An Urban's Rural View

Well, so much for the idea of a farm-bill agreement before Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has come and gone without a deal. The House-Senate conferees tried but couldn't get it done that soon. In fairness to them, the odds were always against them. The tendency in negotiations is for deals to be cut in the eleventh hour. In these farm-bill negotiations, Thanksgiving wasn't really the eleventh hour. There's still time.

Congress comes in for a lot of well-deserved criticism these days, but a penchant for going down to the wire is not a peculiarly Congressional foible. Labor-management negotiations and international-trade talks follow a similar pattern.

It makes sense. Negotiators have to be able to say, "This was the best we could do." If they say it too early, they won't be believed. The people they're negotiating for will think they didn't fight hard enough.

Imagine that ag-committee chair Frank Lucas had come back with a Thanksgiving Day agreement that called for only $10 billion in food-stamp cuts instead of the $40 billion the House had called for. House Republicans would have called the deal a turkey.

Senate ag chair Debbie Stabenow would have gotten a similar reaction from Senate Democrats if she'd agreed on Thanksgiving to $20 billion in cuts instead of the Senate's $4 billion.

A compromise between $4 billion and $40 billion is going to require big concessions, probably on both sides. If they can ever be swallowed -- and there's no guarantee that compromise is possible -- it will only be when there's no more talking time left. Which raises the question: What is the real farm-bill deadline?

Is it December 13, to coincide with the budget negotiators' ostensible deadline?

Is it December 31, when the current extension of the 2008 farm bill expires?

Is it January 15, which many think is Congress's real budget deadline?

Is it the day before whatever day USDA's new permanent-law milk-price regime kicks in?

If Congress has a negotiating idiosyncrasy, it's creative rescheduling of supposedly final deadlines. Lawmakers have that power. We just might see some of this deadline sleight of hand in the next few weeks.

April Fool's Day, anyone?

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

© Copyright 2013 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.