So here's one more piece of context before I get into the history. And a lot of people might step back and say, well, do we even need a farm bill? I mean, we don't have a furniture bill. You know, we, we don't have bills covering a lot of different areas of our society. But we have said we need a government role in agriculture. And the question is why? And so there's three groups of reasons for why. So the farmers need a farm bill, because first of all agriculture is unpredictable. So you may plant something and you don't know what's going to happen over the course of that season, and so having something that will protect your ability to stay in business is really critical and so that's one roll of the farm bill. Farmers are also not nimble in the space of market fluctuations. So what that means is that if the market suddenly drops, and you've got your whole field planted with corn or you've got, you know, all your animals are cattle, and they're growing and they're alive, you can't just, you know, go switch to something else. You have to keep going, and so you may lose a lot of money that season. Another thing is that individual farmers can't influence markets, for the most parts. So for example, if you are growing corn, you can't go in there and you're really hoping to get a little more profit on your corn, and so you say, well I would like to sell my corn for x amount more than what you want to pay for it. Well too bad, because everybody's corn looks the same as everybody elses corn, and so you're not going to be able to influence that market. And finally, farmers in this country are growing older. As you've probably heard in other lectures, the average age is over 60. And we need to have this be an industry that motivates younger people to stay in business and to move into that business. And as a result, we need a structure that will help make that possible. So that's the reasons from the farmer's perspective. From the environment perspective, here's another real key challenge with agriculture. There's a basic tendency towards overproduction. And if you think about this, again, you've got your farm and you're trying to make a profit, and you think prices are going to be low this year. So, your best way to make a profit is then to plant as much as possible because you've got your fixed costs already sunk into the land, your tractor, all that stuff. So, what you want to do is plant as much as possible. On the other hand, maybe this is a year where prices are going to be high and you're going to be able to sell your corn for a lot of money. What are you going to do? You're going to plant as much as possible. So there's, either way, there's this basic tendency and incentive towards overproduction because you have these fixed costs sunk into your business. There's also a tendency towards unsustainable practice, in the sense that if you're trying to make a profit, the incentive is not to invest in long-term sustainability for your farm. The incentive is to do things as inexpensively as possible. Now, there's certainly a lot of farmers and e, especially family farms that have a long term view and they really want to do what they can to keep their land fertile for, into the future. But how hard is it for them if they know that their neighbors over there don't have that same kind of incentive? So having a farm bill that can create more of a level playing field in that regard, is really valuable. And finally, there's a really important reason to have a farm bill for consumers. We need farms. We need them to produce our food. If they're not producing our food, we are hungry. We need to be able to afford the food. We need to be able to access the food. And the farm bill is a key way that we support these food security types of programs. And finally, we as consumers, and I use the word consumers even though, really that's talking about that purchasers, but we are as people, we have environmental and public health concerns that effect us, and having a farm bill in place can protect us in those ways. So those are all the reasons why there's a need for a farm bill even though there's not necessarily a need for a table bill. So, let me give you some history, so there have been long time federal efforts to increase agricultural production. And we can tract this back to around the 1860s when the Homestead Act was created. And the basic goal of that was to convince people to move out west and plow up that land and create farms in the West. And then also around the same time the Morrill Act created these land grant schools which were basically schools that would provide assistance and education to farmers, to help them be more successful in these endeavors. And the Smith-Lever Act 1914, similarly was trying to advance some of the success of farmers through education and research. So in the early 1900s as these farmers were populating the Midwest and developing their farms, there's increasing amounts of technology available to them. So they could basically plow up the prairie, and they have this incentive to over produce. And they don't need to conserve soil, because they maybe either didn't know about that, or they just didn't see the need, because the soil was so beautiful, and rich, and there was so much of it. And the topsoil was kind of blowing away and there was no prairie cover. The crops' roots weren't there to hold it in, especially over the winter. And, so there was a lot of food being produced. Prices begin to come down. And the topsoil is blowing away. And this kind of really came to a head in the early 1930s with the Dust Bowl, when the quote is that 75% of the country was covered mid-west best topsoil and there were strong winds, and there were droughts and some of those occurred not because of what farmers did but they played into these practices that had been occurring on farms, led to tremendous loss of ability to produce and also these low prices. So, around this time, the farmers were protesting, you can see here they're blocking the roads, they were pouring out the milk. The consumers were also not having food to eat and because there was a scarcity of food, the prices were high and so the consumers were angry too. And so as happened many times historically when the people are angry and pushing for radical change, sometimes the best way to deal with that is to create something that's maybe less radical than what they might have been asking for, but really starts to address the problems in a major way and that was, essentially, the first farm bills. So the first farm bill, which technically wasn't a farm bill, was created in 1933. And the goals of these early farm bills essentially were price stabilization. We want the farmers to get a stable price. We want the consumers to get a stable price. And that will sort of enable the farmers to keep doing what they're doing, and get the consumers food. And one of the main ways they did this was something called the Ever-Normal Granary, which is basically, you take your grain, when you have a surplus you put it in