As Congress works to address the federal deficit, farm support programs are dominating farm bill discussions. Final decisions made will affect farmland values and farm viability, both critical components in efforts to protect farm and ranch land. The farm bill influences not only how farms stay in business and how farmland is protected but also how farmers and ranchers care for the land—the nation’s most critical natural resource.

Farm support programs exist to help farmers manage the unpredictable risks of agriculture. They are included in two of the 15 titles of the farm bill. Title I: Commodities Programs provides income support to growers of select commodities, including wheat, corn and feed grains, cotton, rice, oilseeds, peanuts, sugar and dairy. Title XII: Crop Insurance and Disaster Assistance protects farmers from risks associated with adverse weather, weather-related plant diseases and insect infestations.

Collectively known as the farm safety net, these titles contain programs that support farms from risks they cannot control and that also influence farmers’ economic and environmental behavior. Existing farm safety net programs can be inequitable and inefficient while causing market distortions that have negative impacts on soil and water resources.

In the 2012 Farm Bill, we seek two overarching goals to guide changes to farm safety net programs:

Provide Stronger Risk Management with Minimal Distortions

A farm safety net must enhance the long-term viability and competitiveness of American agriculture while being less costly to taxpayers. It must adjust quickly to changing economic forces rather than be set every five to 10 years. The commodities and crop insurance programs must be complementary, removing overlap and helping to manage broader long-term challenges while protecting farmers against yearly risks. Ultimately, a farm safety net must also be publicly acceptable by requiring that farmers experience real, objective losses before receiving payments.

In addition to being market-orientated and accountable to taxpayers, safety net programs should not determine where and how intensely crops are grown—instead, that should be influenced by environmental conditions, such as weather and soil type. Government-induced distortions have real consequences on land and water resources, sometimes encouraging production in areas that can’t be farmed in an environmentally sustainable manner. As a result, by reducing such distortions, the environmental consequences of farm support payments can be reduced.

Mitigate Unintended Environmental Consequences

Environmentally sensitive land—including highly erodible cropland, wetlands and vulnerable land that has never been farmed—are presently tied to payments through basic requirements known as “conservation compliance.” Although conservation compliance has been credited with tremendous benefits, it may be greatly diminished or lost if certain proposed farm bill changes occur. Instead, in this farm bill, Congress should maintain current conservation compliance provisions in order to ensure that farmers continue to protect sensitive lands, no matter how the farm support system is structured. This would not be a new requirement for farmers and would not necessitate additional funding. Rather, requiring conservation compliance will strengthen a comprehensive safety net by making sure taxpayer funding is serving to protect, not degrade, the nation’s soil and water.

Farm Viability and Environmental Health Through an Improved Safety Net

For more than a decade, many farmers have felt that government’s role in agriculture should be more limited. American Farmland Trust wholeheartedly agrees with this sentiment. The federal government’s current budget problems provide a golden opportunity to make the farm safety net more workable for farmers and acceptable to taxpayers, while contributing to the long-term health of the land resource that makes American agricultural productivity possible.

Direct subsidies in the farm bill

On Thursday night, the Senate passed an amendment proposed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to prohibit subsidy payments to farmers with an average annual income exceeding $1 million. Though only proposed for the short-term, this decision highlights the continued discussion on what form subsidies may take in the next farm bill. To help people understand the different proposals, we recently engaged noted Ohio State University agricultural economist Dr. Carl Zulauf to analyze the features of the leading safety net proposals.

Farmland transformed into thriving natural sanctuary

A Minnesota farm couple converted their old plowed land into a grass-fed cow “oasis” while preserving native trees, shrubs and species. Their revised landscape also helps reduce soil erosion and water pollution, which in turn brings additional species to their property

Inmate-farmer relationships form

The Idaho potato harvest got a little extra help this year from the state’s Department of Correction. Inmates helped farmers out across the country, providing the farmers with greatly needed support and the inmates with a task in hand.

Kentucky increases local food access

In conjunction with the University of Kentucky and the Governors Office of Agriculture, a new online resource was created for Kentuckians to have easier access to locally produced food. The page also includes nutritional, economical and environmental resources.

Vacation on the Farm

Farms opening their doors to overnight guests are a rising trend across the United States right now, and one that has been popular in Europe for decades. They offer a very realistic look at farm life and one that you can often participate in, while also enjoying the countryside.

