So let's come back to those subsidies one more time because you know, we talk a lot about subsidies and now the subsidies are gone, so what does that mean? We've basically shifted to, I'll show you this pie chart again, crop insurance being the second largest piece of the farm bill. And crop insurance may have a number of this same types of effects as subsidies and some of the same accusations are likely to be made about it. But what is the crop insurance? And basically, what we do is we're paying 62% of the premium for crop insurance. And there's not a lot of limits on payments, so a very large farm can continue to get a lot of their premium paid. And one of the problems, one of the biggest reasons that it's been difficult to have a level playing field for sustainable and organic farms, is that they don't have good actuarial data. And so for example, we don't know what yield we would expect to have for this broccoli crop on this farm in this county. If it's produced organically, we know what that yield and price should be for, conventional but not for the organic. So as a result, they have a lot of trouble getting crop insurance. And in this farm bill, there's some increases in policies that'll help increase access. But it's still really inadequate and so you know, in some ways you could say that some of the sustainable and organic farms, especially need crop insurance. Because in some ways they have an added vulnerability because they're not using for example, pesticides or herbicides. But they have trouble getting insurance. Now in some ways you could say that they have less vulnerability because they have better soils that may be more resilient to drought, so it does go both ways. And then, I mentioned earlier on, conservation compliance and this idea that in order to get this program, you have to comply with these conservation requirements. And that is a part of the crop insurance policy as of this farm bill, so that's a good thing. So that was kind of what we eat and talking about some of the relatively less healthy foods, how does the farm bill effect our ability to get more healthy, and more local, and more regional foods into our diets. And, just to give you a little bit of background on that, in fact, we produce a lot less fruits and vegetables in our food supply as we would recommend people to eat. So, there's a real need to increase production just to enev, even enable people to meet the dietary guidelines. Of course, if we produced all of that, there wouldn't necessarily be the demand. And so what would happen, the farmers would produce it and then they'd go right out of business because nobody would be buying it. So at the same time as we're increasing supply, we've got to be working on increasing demand for those fruits and vegetables. So interestingly, one of the most impactful ways to increase fruit and vegetable production is actually investing in research. And so there's a lot of push to have more funding for research in the farm bill on methods of fruit and vegetable production. More access to insurance and loans which again means having that actuarial data available. Marketing those crops and having opportunities to add value which means, for example, turning your grapes into jam. And then maybe having some kind of set aside within conservation programs so that there's extra money available for fruit and vegetable producers. So within the farm bill there are actually a number of programs that work to do those things. There's something called specialty crop block grants that give funds to states to do various programs that those states have decided would be most beneficial within their state to address increasing fruit and vegetable production. And I would say specialty crop, just to point that out, is a term that's used in contrast to commodity crop. So commodity's like the corn that's like all the same. And specialty crops are fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and a few other things. And the idea is, it's just a term that's used in contrast to commodity. But a lot of people have said that, you know, those shouldn't be the specialty, those should be the mainstream crops. But nonetheless, that's the jargon. There are programs, there's a fresh fruit and vegetable snack program that brings fruits and vegetables into schools. There's a program called the Healthy Food Financing Initiative that can support bringing supermarkets into underserved areas, and so on. So one of the things that you don't see on this list is subsidies for fruit and vegetable producers. And in fact, there's a reason for that, and the number one reason is that subsidies have been so demonized that I don't think those fruit and vegetable producers want them, and also because these other strategies are seen as more effective. In terms of local and regional production, there are a number of pieces within the 2014 farm bill that can advance local and regional production. Several of them I've mention earlier in other context, so I'm not going to redescribe them, but there are several things related to making Farmers Market produce more affordable and to marketing farmers markets. There's money for farm to school, and so on. So, and what I want to say about these, is that these are for most part, small programs, little dollars in the context of the overall farm bill but as I said earlier, little dollars when there were none before can make a big difference. Okay. So now I'm going to turn to number three, Environmental Sustainability