expand it at an
appropriate rate to both offer more coverage to producers while also
protecting taxpayers. The Risk Management Agency will continue to use
its existing authorities for product development, whether through the
private submission process commonly referred to as 508(h) submissions,
like that used for PACE, or through internal research and development,
as authorized by Section 522 of the Federal Crop Insurance Act, to look
for more opportunities for insuring risks associated with innovative
conservation practices.
Question 2. In recent years there have been multiple exciting
developments in the biofuels industry, including in the ability to
source low-carbon grain, traceable back to the farm level. How do you
anticipate innovations like these will be captured in new programs,
like the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities?
Answer. Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities will help USDA
expand market opportunities for producers. These expanded markets for
climate-smart commodities may include companies or processors sourcing
climate-smart commodities to meet internal targets or other supply
chain goals, biofuel and renewable energy markets, companies seeking to
sell branded consumer products, or other opportunities that could
provide a premium or additional revenue for participating producers and
landowners. Applicants to Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities
may propose and justify innovative biofuels projects that generate
climate-smart commodities.
Pilot projects will increase adoption of climate-smart agriculture
and forestry (CSAF) production practices and systems, investment in
scalable and low-cost measurement/quantification, monitoring, reporting
(MMRV) systems, improve understanding and communication of the
economic/adaptation/co-benefits of CSAF practices and systems, and
support early adopters and underserved producers.
Knowing how important it would be to capture these innovations to
further expand markets for producers, as part of the program design all
selected Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities projects are
required to participate in a Partnerships Network. This Partnership
Network will bring partners together virtually or in-person on a
regular basis to share learnings and USDA will summarize and publish
important information from these gatherings, as well as consolidated
data from required project reporting.
Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities presents an enormous
opportunity to scale up and invest in innovative production methods
that generate new markets and quantifiable climate mitigation benefits.
Question 3. The 2018 Farm Bill strengthened the Transition
Incentives Program (TIP) which incentivizes landowners to sell or rent
expiring Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres to beginning and
socially disadvantaged farmers who must return land to production using
sustainable methods. How many acres have been returned to production
through TIP and how can we improve this program?
Answer. FSA is limited in the amount of TIP acres that can be
enrolled by the amount of CRP acres expiring each year. In order to
qualify for enrollment in TIP, land must be expiring CRP. FSA is in the
process of implementing a notice of funding opportunity for the
Transition Incentive Program (CRP-TIP). FSA is seeking to partner with
and support the efforts of partner and stakeholder organizations to
promote awareness, increase understanding among landowners and program
participants, and increase enrollment in CRP-TIP by providing outreach
and technical assistance to the agricultural community, private
landowners, beginning farmers, underserved farmers and ranchers,
conservation organizations, cooperating agencies, acequias, and land
grants.
The following table is a summary of TIP acres that have been
enrolled through TIP since the 2018 Farm Bill:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Year TIP Contracts TIP Acres
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2019 2 22.54
2020 689 117,953.33
2021 437 81,147.15
2022 28 6,688.76
2023 4 149.50
-----------------------------------------------
Totals................ 1,160 205,961.28
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Questions Submitted by Hon. Chellie Pingree, a Representative in
Congress from Maine
Question 1. I have heard concerns that proposed changes to the
apple crop insurance policy could have disproportionate negative
impacts on apple growers in the Northeast, a region that is already
underserved by crop insurance. How will USDA ensure that the apple
policy remains viable for growers in Maine?
Answer. RMA's proposed rule is designed to update the apple policy
provisions to reflect current growing practices and to reduce abuse in
the program, which will lower costs to all growers over time. RMA did
extensive grower outreach prior to and during development of the
updated policy for apples. RMA encourages producers to provide comments
on the proposed rule and has also extended the initial comment period
by an additional 60 days to give producers more time to have their
voice heard. RMA will take those comments and information provided by
growers and the public into consideration when drafting the final rule.
Question 2. I appreciate the steps USDA has taken to provide dairy
producers impacted by PFAS contamination with more options through the
Dairy Indemnity Payment Program (DIPP), as well as your commitment that
FSA will work with these producers so they have the flexibility to make
an informed decision about the best path forward for their operation.
