The Senate Agriculture Committee of the 117th Congress will meet for the first time next week, kicking it off with a confirmation hearing for USDA Secretary designee Tom Vilsack on Tuesday.
Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) will be once again elevated to chair of the committee, a post she last held in 2015. The agenda she laid out Thursday for the committee includes a focus on food programs, climate mitigation, a move away from ad-hoc payments and laying the groundwork for the 2023 Farm Bill.
Priority No. 1 for Stabenow is to get Tom Vilsack confirmed to return as USDA Secretary. She says she expects fairly smooth sailing in Tuesday’s confirmation hearing and in a subsequent floor vote for confirmation.
“I certainly know he has strong bipartisan support—people know him trust him. He certainly has a broad and deep and wide knowledge, of all aspects of agriculture, and is probably one of our top advocates for rural communities in the country,” Stabenow says.
The Senate leadership has not finalized an organizing resolution, so committee assignments, among other things, are not set yet. Stabenow says she worked closely with new ranking member John Boozeman (R-Ark.) to move forward with planning for a confirmation hearing despite the structural limbo in the Senate.
Related:
Sen. Stabenow Supports CFAP Freeze and Review
COVID-19 Response
Topping the agenda once Vilsack and his team are confirmed is the response to the coronavirus pandemic. Stabenow’s primary focus is addressing the hunger crisis created by the pandemic.
“Our farmers have faced financial strain from a lot of directions. We also have as many as 15 million Americans not able to feed themselves and their families. [These are] folks who have traditionally donated to the food bank [that] now are sitting in lines to get help for their families. So, when we look going forward and working with the new secretary, we want to make sure that we’re addressing issues with the supply chain and that we’re not leaving families behind or farmers that have not fully received the support they needed from previous packages,” she says.
Stabenow says the committee will place a priority on expanding access to food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Climate
The increasing number and severity of devastating weather events is creating a sense of urgency to address climate change, according to Stabenow. She stresses, however, that climate initiatives need to be incentive-based and created with farmer input.
“I know that we can provide voluntary, producer-lead opportunities for our farmers and foresters that will allow them to continue to cut down their emissions and create new sources of income from the adoption of practices that store more carbon in soil and trees,” she says.
Stabenow says she intends to introduce a bill that would create the structure for a carbon credit system for farmers.
“The most important thing is that we put in place the technical assistance and information so that our farmers and foresters feel comfortable in measuring the carbon, and that they’re going to be able to turn those into carbon credits. And the technical piece of this is very, very important, so we need to move forward on the Growing Climate Solutions Act, and get the structure in place, get a one stop website, have the technical expertise in place,” she says.”
An open question is whether USDA has the authority to use the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) to pay for climate priorities. Stabenow says she believes Congress and USDA can move forward without changes to the CCC Charter Act, but that the issue will be reviewed by committee staff.
2023 Farm Bill
While the next farm bill is still two years away, work on the legislation will start this year according to the Senate Ag leader. Some of that work, in addition to listening sessions, will include undoing work of the Trump Administration and building a framework for a carbon program.
“We’ve just had the ad hoc payments, the chaos and the trade policy [and] the, I believe, unfair way in which payments were distributed in some areas, some farmers more than others,” she says. “We need to get back to something that is consistent, that is based on risk management, that allows our farmers to have confidence in the fairness of the system and stability in the system.”
She says she wants to return to what she calls ‘the structure of the farm bill,’ a move back to reliance on risk management tools rather than ad hoc payments.
That structure will include a focus on climate change. Stabenow says she wants the next farm bill to take small-scale pilot carbon programs that were funded in the current farm bill and expand them into full-scale programs that provide the needed infrastructure for an ag-based carbon capture program.
“We can actually lead farmers and foresters in doing more of what they already do, [they] can actually lead in this area where they are as impacted by what is happening with the chaos and severity of the weather as much or more than anybody. They see it every day. So, I think it’s exciting to see that our agriculture and economy can lead on this,” she says.