and Environmental Health within the farm bill. And before I turn to the programs that are actually directed towards the environment,. The number one way that the environment is affected by the farm bill is actually the commodity policy that promotes, typically the production of those five key crops, corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and cotton, and others, but that's where the vast majority of the money goes. And so because this commodity policy is promoting overproduction, that leads to overuse of resources, it leads to using too much fertilizer which runs off. Here's a picture of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone that forms every year because of excess fertilizer runoff coming down the Mississippi River from the corn belt. Reduced biodiversity, pesticide, all those things that you've probably heard about across the course of this quarter. Are essentially in some ways attributable to our commodity policy that's been pushing over production. Another piece of it is when you think about the money that we're sending to corn and soybeans. Where are those corn and soybeans going? We're not eating them directly. They're actually used in animal feed. And the corn is now used a lot in biofuels. Heres a calculation that was done that showed that we were essentially giving a 35 billion dollar indirect subsidy to the large animal production firms. Because these policies were pushing feed grains below the production cost, as I was talking about earlier. So in some ways the environmental impact of this is all those environmental impacts of CAFOs that you've been hearing about, in some ways can be attributed to a lot of these commodity policies. And when I got into the farm bill one of the first things I was talking to somebody about it and I really hadn't read too much about the farm bill. I didn't know what was really in it and somebody said, well, what issues are you going to work on in the farm bill? And I said, you know, thinking well I work at CLF and we do a lot related to animal production, so I said, well I assume we'll work on the animal production issues. And he said, that's funny, there's nothing in the Farm Bill about animal production. And when you look at it directly, there is actually very little. But when you think about it this way, really that's a key part of what the farm bill is about. So now here's the more direct environmental programs within the farm bill. So conservation compliance and Sod Saver. And I mentioned conservation compliance earlier so I’m not going to re-describe it. But it’s important that it’s been linked to crop insurance in this farm bill and here’s some of the impacts of having a provision like this. USDA found, for example, that there was 40% decline in soil erosion for from 1982 to 1997. And a quarter of that was directly attributable to conservation compliance. Some would say that there's been little improvement since then, that's hard to say. But, but regardless, having that provision is really important because it affects so much land. And then there's programs that basically try to incentivize farms to do the right thing. And these conservation programs, there's two kinds, and the, the farm bill's emphasis is on what's called, Working Lands conservation, which means conservation programs on land where there is existing farm activities. The other type of conservation funding is focused on keeping land out of production for a certain period of time to allow it to recover and support wildlife regeneration and so on. And, in these conservation programs, there generally a lot more applicants than there is money. This farm bill had the first reduction in conservation funding since 1985. It's a small reduction but you know, it's still at this time with climate change and everything else that we face, it's kind of crazy when you think about the fact that we're facing you know, significant cuts in conservation funding. So the first kind I'll talk about is the conservation reserve program. And what that does is it removes land from production for 10 to 15 years and it pays the farmers essentially, rental to keep that land out of production. Now one of the challenges is, that we've got a lot of land out of production. And a lot of it's about to expire, so we're hoping that those farmers will re-enroll. But some will transition out. And then the other type of program, the Working Lands programs that I discussed. So there's two major programs within that, and one of them is the Conservation Stewardship program. And what that does is it's focused on what they sometimes refer to as whole farms systems. Like what are you going to do across your farm to make a big difference? Some, this is typically used by farms that are really advanced and want to do some big types of interventions to address their soil or water or air quality things like that. And then the other type of program is EQIP, which is for specific conservation activities. So I want to install this intervention, here's some cost share and technical assistance to enable me do this. And one of the challenges with EQUIP is that 60% of it is set aside for livestock producers, and some of the uses of that is that they may say, well, I'm increasing the size of my CAFO, so I need to build a larger cesspit to keep the manure in. And yes, that is environmentally preferable to not building this cesspit. But some would say that by providing this money we're sort of enabling them to enlarge while complying with the law. And if