Ag Policy Blog

At a Senate Agriculture Committee farm bill hearing on federal nutrition programs, Republican senators complained to Agriculture Deputy Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Stacy Dean about the way USDA had undertaken the reevaluation, and the subsequent...

Ahead of a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing Thursday at which Biden administration officials will testify on the nutrition programs, Republicans pointed to decisions by the Biden administration to increase SNAP spending that dramatically increases the baseline costs for the...

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy talked about the importance of a farm bill to agriculture at a listening session Tuesday during the World Ag Expo in Tulare, Calif. Meanwhile, other lawmakers also talked about getting afarm bill done at a crop insurance industry meeting in Florida as...

Looking at the farm bill debate, some key former Capitol Hill staffers see a need to educate the new lawmakers on the farm bill. It was also suggested that the crop insurance industry should make the case that crop insurance is a climate-change program as well.

Crop insurance and other industries use the models to try to predict potential losses in the next year and to figure out how much that will cost. Creating catastrophic models begins with defining a hazard, trying to determine the local intensity, estimating the damage, adding in...

Chad Tentinger is the principal developer for Cattlemen's Heritage Beef Co., a $520 million project that would process as many as 2,000 cattle a day and employ as many as 800 people. Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, invited Tentinger to watch President Joe Biden's annual speech...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service submitted its rule Nov. 25 seeking to define the lesser prairie chicken as "threatened" in northern areas that include eastern Colorado, western Kansas, western Oklahoma and a few counties in the Texas Panhandle. Texas Attorney General Ken...

The legislation would establish regional cash minimums and equip producers with more market information, including permanently authorizing a cattle contract library. The bill is reintroduced after getting extensive discussion in the last Congress, but did not receive any floor...

On Thursday, GOP lawmakers in both chambers of Congress introduced resolutions of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. All 48 Republicans in the Senate joined in that chamber. In the House, a resolution was introduced with 152 GOP members, including every Republican...

After losing a dispute panel under the USMCA trade agreement in January 2022, Canada revised how it allocates its TRQ, but that imposed new conditions still restrict a range of potential buyers from importing U.S. dairy products. The U.S. is now calling for a new dispute...

USDA was authorized to create the pilot cattle contract library in a 2022 funding bill. USDA stated the website will work similar to a library model developed and shared with stakeholders last year. Packers that slaughter an average of at least 5% of fed cattle nationally over...

The Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday will start a series of hearings on farm bill programs, starting with trade. Over the next month, the committee will also hold hearings on the commodity programs and crop insurance, as well as nutrition and conservation programs.

A new bill in Congress, the Foreign Adversary Risk Management (FARM) Act, would give the USDA Secretary a permanent seat on the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS). The bill also would require more reporting by USDA and the Government Accountability...

In a news release Monday, U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Alexis Taylor and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Chief Agricultural Negotiator Doug McKalip issued a joint statement citing that Mexico's government is...

Law firms are soliciting cattle producers for clients in some major cattle price-fixing lawsuits that could be declared as class-action cases later this year. At the moment, producers should just make sure they have their sales records in order going back to 2015 instead of...

Iowa lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this month meant to tighten rules and requirements for people in the state who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The bill would require SNAP recipients to use a list of products under another food-aid...

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that she intends to get the farm bill done this year. Meanwhile, economists at Texas A&M indicate an extension of the current policies might not be a bad deal if a new farm bill doesn't improve commodity...

National Farmers Union criticized the memorandum of undersanding between John Deere and the American Farm Bureau Federation as a non-binding agreement between only one group and one manufacturer. NFU noted there is a history of preventing farmers from being able to...

As the House of Representatives creates a new select committee to look at China, lawmakers also want to ban companies or people tied to the Chinese Communist Party from buying land in the U.S. as well. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also said this week he would like to see a similar...

Delegates at the American Farm Bureau Federation annual meeting approved some policy recommendations that would increase funding for the farm bill and farmer safety nets. The push for higher spending may run into a roadblock in the House of Representatives where GOP...