New England gains protected farmland

Warren, Maine gained two additions to their “Forever Farms” preservation program this past week: Hatchet Cove Farm and Oyster River Farm. Across the state line in Concord, New Hampshire, city council approved an easement for a 72-acre farm that will prevent future subdivisions and development from the property.

Preserve North Carolina Farmland

Want a grant to protect farmland in North Carolina? You are in luck! The N.C. Agriculture Development and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund are currently accepting grant applications up until December 15.

Food Day, October 24

To celebrate Food Day, on Monday, October 24, join NYU for a panel discussion of beginning farmers who live and work in New York state. If you are in the Washington, D.C., area, stop by the National Archives for their Food Day Open House. We will be there along with the USDA and ThinkFood Group.

The deficit reduction roadmap laid out by President Obama this week was a stark reminder of the far-ranging effects of our nation’s debt problems. In addressing the reality of the budget situation, we have long recognized that agriculture must join the ranks and contribute its fair share.

The Obama administration’s five-part plan for agriculture, however, is unreasonable. The proposal outlined a five-part plan with $33 billion in agricultural cuts for the next 10 years, which represents 13 percent of all non-health mandatory cuts identified by the plan. With agricultural programs accounting for only one percent of the federal budget, programs impacting our nation’s farmers and ranchers face disproportionate cuts.

Land and healthy soil are strategic resources critical to our nation’s ability to feed itself and secure a healthy future. Conservation programs for farmers and ranchers are vital to maintaining those resources. The president’s statements about the appropriateness of cutting conservation appear to ignore the realities on the ground. Farmers today face challenges in combating extreme weather events that are likely to become even more acute. Water quality concerns at the local, state and federal levels as well as growing consumer demand must be addressed. And land use pressures will only increase along with the need to feed, clothe and provide fuel for a population projected to reach 10 billion in 2050. In fact, in 2011, 50 percent of farmers applying to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, 40 percent of farmers applying to the Grassland Reserve Program, and 33 percent of farmers applying to the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program were turned away due to lack of funding. Current conditions warrant more, not less, emphasis on conservation.

We should note that over the past several years, conservation programs have already contributed more than $2 billion to the nation’s deficit reduction through appropriations cuts. While we acknowledge that everyone may need to sacrifice, the additional $2 billion in cuts proposed by the Obama administration are an unwelcome blow to the nation’s farmers who are already facing a double challenge to meet the needs of a growing population while they face more environmental and resource pressure.

With respect to changes proposed to the safety net, we have concerns about the nature and severity of the cuts being made to the crop insurance sector. Agricultural producers today rely on crop insurance in ways not thought about even a decade ago. Reducing the support given to producers as they buy up larger insurance coverage as proposed by the president is a short-sighted budgeting decision that will ultimately cost taxpayers more when insurance payments are replaced with disaster payments. We oppose that move, but with that said, it is clear that all sectors of the agricultural community may be faced with sacrifice. While we believe the amount and severity of the cuts being asked of crop insurance companies appear to be unwarranted, we concur with the president’s core belief that if cost efficiencies can be identified, then they must be pushed forward.

We have said for some time that taxpayers must receive accountability for the dollars they provide in support. Indeed, in the 2008 Farm Bill we worked with the National Corn Growers Association to create the first Title I program that required a loss before a producer received a check. The president’s move to eliminate direct payments reflects this new fiscal discipline and reality, which many farm organizations have already recognized. As such we are not surprised by this decision.

The president’s plan also calls for the creation of a permanent disaster program. With so few details, we at American Farmland Trust are hesitant to speculate about how that program would really work, but from our perspective a modern safety net program must follow some basic principles:

Responsive to Markets: Programs should reflect the current economic reality that farms face. Programs with arbitrary target prices set by Congress every five to ten years don’t do this and should be changed.

Accountability: Farmers should only receive assistance if there is an unavoidable loss. Trying to justify a program that that doesn’t meet this standard in the face of the fiscal problems our government faces is not a message we can succeed with.

Minimize distortion: Great care should be taken to design a safety net that protects farmers from extreme economic volatility but doesn’t encourage production in areas that can’t be farmed in an environmentally sustainable manner. The public will not stand for programs that don’t consider this concern.

We are struck by, and disappointed in, what was missing from the president’s agricultural plan. The proposal does not talk at all about critical investments needed to create jobs in rural America through the use of critical programs found in the chronically under-funded and fiscally vulnerable rural development portfolio administered by USDA.