we didn't give this money then they wouldn't necessarily be able to afford to enlarge. So they've tried to challenge that year after year, and it continues to be there. There are some extra phones within the EQIP program for organic production, so that's on the other side of it. And then there's some significant programs within the farm bill that do support organic production directly. In fact, for the first time you can insure an organic crop at the contract price rather than the price for conventional crops. So, if you would normally get, you know, say $5 more per whatever for the organic product you can now insure at that rate, rather than the lower rate. And there's also funds to assist people becoming certified, and so on. Okay, let me turn now to equity, number four. And I'm moving more quickly through these last pieces, not because they're less important. But because there's a little bit less to say in, in relationship to public health. But what I do want to say is that there is several equity provisions that sort of try and level the playing field from smaller, or more sustainable farms against agribusiness. One of them is country of origin labeling. And basically that would say that meat and other products have to be labeled by what country they originated in. Another one, GIPSA, was a provision with the farm bill that basically would say that USDA has to address these business practices that are fraudulent or deceptive or retaliating against farms. And the farm bill actually defeated that. So USDA should go forth on challenging these practices. And then there was something in the farm bill called the King Amendment. And that would have allowed preemption which is this idea that the federal government can basically nullify state or local laws and say, because we have a broader federal law on the same topic. And so the King Amendment would have allowed us to say that some of the state and local laws related to agriculture that might protect animal welfare or food safety, those states and localities can't pass those laws. So that was defeated too. And because a lot of these provisions would particularly affect the meat industry, in fact the meat industry was the only major agricultural group that opposed the 2014 farm bill. On the plus side of equity, there was also a number of provisions in there that would assist beginning and socially disadvantaged and veteran farmers and that would give funds to support them. It would support training. There's a reduced crop insurance premium and so on. And this is seen as a real area of need both for equity and also to ensure a future of farming in this country. There were also some things on the less equitable side. So there was a provision to try and reduce the crop insurance subsidy for farmers that were earning over $750,000. This failed. They wanted to make it publicly available who was supported and how much. And that was decided that that would be kept confidential. And there were several other pieces that would basically help with at least, transparency in the crop and trades program that did not pass. Finally I want to turn to Rural Income and Quality of Life. And within that there are a number of provisions within the farm bill that can really assist rural economies and assist people living in rural areas and through that, by improving their ability to thrive in rural areas basically affect public health in that way. And there's telemedicine, there's rural healthcare, there's broadband internet in rural areas, there's water and waste disposal provisions. So all these things assist public health in rural areas. And we're going to talk about one last piece of the farm bill and that's research. And I mentioned earlier that research is the number one way to advance fruit and vegetable production. It's really been shown by research to advance resilience and to be really the best way to bring down price and we need research because we need to know a lot more about how to advance the resilience of our food system. There's a lot we don't know. There was a lot more money in this farm bill for specialty crop research and also for organic and new farmer education. So that's great. That said, the majority of the research funding still continues to go for conventional and commodity crops. So there's a long way to go in that regard. Another piece that was new was the creation of a foundation for food and agriculture research. And the concept of this is that we put a certain amount of government funds in and then we ask private funders to also contribute to the budget of that foundation. So, a long way to go, but a lot of really important and exciting progress. Let me just summarize the major changes in the 2014 farm bill. So, overall, it cut $23 billion over 10 years. And a lot of that came out of SNAP, as I had discussed. Conversation also got cut and then there was a cut in farm program payments, although some of that then came back to farmers through the crop insurance. There was the end to the direct and countercyclical payment subsidies that I discussed and increase in crop insurance. And there increases in several programs related to healthy food, local and regional food, and organic food. In the next section, I'm going to walk you through how do we get there and why does the farm bill look the way that it does. And when you want to think about making change both in the farm bill and maybe in other policies affecting food and agriculture, what do you need to do and what do you need to know.
