Excerpted from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition:
We have been fielding lots of questions in the past few weeks following the congressional meltdown on the new farm bill. This is not surprising, given Congress’ failure to date to either pass a new farm bill or to enact a short-term extension of the existing farm bill before the farm bill expires at midnight, this Sunday, September 30.
In an attempt to answer the questions we have been getting in a more public way, we are publishing this post in the form of frequently asked questions.
- When and why does the 2008 Farm Bill expire?
- Why didn’t Congress extend the current farm bill for a few months?
- Why aren’t food stamps and crop insurance affected by farm bill expiration?
- Why are many people saying there is a lot more time remaining before the deadline for commodity program changes?
- What happens if we were to revert to the 1949 Farm Bill?
- What about conservation programs — what happens to them?
- So, CSP, GRP, WRP, CRP, and CBCP are all shut down for new enrollments starting October 1. Are there other programs that also screech to a halt on October 1?
- Do these program expirations really matter?
- How does the disaster assistance bill factor into this discussion?
- What is the relationship between the farm bill and the Continuing Resolution?
- What is the relationship between the farm bill and the automatic budget cuts scheduled for January 1?
- What are the farm bill choices that Congress has during the lame duck session?
- Can a new Congress next year simply revert to the farm bills passed this year?
- What is the best path forward?
- What can I do?
Those programs, which offer payments to farmers when market prices fall below targets, would likely be fine for some time after expiration. CRS writes the last year of support under the existing bill’s commodity programs in the 2012 crop year, or crops harvested during calendar year 2012 and marketed the year after that. “Thus, the effective deadline for enacting a new farm bill is when the first supported commodity is harvested in the subsequent (2013) crop year, not the end of the fiscal year,” CRS writes. In other words, Congress still has time to deal with the issue.