Jana Cone
TIFTON — U.S. Reps. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., and Collin Peterson, D-Minn., met with area farmers and agriculture businessmen Monday afternoon at Lewis Taylor Farms to discuss the 2007 Farm Bill. Peterson is the U.S. House Agriculture Committee chairman.
Marshall, whose district includes Colquitt County, introduced Peterson to the approximately 100 attending the meeting by saying, “He has been a farmer, he was in the Army and he’s also been a CPA who represented farmers.”
The meeting began with an update on the farm bill, followed by a question and answer session.
Peterson said the House Agriculture Committee, which is drafting the farm bill, “is not a partisan committee.” He said, “We try to keep that out and try to keep it bipartisan.”
Peterson told the audience, “The farm bill is halfway there. We have marked up five of the 10 titles.” He said he planned for the farm bill to be out of the House Agriculture Committee by July 4. He said the current farm bill expires on Sept. 30.
“The Senate committee is quite a bit behind us,” Peterson said. “The last two farm bills didn’t get signed until April.”
Peterson said in the event the new farm bill was not signed by the time the old one expired, “We can go back to ’49 law if nothing is done before it expires.”
He said the biggest problem for the farm bill was that “we are short of money.” Peterson said this was a result of trying to get a balanced budget and so “we use the pay-as-you-go rule.”
Peterson talked with the area farmers about recently passing a disaster bill.
“It’s not as much as we wanted,” he said.
He credited Nancy Pelosi as the person who was responsible for making it happen and said, “Pelosi stuck with us and she doesn’t have a farmer in her district.”
“We are trying to make everyone equally unhappy and maintain a safety net for farmers,” Peterson said. He said there was “no new money” and yet fruit and vegetable farmers wanted in. Peterson said he agreed they should be included, but said, “We haven’t figured out how to pay for all of this.”
He said the farm bill would have “a very significant” energy component for biodiesel and ethanol development and that they would have to identify the crops best suited for conversion, do the research and then “figure out what will really work in the real world.”
Marshall told the agribusinessmen they could expect a lot of changes in agriculture in the future. Speaking of the investments in peanuts, Marshall said, “We can’t let that go south.”
The first question asked of Marshall and Peterson was from a fruit and vegetable farmer asking if they would be included in the farm bill.
Marshall indicated they would be, but said, “It’s like Monopoly money. The programs will be authorized, but there won’t be any money for them.”
Peterson told the farmer, “I want to ask the fruit and vegetable farmers to stick with us and I hope we can find enough money.”
Peterson said there were 255,000 farmers with 10 acres or less.
“They are not real farmers,” he said. “They are city people.” Peterson talked about excluding them as a way of raising $2.4 billion. “This might be a way to raise money,” he said. “But it will cause some commotion.”
Another farmer asked, “They have only implemented half of the peanut program. Why don’t they implement the whole program?”
“This administration does not want the peanut program to work,” Peterson said. “They have scored sugar at 130 million a year, and that’s baloney. It’s a similar thing with peanuts. I don’t agree with the way they’ve scored this. But we’re not going to give up.”
Marshall said, “We tried to have them give us the formula they used, but they wouldn’t do it.”
The next question was about immigration reform.
Marshall said, “The H2A program (farm labor guest program) needs reform. But H2A is all caught up in the bigger immigration issues.”
Peterson said of the H2A program, “The more I look at it, the more complicated it gets.”
Peterson said the H2A program is not included in the farm bill because they do not have jurisdiction.
“I’m not going to vote for a program that doesn’t work. I’d have to be convinced it was a workable deal,” Peterson said.
“The H2A program is getting more and more frustrating,” the farmer said. “We comply and the neighbor who is not in the program is paying $6 an hour and I’m paying $8.51.”
Marshall told the farmer, “It puts the honest guy in a difficult situation.”
Marshall then spoke about the larger immigration issue.
“We did amnesty and it didn’t work. We need to focus on stopping the flow. We need to have tamper-proof identification and gradually step up enforcement. We need fences and border guards, but the real solution is to stop the jobs.”
The farmer wanted to know what the farmers were supposed to do in the meantime without labor.
“There’s going to be a lot of pain,” Marshall said. “You should see the letters I get. People are very stirred up about it.”
Among the farmers in attendance at the meeting was Lucius Adkins, who is a farmer and cattleman in Baker County. Adkins also serves as a state member of the Georgia Farm Bureau. Adkins said he farms 300 acres of row crops, has 10 chicken houses and 300 head of cattle. He came to the meeting to get some answers to his questions and to voice some concerns.
“What we have now works,” he said. “What we need is a disaster provision. The way it is set up now, when they take money out for a disaster, they take money away from a program. We need to have it set up so that it is just like any other natural disaster, like a hurricane.”
Migrant labor was a subject on Adkins’ mind. “If we don’t have migrant labor, we’re out of business,” Adkins said.
He said, “No one wants amnesty. We all want our borders secure. We need a better guest worker program.”
Adkins said the migrant issue was “very volatile.”
Regarding trade agreements, Peterson said, “There’s nothing on the table that is a good deal for agriculture.”