An additional concern I've heard is that the DIPP indemnification
calculation for the value of depopulated animals is based on the value
of the average conventional dairy cow, which is not helpful to
certified organic farms. As FSA works to implement the new DIPP
changes, how will FSA ensure that organic producers are fairly
compensated?
Answer. FSA will accept applications for DIPP for all eligible
dairy operations, regardless of size or organic/conventional status,
that are affected by PFAS chemical residues and can no longer
commercially market milk. Per the DIPP regulation published in December
2021, cow indemnification will now be based on the 100 percent value of
Livestock Indemnity Program (LIP) rates as applicable for the calendar
year of milk indemnification. LIP has traditionally provided indemnity
for animal losses due to disaster events at 75 percent of fair market
value for the applicable farm animal. Unfortunately, the LIP rates do
not provide specific rates for organic cows.
However, for PFAS-related milk indemnity under DIPP, FSA has been
able to support organic dairy operations with indemnity payments at the
value of the organic market price. FSA will provide support according
to program provisions to any organic dairy operation eligible for cow
indemnification through DIPP.
Questions Submitted by Hon. Ann M. Kuster, a Representative in Congress
from New Hampshire
Question 1. Mr. Under Secretary, I recently received USDA's
response to a letter I co-signed in July requesting an increase to
available supplies of sugar. In its response, USDA noted that it has
taken action in recent months to rebalance the sugar market. While I
applaud these actions, I remain concerned about the current sugar
market. As USDA's response letter acknowledged, ``raw sugar prices are
at a 9 year high'' and are ``inconsistent with market fundamentals.''
Does USDA have any plans to take further action to correct this
imbalance? If so, can you share what actions USDA may take?
Answer. USDA sugar analysts continually monitor sugar supplies and
demand to maintain adequate supplies of raw and refined sugar as
required by statute. While USDA took actions in December 2021 to
address domestic sugar shortages (increasing the Fiscal Year 2022 OAQ
to allow beet processors to market all their available production and
requesting that the Department of Commerce increase Mexico's Export
Limit by 150,000 short tons raw value of raw cane sugar to be exported
no later than March 31, 2022) the efforts had little impact on prices.
USDA analysts believe that the large beet crop loss in November 2019
destabilized the market, and while corrective actions were taken using
the tools at hand, it might take more time for the market to fully
rebalance.
USDA recognizes that, since last year, sugar prices seem too high
given the market is operating within a 13.5 to 15.5 percent stocks-to-
use ratio--USDA's standard measure of adequate supply. With the added
challenges related to COVID, it is unclear whether this is a permanent
or temporary phenomenon. Analysts recognize that labor shortages and
strains on truck, rail, and barge capacity have increased costs for
sugar sellers as well as sugar users, similar to other commodities. If
there is a supply response to current high prices, we expect a natural
reduction in sugar prices to follow. In the meantime, USDA will
continue to monitor the sugar supply situation and take actions to
ensure adequate supplies.
Question 2. Mr. Under Secretary, USDA's response letter also
acknowledged that using ``traditional stocks-to-use ratio metrics,''
the market appears ``adequately supplied.'' I'm hearing a very
different story from sugar-using industries across the country. Could
the problem be that the ``traditional stocks-to-use ratio metrics''
employed to generate reports like the World Agricultural Supply and
Demand Estimates need updating?
Answer. With recent high sugar prices seemingly out of sync with
the stocks-to-use ratio, USDA sugar analysts are continually monitor
sugar supplies and demand. Most USDA sugar decisions are linked to the
World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report. In fact,
Mexico's access to the U.S. market is defined by a formula in the U.S./
Mexican Suspension agreement that is based off the WASDE. However, the
WASDE's purpose for any commodity, in its purest form, is to provide
estimates/forecasts of stocks, production, imports, exports, deliveries
and prices--and not to serve as a policy tool. Looking back over time,
USDA finds much variability between monthly sugar forecasts and final
actual values. With the Suspension Agreement requiring strict adherence
to the WASDE during certain months, Mexico's calculated access may be
inadequate for rebalancing the market. USDA is not suggesting that the
Suspension Agreement terms be altered. However, USDA has the discretion
to recognize the existence of certain factors that are not reflected in
the WASDE when making sugar supply decisions.