Changes are inevitable. As we move forward, we must recognize both the challenges and opportunities of doing more with less. Although some of it may be necessary, we cannot simply look at cutting overlapping programs and downsizing bureaucratic staff. Rather, a look to the future will require answering more fundamental questions about what types of conservation programs best serve the interests of the public, what kind of safety net we think is appropriate for modern agriculture, what kind of rural development strategy is most effective, and how generous all of these programs can be.

About the Author: Jon Scholl is President of American Farmland Trust. Prior to AFT, he served as Counselor to the Administrator for Agriculture Policy at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Jon and his family operate a corn and soybean farm in McLean County, Illinois.

This post was originally featured on AgriPulse.com as part of an on-going series of opinion pieces.

Since becoming President of the American Farmland Trust, I have been asked many times why an organization that promotes the protection and conservation of farm and ranch land cares about the safety net in the farm bill.

The answer to me is simple:  If you want to protect farmland, keep farmers farming.

Putting aside nutrition spending, the conservation, crop insurance and commodity titles of the farm bill have lots to do with keeping farmers in business. They affect farmland values and farm viability, both of which are critical components in our efforts to protect farm and ranch land. They influence how farms stay in business, how we protect farmland, and, how we care for our greatest natural resource.

Let’s consider commodity programs and crop insurance.  I know from the experience on our farm that the biggest problem we face is extreme volatility often caused by factors we can’t predict or control.  It might be a drought, or a dramatic increase in oil prices, or a political decision by a foreign government.  I believe the American people have it in their interest to help farmers – people who care the most and have in their personal interest to protect the land that sustains them – manage against these kinds of shocks in the market.

While the safety net is necessary, in this time of scarce budget resources we ought to be asking what is the right role for government in risk management, when should they get involved “on the farm”, and what should the principles be by which we help decide our agricultural policies and programs?

We believe that a good safety net is one which meets the needs of modern-day agriculture. I believe the current budget conditions have brought a bit of cohesion among agriculture groups —with a new level of recognition that it’s time to talk about changing programs that were designed for agriculture decades ago—and working toward programs that better serve both farmers and taxpayers.

Some today would eliminate all government support to save only crop insurance. We believe that such an aspiration is misplaced. Crop insurance works well now to provide producers protection during a planting season from a variety of risks. What crop insurance does not do well is deal with multi-year risks, risks that can be caused by things like long-term drought or a multi-year economic downturn. For such multi-year events we need the safety net needs to also include a pure government program.

It’s no secret that American Farmland Trust worked with the National Corn Growers Association in the 2008 Farm Bill to promote the Average Crop Revenue Program (ACRE). Few government programs work perfectly right out of the chute, and ACRE has been no exception.

Some producers have suggested that the current state-level revenue triggers for ACRE are too high. While we have heard these complaints, we also believe that a safety net that takes out too much risk from farming is no safety net at all. Rather, the program becomes a “government hammock.”

Farming is risky, if the government takes too much risk out of the business, producers’ decisions about what to plant become influenced more by government payments, guarantees and programs than they do by market forces, input prices, weather and soil type.

Those government-induced distortions have real consequences on our environment and create oversupply, fueling dramatic fluctuations in farm income. While the appropriate level of risk management can be found, the closer the level of support is to the farm level, and the more generous that level of support is, the greater the distortion.

AFT believes the workable model we should pursue is a partnership between private crop insurance that lets farmers manage farm level risk along with an ACRE-type program that serves to manage risks that broadly affect markets.

There are principles that should set a standard for risk management—and ACRE meets the standard. These principles tend to reduce the market and environmental distortion that our current government support may create.

The principles are:

Responsive to Markets: Programs should reflect the current economic reality that farms face.  Programs with arbitrary target prices set by Congress every five to ten years don’t do this and should be changed.

Accountability: Farmers should only receive assistance if there is an unavoidable loss.  Trying to justify a program that that doesn’t meet this standard in the face of the fiscal problems our government faces is not a message we can succeed with.

Minimize distortion: Great care should be taken to design a safety net that protects farmers from extreme economic volatility but doesn’t encourage production in areas that can’t be farmed in an environmentally sustainable manner.  The public will not stand for programs that don’t consider this concern.

