NSAC Archives for the 'Farm Program Reform' Category
President’s 2014 Budget: Overview and Department of Agriculture
Thursday, April 11th, 2013
On Wednesday, April 10, President Obama released his budget request for Fiscal Year (FY) 2014. In this year’s ongoing budget saga, the White House is billing its proposal as a step towards reaching a “grand bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. (For more on the “grand bargain,” see a previous blog post.) Over ten weeks Read the Rest…
Budget Blueprints Outline Radically Different Paths for New Farm Bill
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
This week, both the House Budget Committee and the Senate Budget Committee released their respective budget resolutions for fiscal year (FY) 2014. A budget resolution is a non-binding document that outlines a framework for budgeting decisions in the next fiscal year. Normally, the House and the Senate consider budget resolutions after the President has submitted Read the Rest…
Path to the 2012 Farm Bill: No Bill is Better than a Bad Bill
Wednesday, December 12th, 2012
Last week we tried to address what a good 2012 Farm Bill deal would look like. This week, as last, the so-called “gang of four” — Senate Agriculture Chair and Ranking Member Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Pat Roberts (R-KS) and House Agriculture Chair and Ranking Member Frank Lucas (R-OK) and Collin Peterson (D-MN) — are meeting Read the Rest…
Strengthening Policy for Soil Health and a Food Secure World
Friday, December 7th, 2012
All week we have posted articles from people involved with USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program about soil health and cover cropping. SARE offers a rich stockpile of research results and educational materials on these issues that will help farmers adopt best practices and also help inform USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) Read the Rest…
Path to the 2012 Farm Bill: Farm Bill Expires on Monday — What Does It Mean and What Happens Now?
Friday, September 28th, 2012
We have been fielding lots of questions in the past few weeks following the congressional meltdown on the new farm bill. This is not surprising, given Congress’ failure to date to either pass a new farm bill or to enact a short-term extension of the existing farm bill before the farm bill expires at midnight, Read the Rest…
Revised Version: Obama Administration Details Sequestration Cuts
Wednesday, September 19th, 2012
On Friday, September 14, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a preliminary outline of how it would implement automatic budget cuts (known as sequestration) across government programs, as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA). In early August 2012, Congress passed the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, which forced the Obama Read the Rest…
Path to the 2012 Farm Bill: Congress Returns to DC with No Clear Path Forward
Thursday, September 6th, 2012
Earlier this month, when Congress left the heat and humidity of the DC summer to go on August recess, the fate of the 2012 Farm Bill remained unclear. (If you need a refresher on where we are in the process, recall that the House Agriculture Committee passed its version of the bill in July, but Read the Rest…
Glickman, Moseley Urge Conservation Compliance in Farm Bill
Friday, August 3rd, 2012
On Thursday, August 2, two former senior-level Administration officials penned an op-ed in The Hill urging Congress to reattach basic soil and wetland conservation requirements to federal crop insurance premium subsidies. Dan Glickman, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton, and Jim Moseley, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture under President George W. Read the Rest…
Path AWAY from a 2012 Farm Bill: Pending House Extension Dooms Farm Bill Programs
Saturday, July 28th, 2012
For the past two days we have reported on the surprise move by the House Republican leadership to pull the rug out from under the 2012 Farm Bill. Rather than complete its business by taking the farm bill reported out of the House Agriculture Committee to the floor and then to conference with the Senate-passed Read the Rest…
NSAC Briefs House Members on Conservation and Crop Insurance
Friday, July 20th, 2012
On Friday, July 20, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition joined with the National Wildlife Federation, American Farmland Trust, and Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership to brief more than 30 House legislative aides on the importance of attaching basic conservation requirements to crop insurance subsidies. The briefing, entitled “Preserving soil and wetlands through the farm safety net: a Read the Rest…