there, and then when there's low availability you pull it back out and sell it. So that keeps the prices stable both for farmers and consumers. There was also mandatory idling of land which means that, at a certain time you can't plant on certain pieces of your land, so it also kind of stabilizes the supply. And there were land and water conservation provisions in there as well to deal with some of the factors that led to the dust bowl. Subsidized food and school lunch also were in there. There was farm credit, there was insurance research and extension, all these were in this initial farm bill. And then in 1938 and 1949, they created permanent farm bill legislation. I'm going to come back to this, but think about the world in 1938 and 1949, and the types of needs and the kinds of policies that I've just been describing. And think about how different that is, from the world of today and from the types of strategies that we might have or that might be politically acceptable today. I'm going to come back to that in part C, as I describe the current farm bill situation. So 1973 was another sort of big farm bill change that occurred. And that was when we basically said let's shift away from that supply management, and let's, what we want to do is produce as much as possible. However much we produce we can sell it, because if we can't sell it in the United States we can sell it overseas. So we want to plant fencerow to fencerow, which means don't leave any kind of buffer zones. Just get every bit of place where you can plant your fields planted. And if you have a wetland where you can't necessarily plant, the soil conservation service was actually going out there and helping farmers to drain their wetlands, which is something that is not a good way to conserve soil, obviously. And the other thing that was pushed in this farm bill in around this time was decline of small farms. So the larger the farm is, maybe that was seen as more efficient, and a more industrial process was seen as more efficient and better because you could produce more. And, so, this is a major shift in how we viewed farming and it didn't all occur in 1973, but this is one of the key places where it was really getting started. Another major thing that happened in 1973 was that the food stamps program, which had been developed earlier, but it was brought into the farm bill. And that is going to have major implications for what the Farm Bill is, because suddenly it's not just an agriculture bill. It's an agriculture and food security bill. What do those two things have together? Well, this is a place where farmers can sell their goods, and they, if we have excess, we can give it to people. And at least get some profit for it. So having a food security program is very directly tied to the needs of farmers in addition to the needs of low income people. And the food stamps program just to say what it is, basically had two pieces. And one is we give people basically coupons, which are now, you get something that looks like a credit card. It's called an EBT card. And you can buy food products with it. And then at the same time, there's an emergency, food commodities program which gives certain surplus commodities from the farm as donations to food banks and so on. Not everybody knows what a commodity is, so let me just say, a commodity is essentially something where all items of it are essentially interchangeable. So my grain of corn is just like your grain of corn. So fast forward again to 1985 and 1990, and here's another, and all through these years there's farm bills every four to six years, so I'm just giving you some real highlights here. So 1985 to 90 was when a lot of these environmental programs came into the farm bill. And I believe that a lot of them probably came in because of environmental damage sustained from some of these get big or get out types of approaches. So there were conservation and wetlands reserve programs, something called conservation compliance, which basically said that if you are going to receive certain payments from the farm bill, you have to comply with conservation requirements in order to receive them. So that's big because on all of the land that's covered by whatever payment or subsidy this is, all those people, in theory, are complying with these regulations. And then they added information and research on sustaining the agricultural. And in the next section I'll get into much more detail on what these programs were. 1996 we get another landmark farm bill and this was called Freedom to Farm. The picture on the right is when you Google freedom to farm, that's the only picture that comes up, so I had to use it. But basically what happened in this farm bill is that it was a time, this is soon after the contract with America, Republicans are in dominance, and there's high commodity prices and high farm income. And there was a view that maybe we don't really need the government in agriculture. Let's get them out. And so we had these price supports that we were giving to farmers that were, even though in 1973 we had started phasing out a lot, they weren't all gone. But, at this point people were saying, let's just end it. We're going to end it over seven years. We're going to end all the programs that would idle the land so that would manage supply. And those grain reserves, the ever normal granary that I talked about. Let's just get government out of it. So they passed this farm bill. Very soon after that, for reasons not necessarily related to the farm bill, prices dropped within the economy. And suddenly farmers were really between a rock and a hard place. And the government came in and really needed to kind of help them out. So at that point there was a large increase in government payouts to basically deal with this problem. Within two years is 50% increase by 1998, it had doubled between 1999 and 2001. And suddenly instead of getting rid of something like subsidies, we had the beginning of a large escalation in subsidies and they just basically at that point just dropped the plan to end them. And I'll come back to what happened with those subsides in the next section. So and then the last piece that I want to talk about, it's started in 1996 and it's been growing ever since, is a portfolio on local foods, regional foods and healthy foods. And there are a lot of relatively small programs within the farm bill, especially on the scale of the budget of the farm bill. These programs are very small, but given the size of some of these markets, a small program can make a huge impact, and so you can see some examples of some of these. So in the next section I'm going to turn to the, this gives you sort of preview and overview of the big picture, the farm bill and its history. So where are we now? What does the new farm bill that was passed in 2014 look like? What's in it? How has this history led to where we are today? And that'll lead us into thinking about what our some of the opportunities for the future? So thank you very much. And I will see you again in section B.
