Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I rise in support of my amendment, No. 3134.

By providing haying and grazing flexibility, this amendment would offer commonsense and effective land management options for land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, or what we refer to as CRP.

There are CRP contracts today that are typically 10 to 15 years in duration. As it stands, some CRP contracts only allow for vegetative cover to be removed once or twice during the life of the contract--a practice that is referred to as ``mid contract management.'' Even in areas that have experienced a drought or feed shortage, CRP mid contract management rules have required vegetative cover on CRP land to be destroyed--a practice I have never understood and one about which I get a lot of feedback from farmers across South Dakota who don't understand it either.

The amendment before us today would allow haying and grazing under terms agreed to between the USDA and State technical committees, with safeguards in place that would protect the CRP cover when long-term droughts occur. Specifically, the amendment would allow haying and grazing on one-third of a producer's CRP contract acres on a rotating basis, which would be coupled with a reduction in the CRP rental payment.

CRP is important for so many reasons. After more than 30 years, it remains the cornerstone of the conservation programs the USDA administers.

In my opinion, we need more than the 24 million acres the current CRP acreage cap allows. In order to raise this cap in the current budget environment, in both the House and the Senate farm bills, the CRP cap is raised, and annual CRP rental rates are lowered to 80 and 88.5 percent of normal rental rates, respectively.

In other words, to get an additional cap, you have to reduce the rental rate in order to offset the cost of raising the cap. The House found a way to do that. It raised it to 29 million acres in its version of the bill, but it lowered rental rates to 80 percent of normal. In the Senate version of the bill, it only goes up 1 million acres, from 24 million acres to 25 million acres, but the rental rate is at 88.5 percent.

My assumption is that in the conference with the House, when we get there, this will be an issue that will be negotiated. Yet, as I said before, it makes sense, in my view, to raise that cap because the cap today is not sufficient for what the demand is out there and for the importance of the program in terms of its impact on production and agriculture in our farming and ranching communities.

The haying and grazing flexibility provisions in this amendment will help to offset these lower rental rates and make CRP a viable choice for a producer's less productive land in today's very tough agriculture economy.

This amendment is a win for farmers and ranchers, and it is a win for conservation.

I thank Senator Klobuchar, my neighbor from Minnesota, for cosponsoring this amendment. I think she will be here, at some point, to talk about this as well.

I thank Chairman Roberts and Ranking Member Stabenow for following through on the commitment that they made at the Ag Committee markup, when we were debating this, to work with me on this amendment to improve the CRP program.

I also thank the stakeholder organizations and majority and minority committee staff, who worked with my staff over the past 2 weeks to reach agreement on the amendment before us today.

In my view, this strengthens the farm bill, and it strengthens the CRP program in a way that many producers, farmers, and ranchers across my State have sought for a long time. It allows that added flexibility so that they can, on a 3-year basis, rotate and allow a certain amount of those CRP acres to be harvested and to do away with this crazy mid contract management practice requirement that, as I mentioned earlier, has very little support out there in the farm community.

It also does away with another issue that comes up frequently in States like mine when we have a drought. We had one in 2012, and we had one last year, in 2017. We had to plead with the USDA to allow emergency haying and grazing. This also would eliminate the need for that and, on a periodic basis, when we would face those conditions in States like South Dakota and in other States across the country.

I see that the distinguished committee chairman of the Ag Committee is here. As I said, I appreciate his leadership on this and on so many issues in this farm bill. I hope we get a good, strong, big vote in the end.

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Mr. THUNE. Absolutely. I am happy to yield to the chairman of the Ag Committee, Senator Roberts.

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Mr. THUNE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I appreciate that endorsement. Again, I thank you for your hard work and that of your staff in helping to structure this in a way that we could get the broad support you mentioned from the commodity groups and the wildlife groups. I think this is a win-win for conservation and certainly a win-win for the CRP program and for the farmers and ranchers in South Dakota who--and not just in South Dakota but all across the country who make use of this important and vital resource.

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