Congress is weighing several ways to get emergency assistance to farmers, with the current, expired farm bill likely to get an “extension-plus,” a National Association of Wheat Growers analyst says.

“It is a pretty tough time out there in agriculture,” Jake Westlin, NAWG vice president of policy and communications, told the Capital Press. “Prices are way low and input prices remain high. Growers have seen 20% less revenue from last year. … We are glad Congress is understanding the dire situation that’s out there in production agriculture and working actively to get an economic assistance package to help bridge that gap, where we don’t have the right farm bill in place.” 

The Farmer Assistance and Revenue Mitigation (FARM) Act is an economic assistance package to get dollars out “as quickly as possible,” he said. Lawmakers are considering whether to package the bill as emergency funding, and how much to approve.

Current conversations have the FARM Act at about $20 billion.

Discussions have the act providing a 60% payment rate, which would provide wheat growers about $85 per acre on the high end, Westlin said.

The assistance could come as part of a continuing resolution to keep funding the federal government, Westlin said.

It could also be tied to emergency hurricane assistance, the National Defense Authorization Act or the Water Resources and Development Act.

“A robust farm bill is what we needed last year,” Westlin said. “That could have helped mitigate any need for special economic assistance. If we were able to strengthen the farm safety net and make those meaningful investments, we might not have needed to do economic assistance.”

Farm bill ‘in limbo’

Meanwhile, efforts to develop a new farm bill are “in a limbo area,” Westlin said.

Having a new farm bill by the end of the year is “kind of off the table,” he said.

“A couple weeks ago, it was a little bit of a long shot, but it wasn’t impossible,” he said. “But things since then — we did not see a lot of fruitful back and forth in negotiations or conversations happen in November, which was unfortunate. That was the final nail in the coffin to getting something done this calendar year.”

The 2018 Farm Bill was extended last year for one year, and expired in September. Many programs are part of permanent law or don’t revert to permanent law until the new marketing year kicks in, which would be mid-2025.

Lawmakers and industry members are working on a farm bill “extension-plus,” covering “orphan programs,” those programs that are not part of the farm bill baseline, Westlin said. 

Inflation Reduction Act funding could be brought in to help with those programs, he said.

A one-year extension, at least, could come as part of the continuing resolution to keep funding the government and avoid a government shutdown, Westlin said.

He hopes the economic assistance discussions provide lawmakers with the proper motivation to continue farm bill efforts.

“So that producers have that certainty and we don’t have to put a special emergency package together every year,” he said.

Road to a new farm bill

Lawmakers will be sworn in Jan. 3, and President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated Jan. 20. 

Committees will be formally organized and assigned through February, with House and Senate agriculture committee leadership shuffling.

Westlin said he hopes for committee hearings on the bill in the late spring and summer.