We must find balance in risk management.  It is important that programs provide an adequate means for farmers to manage risk while not making it too safe to grow crops on land that shouldn’t be farmed. ACRE needs improvement, but the concept it promotes provides that balance.

For more than a decade, farmers have felt that government’s role in agriculture should be more limited in scope. I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. The federal government’s current budget problems give us a golden opportunity to make the farm safety net workable for farmers, more justifiable to taxpayers, and friendlier to the long term health and well being of the land resource that makes the wonderful productivity of American agriculture possible. That’s an outcome that a leader of an organization that seeks to promote conservation and farmland protection can get very excited about!

About the Author: Jon Scholl is President of American Farmland Trust. Prior to AFT, he served as Counselor to the Administrator for Agriculture Policy at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Jon and his family operate a corn and soybean farm in McLean County, Illinois.

The farm bill provides a significant opportunity to influence agricultural activity: what is grown, where, when and how, and who benefits from this production. In this sense, it influences each individual everyday: from the cost and availability of food to the tools that exist for your community to protect farm and ranch land.

U.S. lawmakers are embarking on the negotiations process for the 2012 Farm Bill. This debate is taking place at an unprecedented time in history, when debt and deficits ranging from the national to local level are guiding the decision-making process.

As the debate gets fully underway, we offer this short quiz to help test you on some of the basics.

A Sound Course Would Say: Conserve as much of the Peripheral Farmlands as a Region Can

Protecting farmland from urban sprawl and fostering food cultivation in urban settings has reached another benchmark with the commencement of Former Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco’s first full-scale urban agriculture program in America. This urban agriculture program materialized after a year-long process of proposals organized by Roots of Change and American Farmland Trust’s California office, along with American Farmland Trust’s San Francisco foodshed study, Think Globally, Eat Locally.

The Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) Program: Risk Management for Farmers and Minimizing Overlap for Taxpayers

Carl Zulauf, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University writes about possible improvements to the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program, a better farm safety net and risk management tool for farmers and a more transparent and less expensive program for taxpayers.

Courtroom Drama Doesn’t Save the Chesapeake Bay

Jon Scholl, American Farmland Trust’s president, provides a glimpse into the complex relationship between agriculture and the environment and emphasizes the need for collaboration rather than heated lawsuits, so viable environmental solutions can be reached in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. His opinion appeared in the The Delmarva Farmer this week.

California proposed cuts may eliminate longstanding farmland conservation incentive.

The Williamson Act, which allows agricultural landowners to enter into contracts to keep their land in agriculture and in return pay reduced property taxes, has been slashed down to a $10 million appropriation. American Farmland Trust’s California Director Edward Thompson calls for a restoration of $40 million in funding, while recommending incentives be linked to more effective land use planning.

On-Farm energy audits help farmers and ranchers improve energy conservation and efficiency

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the expansion of the USDA’s On-Farm Energy Audit/Implementation Initiative that helps farmers and ranchers conduct energy audits and improve their overall energy efficiency. This initiative helps determine the amount of energy used on farms and ranches and identify short- and long-term measures to conserve energy.

Farmland protection plan unveiled in Nichols, NY

Kevin Engelbert, a fifth-generation farmer who wants to be able to tell his great grandchildren he did all he could to protect his family’s way of life, helped form a steering committee and the drafting of an agriculture and farmland protection plan that was unveiled to the public this week.

Northeast Indiana group Sets Milestone on Farmland Easements

The Wood-Land-Lakes Resource Conservation and Development group in northeast Indiana is spearheading farmland easements, working with landowners who want to put their farms under conservation easements so they will remain in agriculture permanently.

Maryland Farmers Set New Record for Crops that Help Protect Clean Water

Maryland farmers are planting cover crops across nearly 400,000 acres of farm fields this winter, in an effort to soak up nutrients that harm the Chesapeake Bay and keep soil from washing into the water. This boost in cover crops comes at a key time in the decades-long effort to restore the health of the Chesapeake Bay.

The 2008 Farm Bill featured the creation of the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program. American Farmland Trust guided its development in conjunction with agricultural economist Dr. Carl Zulauf, who was the chief economic designer and modeler of this innovative risk management tool for farmers. In this guest blog post, Dr. Zulauf reflects on the current ACRE program and sets the tone for the discussion of the government’s role in farm policy and safety net programs in the 2012 Farm Bill.