Question Submitted by Hon. Glenn Thompson, a Representative in Congress
from Pennsylvania
Question. Mr. Under Secretary, on September 30, 2021, Congress
enacted $10 billion in disaster assistance for producers who suffered
crop losses in 2020 and 2021. To date, USDA has not made any additional
information available to producers about how these funds will be
dispersed or how losses will be calculated. Having a clear
understanding of a farm's financial picture for the upcoming year is
vitally important, especially in light of the volatility and
unpredictability of markets and growing conditions producers are
experiencing. This $10 billion in assistance was intended to be a
simple extension of previous rounds of aid enacted for 2017, 2018, and
2019 losses, for which regulations have already been written, which
makes the delays even more concerning.
Please provide in detail how USDA will provide disaster assistance
to producers for their 2020 and 2021 losses. Please specify what
program parameters USDA intends to change from the Wildfire and
Hurricane Indemnity Program Plus (7 CFR Subpart O) which covered 2018
and 2019 losses. For each of these changes specify if it was required
by statute or a change that is at the discretion of USDA, and for each
discretionary revision provide the rational for such change. Finally,
up to $100 million was designated for use in implementing the program.
How will those funds be used to simplify the application process and
reduce workload on FSA county office employees?
Answer. USDA is working expeditiously to implement the $10 billion
in disaster assistance signed into law on September 30, 2021, as part
of the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance
Act (P.L. 117-43). After engaging with several stakeholder
organizations to better understand emergency relief needs, USDA's Farm
Service Agency is working to specifically develop two programs, the
Emergency Livestock Relief Program (ELRP) and the Emergency Relief
Program (ERP), both of which will be administered via a two-phased
process. FSA cannot yet share the differences between ERP and the
Wildfire and Hurricane Indemnity Program Plus, given that both ELRP and
ERP are currently in final development. However, we can share that the
Department is focused on streamlining the application process to reduce
the burden on producers and county offices, proactively include
underserved producers who have been left out of past relief efforts,
and encourage participation in existing risk management tools that can
help producers navigate future extreme weather events.
USDA will follow a two-phased process to administer relief to
eligible livestock and crop producers, with the first phase utilizing a
streamlined process that relies on existing data that producers have
already reported to USDA.
For the first phase of ELRP, USDA will leverage Livestock Forage
Disaster Program \1\ (LFP) data to administer relief to impacted
ranchers. LFP is an important tool that provides up to 60 percent of
the estimated replacement feed cost when drought adversely impacts
grazing lands. FSA continues to tally 2021 LFP applications filed by
the January 31, 2022, deadline, but early estimates show 100,000
applications totaling more than $670 million in payments to livestock
producers under LFP. This will streamline the application process to
require no or minimal additional paperwork. FSA announced phase 1 of
ELRP on March 31, 2022.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/disaster-
assistance-program/livestock-forage/index.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The broader ERP will provide assistance to crop producers and
follow a two-phased process similar to that of the livestock assistance
with implementation of the first phase this spring. Phase one of the
crop assistance program delivery will use existing Federal Crop
Insurance \2\ or Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program \3\ data
as the basis for calculating initial payments. Making the initial
payments using existing safety net and risk management data will both
speed implementation and further encourage participation in these
permanent programs, including the Pasture, Rangeland, Forage Rainfall
Index Crop Insurance Program, as Congress intended.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ https://rma.usda.gov/.
\3\ https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/disaster-
assistance-program/noninsured-crop-disaster-assistance/index.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The second phase of both the livestock and crop programs will fill
additional assistance gaps and cover eligible producers who did not
participate in these existing programs. Through proactive communication
and outreach, USDA will keep producers and stakeholders informed as
program details are available.
USDA has also developed a detailed spend plan to utilize the $100
million designated for use in implementing the relief to support
staffing needs, both overtime and temporary, along with information
technology needs and outreach efforts that will result in a streamlined
approach for our county offices and leverage partners to ensure broad
awareness and access to the programs.
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