Airing September 26 - 30, 2005

End of September

This is Ag Outlook 2005 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. It's the end of September, or at least the last week. IT's officially fall but the start of wheat planting should still be a week and a half,or so, away. We had that discussion last week. The recent rains certainly will slow things down a little but it should help get a good batch of volunteer wheat and cheat seed sprouted so we can get one last chance to get those seedlings destroyed before wheat planting. And remember, while earlier planted wheat does have a yield advantage in most years, you don't really start suffering yield reduction until after about October 20th and then most of that can be compensated with extra seeding rates and slightly higher fertilizer rates. Don't be in a hurry. Late last week I was in a brome field that was getting ravaged by white grubs. There were over 20 acres that were killed and spotty damage in another 40 acres. If you'd start grabbing the dead brome grass plants and pulling on them, it was just like peeling a banana. The dead grass, crows and a few shallow roots would peel back and there would be grubs everywhere. These grubs happen to be one that have a three year life span and there were some that had just hatched last month, others that were from a year ago and these will turn into June Bugs next spring. The areas where there was spotty damage there were dead looking areas but green shoots were coming up, which with this rain should fill back in nicely. In the large dead area, there was nothing growing and that was going to be reseeded immediately. There isn't much we can do about this problem other than reseed, fertilize good in November and stay tuned for possible developments. This has been Ag Outlook 2005 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

Thoughts on the 2007 Farm Bill

This is Ag Outlook 2005 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. I had the privelege last week to be in Washington DC at a conference where we talked about many of the factors that will be going into the 2007 Farm Bill. I thought you might find interesting some of the diverse items that go in to a farm bill. Naturally, farm bills are big and diverse. There are ten different sections in each farm bill and these are called titles. Specifically, these titles are: commodity programs, conservation, trade, credit, rural development, research and related matters, forestry, energy, miscellaneous and nutrition programs. Far and away, the largest expenditure in these ten titles is nutrition. In recent years, nutrition has accounted for 50 to 60% of the total cost of the farm bill. While the nutrition title, like all the titles, is quite complex, the biggest portion of it is the food stamp program. The second biggest title, by dollars spent, is the commodity support program and it is usually less than one half the size of the nutrition title. The remaining 8 titles account for about 20% of the farm bill costs. Conservation and Crop Insurance are a distant 3rd and 4th and the rest of the titles make up less than 4% of the total expenditures. So what kind of dollars are we talking about here. Roughly, because actual expenditures can be up or down depending on market prices, we are looking at 40 to 45 billion dollars per year. While that may sound like a lot of money, think about the estimated cost of cleaning up after Katrina which has been tossed around as 200 billion. That's five years worth of farm bill expenditures folks. Farm bills are big business to us, but less than ½ of 1% of the federal budget! This has been Ag Outlook 2005 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

Issues facing the 2007 farm bill

This is Ag Outlook 2005 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. Continuing with our discussion of the 2007 farm bill. Even though we are only finishing up the 2005 portion of the farm bill, there had been plans to be under way working on the 2007 farm bill by early September. The hurricane season changed those plans and it now looks like it could be after the first of the year before we go to work on the 2007 farm bill. And just like the 2002 farm bill was originally going to be the 2001 farm bill, don't be surprised if the 2007 farm bill becomes the 2008 or even 2009 farm bill. Many of the folks that work in the process of writing farm bills were sensing that there may just be continuing resolutions go on to the 02 farm bill and continue it on. Why this move? Dollars and trade. Trade issues we'll talk about another time, but today we'll talk about dollars. The federal government is currently working in a deficit mode. Depending on which side of the aisle the people you talk to are - the deficit is anywhere from 200 billion to 600 billion. There is growing interest to get that deficit erased. Then on top of that we have the costs on the war in Iraq along with the uncertainty of how long those expenditures will continue. Then the real kicker is the hurricane season of 05, and it isn't even over with yet. The slow enactment of some of the conservation provisions of the 02 farm bill has been because of the need to find dollars where ever they can. Granted, the farm bill accounts for less than ½ of one percent of the total federal budget, which is down from 4% in 1940, but everyone has to take a cut. All we can do is stay tuned and see what comes out from DC. This has been Ag Outlook 2005 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

Trade issues and the farm bill

This is Ag Outlook 2005 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. Let's talk some more about the farm bill this morning and specifically how does international trade figure into all of this. If you aren't aware that international trade is a big controller of agriculture and agricultural programs, you obviously just arrived in a time machine or a space ship. I'll try to avoid political comment on the many different trade issues, but basically there is a strong interest by the government of our country and many countries around the world to have fair and open trade of agricultural products. But at the same time, we all want this trade to happen to our benefit and without hurting our producers and industries. And that's where things get sticky and downright ugly. There's NAFTA and CAFTA and WTO and all of these trade alliances start to weave a web that's so interconnected that is one sneezes, the whole world shudders. Details of the Doha round of talks of the WTO are still trying to be worked out a couple of years later. Why all of this impacts farm bills comes down to how payments to agriculture are classified. The basic tenant comes down to amber, blue and green boxes. These are the classifications of the different types of payments. Trade distorting payments are amber - these are based on production and price. Blue box payments are decoupled from production but not price and green box payments are completely decoupled from both. Amber box payments are having the most pressure on them right now and so the new farm bill, very simply, will be looking at reducing amber box payments in favor of more conservation program payments that will fall into the green box. And that will direct much of future farm bills. This has been Ag Outlook 2005 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

Conservation issues and the farm bill

This is Ag Outlook 2005 on 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte, Geary County, K-State Research and Extension Ag & Natural Resources Agent. As work on writing the new farm bill gets under way, at some point in the future, there will be a very strong movement to reduce the payments that are coupled to price and production and move towards partial or total decoupling. Partial decoupling means that the payments are still tied to production, but not to price, and total decoupling is tied to neither production or price. Guess what comes under totally decoupled payments? Well, for a hint these are often called green box payments. That's right, many of the conservation program payments are green box payments and these are pretty much ignored by the many different trade agreements that we are bound to. This has been a growing movement and is one of the reasons that we are seeing so much effort on EQIP and the Conservation Security Program or CSP. But there's more than just the farm bill driving this conservation truck. There's also this old piece of legislation going back to 1972 called the Clean Water Act. In the early years of the clean water act, the government and the environmental groups went after the low hanging fruit of the big, easy to spot, easy to fix polluters. Well over the years the work has been to keep taking the next highest ranking problem on the list and fix it. And agriculture, for the most part was below the radar screen. Guess who's not below the radar screen any more. And according to legal insiders, we ain't seen nothing yet. I won't go into that now, that's enough for another week worth of programs. Suffice it to say, that future farm bills will have more and more programs and payments that have nothing to do with production and everything to do with water quality, consrvation and pollution prevention. This has been Ag Outlook 2005 on the Talk of JC, 1420 KJCK, I'm Chuck Otte.

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