In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, the American public is once again debating what role government should play managing economic risk, but this time during severe budget deficits.  Throughout our history, Americans have preferred a free market economy and limited government involvement in individual business failures.

At the same time, there are some economic risks, which affect so many people at once, and are so far beyond the control of individuals, the government enacts policies to help manage them.

Farming, one of the basic sectors underpinning our economy is a highly risky business. Despite all the advances in production practices and the best planning in the world, farmers continue to face risk from factors largely beyond their control.

Moreover, some risks can affect large numbers of farmers all at once, something we economists call “systemic risk.” This includes things like widespread weather problems from drought, to significant market problems like the Asian fiscal crisis in the late 1990s.

Even individual insurance companies can get overwhelmed with these types of risks, for instance, when multiple hurricanes hit in one season.

Unfortunately, American agriculture could be better served by our current government farm programs that do not provide our farmers with adequate assistance against revenue risks.

The current farm programs also don’t serve taxpayers. The current half-dozen farm programs have a variety of overlapping objectives that can lead to duplication in payments. Both taxpayers and many farmers increasingly object to programs that send government checks even when farmers don’t experience a loss, yet don’t help in situations when farmers are in genuine need.

So how can we design a 21^st century farm safety net program that provides an appropriate and equitable safety net for farmers, but costs taxpayers less?  By using the following principles:

• The farm safety net addresses risk management, instead of providing income support.
• Government programs address systemic risk, the type of risk beyond the control of the individual farmer and problematic for private insurance companies.
• Payments are only made when a farmer experiences a loss, and only for the amount of the loss;
• All government farm risk programs, including insurance, are integrated to avoid duplication and save money;

Recent progress was made in the 2008 Farm Bill with an experiment for a new type of risk management program. The Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program was designed as an option for producers to address systemic risk for both price and yields. A specific proposal to improve on this concept and to meet the above objectives is to modify ACRE so that it is fully integrated with crop insurance, which addresses risk unique to an individual farm.

What would farmers gain? Assistance, when it is needed, against the kind of systemic risk that can cause widespread bankruptcies and dislocation, even among well-managed operations and through no fault on the farmer’s part.

What would the public gain? A more transparent, streamlined and focused farm safety net that can be less expensive to taxpayers because it eliminates duplicate coverage and because payments would only be made when there is genuine need.

In short, we can reduce our budget deficit and still provide the risk management this critical sector of our economy needs.

This commentary piece was originally featured in Iowa Farmer Today.

About the Author: Dr. Carl Zulauf is an agricultural economist at The Ohio State University.

Last month, Chris Clayton wrote about the Average Crop Revenue Election program, quoting former USDA Chief Economist Keith Collins, who now represents the crop insurance and rice industries as a consultant.

Since American Farmland Trust (AFT) was one of the chief supporters of ACRE during the last farm bill I thought a few words to set the record straight would be important.

The column says, “Acres are not going into ACRE.” though nearly 13 percent of the 255+ million commodity-crop acres in the United States enrolled in ACRE in its first sign-up year. Others may view the first year’s enrollment as a disappointment—we at AFT do not, we view the nearly 35 million enrolled acres as a preview of things to come. For context, the 35 million acres enrolled in the program is more than double the current cotton and rice acreage in the United States.

We think ACRE enrollments will only grow. Why? Because as producers understand the program and get comfortable with it, most will realize ACRE provides better protection than the old counter-cyclical, marketing loan and direct payment system.  ACRE is designed to cover BOTH price and yield risk over multiple years, while under the old system producers only receive price protection. What is worse is that the price protection producers receive under the old system is based on outdated government-set target prices. Growing numbers of producers recognize and understand that the old system doesn’t provide them any real protection and ACRE is a superior risk management tool.

The article says bankers are not fond of ACRE, which seems quite odd, since direct payments provide little benefit to producers who rent land and see their direct payments capitalized directly into the rental price. With approximately half of America’s farmland being rented out, the effectiveness of traditional programs and direct payments clearly has been diminished. Bankers have a much greater certainty of repayment if farmers are enrolled in the ACRE program in which they know farmers will either make money from the market, or they know ACRE will provide producers a more comprehensive safety net than the traditional system.

From a taxpayer’s perspective, ACRE serves as a better option, too. Why? ACRE pays farmers only when they need it—when a producer suffers a real loss in revenue. ACRE’s eligibility requirements ensure that payments are made when losses are suffered, not when bureaucratic formulas trigger a blind payment. As taxpaying families tighten their belts, and as our nation faces tough budget choices, a safety net that supports farmers when they really need it, but only when they need it, is important.

