SPOKANE — Crop insurance needs to be protected, national leaders told Pacific Northwest grain farmers.

Gordon Stoner, vice president of the National Association of Wheat Growers, and Dale Thorenson, lobbyist with the National Barley Growers Association, spoke of recent efforts to cut $3 billion from the crop insurance delivery system in the federal budget and through the proposed H.R. 3973, or the Assuring Family Farms through Insurance Reform (AFFIRM) Act.

“I call it Attacking Family Farms Through Insurance Repeal,” Stoner said during the Tri-State Grain Growers convention in Spokane.

The bill would cut $24 billion from crop insurance over 10 years, Stoner said. Crop insurance provides the only safety net for agriculture, he said.

“The assault on crop insurance is continuous and relentless,” he said.

After the last Farm Bill eliminated direct payments, “I thought we’d have another cycle before they started on crop insurance, but the very next day, the opponents of crop insurance were out beating their drum,” he said.

Farmers around the country called their legislators to protest the move and House and Senate leadership responded, Stoner said. They have committed to remove the budget cut as part of a 2016 fiscal year omnibus appropriations bill in December.

New legislation still has to be completed and inserted into the omnibus bill to negate or remove the cut, Thorenson said. He will participate in meetings in Washington D.C. to fight to secure the deal.

Thorenson said opponents to agriculture such as the non-profit Environmental Working Group have focused relentlessly on crop insurance, putting on seminars when speaking to legislative staff members that don’t tell the whole stories.

“We had a major crop failure a year or two ago, and producers were able to go back and plant a crop the next year, you had a food supply being grown,” he said. “How long would that have happened without having crop insurance in place?”