Last week Rep. Glen “GT” Thompson (PA-15), chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, released a farm bill draft titled the “Farm, Food and National Security Act”. While the bill still needs to be approved in the House Agriculture Committee and sent to the floor for a vote, Kam Quarles, CEO of the National Potato Council and co-chair of Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance, says this iteration of the farm bill is markedly different from 20 years ago, when specialty crops had to fight for a seat at the legislative table.
“It’s been a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes, really, to get the whole industry on the same page so that we could have the opportunity to be in the chairman’s mark in a meaningful way,” Quarles says.
The Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance released its own statement in support of the bill.
A Unified Voice for U.S. Growers
Quarles says this is due to the work of the entire Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance to align the industry to advocate for the specialty crop industry’s interests in the farm bill. He points to Mike Stuart, former president of the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, who helped push the industry to come together “to just get the industry all speaking with one voice about the farm bill.”
He adds this work to push for specialty crops’ interests in each conversation around the farm bill has paid dividends. Specialty crops’ role in the farm bill has residual effects on economic relief packages, which are built on the structure of the farm bill, all to benefit family farms in the fresh produce industry.
“I think it has created real value, not just for our industry, but for policymakers and, ultimately, for the consumers that we serve,” he says. “I’m incredibly proud of the evolution. It’s been great to see the entire story arc of the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance.”
Three Keys to a Competitive Future
Quarles points to three sections of the farm bill that could have a tremendous impact on the specialty crop industry. The first is economic relief, he says, which codifies the direct-payment methods developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“To have that policy there for USDA to say, ‘We don’t have to think about this. We know what works, reload it and go.’ It’s going to keep farms in business,” he says.
Second is the farm bill’s attempt to provide risk management tools for specialty crops to provide a safety net for family farms.
“That is an incredibly important thing, likely transformational for the specialty crop industry,” he says. “That, if there is a single thing in this bill, if they get that right, that is going to really impact, in a positive way, the health of the specialty crop industry. It’s having those tools available to farms that want to use them.”
Lastly is a focus on mechanization and technology to help improve efficiency and make family farms more competitive.
“If we’re able to get some dedicated mechanization research, AI … those kinds of things are really costly to do for specialty crops, just because you have so many variations in the commodities,” he says. “If the federal government can go into partnership on some of that research, I think that can be really transformational as well.”
The Imperative of Modernizing an Aging Policy
But, for now, Quarles says the most important part of the farm bill is getting it to the finish line. He says agriculture is now working under a farm bill created in 2016 and enacted in 2018.
“Effectively, you have a farm bill that’s looking a decade in the past, trying to serve an industry that has massively changed in that decade,” he says. “We need the inverse of that. We need a farm bill that is modernized, that is written for today but is also looking 10 years into the future.”
He says the approach to the lifespan of a farm bill may change in the future, too. Gone are the days of a four-year cycle. The farm bill might need to look more to the future with legislation. While there are a lot of unknowns in the future, the farm bill can still help prepare the industry for what’s to come.
“Providing the flexibility, the foresight of U.S. agricultural policy, to deal with potentially a decade of life for a farm bill is going to benefit us substantially,” he says.
Quarles, too, says that while the U.S. is operating under an aging farm bill, which is in desperate need of updates, the rest of the world is moving forward at full steam ahead.
“Our competitors around the world, they’re not waiting,” he says. “Often, we’re not competing against foreign farmers. We’re competing against foreign farmers and their governments, and those governments are investing heavily, and one of their goals is to put the U.S. out of business. We can’t allow that to happen. A farm bill has to empower not only the specialty crop industry, but all of U.S. agriculture. To me, that’s the imperative of getting it updated.”
Although the farm bill still has several more stops in its journey to becoming law, Quarles says he really wants to see the bill move out of committee and onto the floor with bipartisan support.
“We are three years behind when we should have had a farm bill done,” he says. “We’ve got to get this process moving, and to have such a good bill, in our opinion, come out of the chairman’s initial offer to the committee, I think that really speaks well of all of the work that’s been done on a bipartisan basis.”
He says that while there could be a potential for markups to change the farm bill, he’s also quick to point out the specialty crop industry shouldn’t take its eye off the ball.
“Chairman Thompson is doing everything under his power to generate the best farm bill he possibly can, get it out of committee, pass it through committee and send it to the House floor,” he says. “I think the things that we can control are making it clear to every member of the House Agriculture Committee the benefits that are embedded within this bill for the specialty crop industry.”
He also says those in the fresh produce industry communicate with members of the House and Senate agriculture committees to voice support for this farm bill.
“We feel that this is a very worthy bill to move forward,” he says. “I think people really know what the solutions are there. And moving this urgently, efficiently through the House Agriculture Committee and getting it to the House floor, that’s the entire exercise right now.”
And he reiterates the role the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance has played in bringing the collective interests of the industry together to ensure that, regardless of a lawmaker’s location, each hears the same strategic priorities.
“The ability for a member of Congress from California or Florida to hear the same priorities as a member from Maine or North Dakota,” he says. “For them to all be on the same page, it makes it that much more likely that we’re going to get these beneficial policies that we’ve all rallied around.”
