As the 2018 Farm Bill debate heats up, farmers, activists, industry, and groups like us look to the House and Senate to make progress on the farm bill. CFSA is working with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) to advocate for policies and programs fundamental to organic agriculture and local food entrepreneurship.

Over the past few years, North Carolina and South Carolina farmers — including many CFSA member farms — have been impacted by hurricanes, flooding, drought, and late freezes. Federal crop insurance with funding, structure, and delivery conducive to our member farms is one of our top priorities in the 2018 Farm Bill. This year’s farm bill must modernize crop insurance to serve the diversity of American agriculture, support natural resource stewardship, reduce built-in distortions, and ensure efficient use of public funds.

We’ve signed on to help push several policies and programs for inclusion or improving in the 2018 Farm Bill. The summary of our crop insurance modernization priorities as developed by NSAC are listed below.

Ensuring Access to Expanded and Innovative Offerings:

  • The limited availability of policies for specialty and organic crops, limited access for beginning farmers, and policies that are not tailored to the diversity of American farms means disincentives to implement the practices that are best suited to the land and climate and low participation rates in many sectors and regions.
  • Options for beginning farmers should be expanded, Whole Farm Revenue Protection should be made more flexible, and more options should be made available to level the playing field.

Incentivizing Natural Resources Stewardship:

  • The current program presents barriers to farmers that want to undertake conservation practices on their farms, disadvantages farmers who engage in conservation anyway, and incentivizes short rotations, and other risky practices.
  • Cover crops and other NRCS conservation practices should be encouraged, basic conversation requirements should be updated, and incentives for conservation should be piloted while incentives for risky practices are eliminated.

Leveling the Playing Field for the Diversity of Family Farms and Ensuring Efficiency:

  • The program unduly influences markets and planting decisions and contributes to putting land out of reach of beginning farmers and mid-scale farmers by allowing the largest farms to capitalize subsidies to bid land prices and rents higher. There is also little transparency in the program as to where $8 billion in funding is going.
  • Means testing and premium subsidy caps, which have applied to Title I subsidy programs for decades should be extended to the crop insurance programs. Transparency should be increased to allow the public to evaluate the use of public funding for the federal crop insurance program.

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