Does ACRE need to be improved? Sure, every program needs fine-tuning its first time out of the chute! Administering ACRE, and educating producers about how it works absolutely need to be improved. Should the next farm bill look at making substantive changes to ACRE?  We think so. For example, we would like to see ACRE’s market-orientation strengthened so that ACRE will do an even better job of helping keep U.S. agriculture more competitive, and encourage the best use of resources.

Indeed, we are not the only ones who would like to improve ACRE. During the summer, Iowa Farm Bureau approved policy that supports the redirection of direct payment money toward a better ACRE and/or better crop insurance system; and just last month at a farm bill hearing in North Dakota several state organizations there made very similar comments.

As the time for a new farm bill approaches we look forward to working with anyone who wants to bring the safety net for America’s farmers into the new century—as ACRE does.

About the Author: Jon Scholl is President of American Farmland Trust. Prior to AFT, he served as Counselor to the Administrator for Agriculture Policy at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Jon and his family operate a corn and soybean farm in McLean County, Illinois.

Building a smarter farm safety net that better serves farmers was the cornerstone of American Farmland Trust’s farm policy efforts during the 2008 Farm Bill. We are happy to see even more and more farmers join the call early in the 2012 Farm Bill process for revenue-based programs like AFT’s ACRE. The Iowa Farm Bureau and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) all have taken public policy positions or spoken in favor of this approach in recent weeks.

Here’s why a revenue-based safety net works better for farmers and consumers:

Farms and ranches are inherently prone to variations in prices and yields and farm program payments were introduced as a way to protect our nation’s food supply against these forces.  Unfortunately, not all subsidy programs have worked to that effect and some have proven unwieldy, inefficient and supportive of only a few producers. Chief among these are direct payments, from which producers receive yearly government checks, regardless of any financial loss.

As a result, American Farmland Trust (alongside the National Corn Growers Association) developed and championed the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) in the last farm bill.  An alternative to traditional subsidy payments, ACRE restores the concept that a farm safety net should provide help only when farmers suffer from a loss beyond their control.

We believe the revenue based safety net also better serves the public, because it is a more transparent program as well as a program that reduces market distortions that lead to negative environmental consequences.

With an ever-expanding federal deficit, it is a reality that the 2012 farm bill will be written with less money than the last. Expanding the ACRE program is a smarter, more efficient use of money that recalibrates the farm safety net away from handouts and towards its real purpose – protecting individual farmers and our food supply.

About the Author: Jon Scholl is President of American Farmland Trust. Prior to AFT, he served as Counselor to the Administrator for Agriculture Policy at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Jon and his family operate a corn and soybean farm in McLean County, Illinois.

Typically farm bills set U.S. agriculture and food policy for five to ten year periods. And ever since the most recent bill was signed in 2008, AFT has been working to help finalize the details of its’ implementation.

So in between farm bills, you sometimes think the next one is a long way over the horizon. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN) quickly brought us back to reality when he announced that his committee will hold 2012 Farm Bill hearings starting in March, and that agriculture will have to live within a “baseline bill” —the money currently available in the federal budget.

I was really excited to see that Chairman Peterson also said he expects more focus on a revenue-based safety net. As many of you will remember, the ACRE program that AFT and the National Corn Growers worked so hard to include in the 2008 Farm Bill, is a revenue-based safety net, and one of our great successes in that effort.

I’m proud to say that the ACRE program has gotten off to a successful start this year, too!

Former Congressman Charlie Stenholm echoed some of Chairman Peterson’s words this week too, noting that agriculture won’t escape budget cuts and “telling reporters he expects lots of discussion on ways to improve agricultural programs while cutting spending…direct payments are endangered.”

Here at AFT, were keeping all of this in mind and are starting to plan our part in advancing the direction of U.S. farm and food policy to best serve producers and consumers. We’ll keep you posted as the 2012 Farm Bill gets rolling, and I hope you’ll look forward to getting involved with our efforts in the months ahead.

About the Author: Jon Scholl is President of American Farmland Trust. Prior to AFT, he served as Counselor to the Administrator for Agriculture Policy at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Jon and his family operate a corn and soybean farm in McLean County, Illinois.