Treatment of Farms With Limited Base Acres

Floor Speech

TREATMENT OF FARMS WITH LIMITED BASE ACRES -- (House of Representatives - September 24, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MORAN of Kansas. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I rise in support of H.R. 6849.

I certainly support the fundamental purpose of this bill. I do have some concerns about the offset, the pay-for, that is necessary. I am also concerned that the bill only provides temporary relief.

As has been indicated, decisions were made in the farm bill to eliminate 10 acres from being considered for program payments under the new farm bill, and the attempt was made to make it clear that farmers could aggregate their properties. That has not been the case as the farm bill has been implemented by the Department of Agriculture, and we now are here to correct that mistake.

Mr. Etheridge and I, the gentleman from North Carolina, introduced legislation to do that in September, and this is the base behind the bill that we have before us today, although our plan was to allow farmers to combine base acres through two processes: either reconstitution or aggregation.

And when it became a concern that that bill would not pass in sufficient time and the offset was not there, the bill we have before us became the compromise; and I'm pleased knowing that this legislation must pass to be supportive of this compromise bill. It does mean that this Congress, the House Agriculture Committee, will need to come back in future years to make certain that we get this corrected.

Also, by speaking today, I want to raise the concern that I have with the offset that we're using. For a long time I have worried that my farmers, when they go to see their USDA officers, particularly FSA, at their county office, they have had tremendous delays in access to computers. And the offset for this bill is computer/IT funding in the Risk Management Agency, RMA. In my opinion, we need to find a more appropriate offset because we authorized only $60 million in the farm bill, $15 million in each of the 4 fiscal years for the IT system at the Risk Management Agency, and those systems were only updated--the last time was 15 years ago.

This would remove nearly $20 million from the original $60 million authorized in the farm bill, removing about a third of the money allocated for computer upgrades.

And so we have an opportunity, I hope, when the Senate passes similar legislation to sit down and see if we can't agree upon a different way of paying for this needed correction.

Without sufficient funding, the Risk Management Agency will be forced to limit future product approvals, enhancements, and expansions, and I believe that will adversely affect farmers and ranchers. RMA must be able to interface with 17 insurance companies that deliver Federal crop insurance covering more than 1.1 million policies and $89 billion in liability.

Upgrades are not only needed to allow services to continue but are also necessary to implement current technology to improve program integrity and data security and the protection of personally identifiable information.

Again, I raise the concern and hope that as this bill works its way through the process, that we can find a more satisfactory offset than the information technology, the RMA IT account, at the Department of Agriculture.

I am here to support this legislation. I appreciate the fix that it provides. We need to figure out a permanent solution, and we need to figure out a different way of paying for it. I look forward to continuing to working in the process to see that those two things occur.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source