FoA 393: The Farm Bill With Bart Fischer, Ph.D.

<p><a href="https://farmwave.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Put AI to work on your farm</a>: https://farmwave.io/</p><p><a href="https://agecon.tamu.edu/people/fischer-bart/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Texas A&amp;M Website</a>: https://agecon.tamu.edu/people/fischer-bart/</p><p><a href="https://southernagtoday.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Southern Ag Today</a>: https://southernagtoday.org/</p><p>As we approach the end of 2023, one thing that many in agriculture thought would happen this year that hasn't is a new farm bill. </p><p>"The farm bill attracts this outsized attention. It's carrying some baggage that probably was not envisioned, you know, 80 to a hundred years ago when this process was started."</p><p>That's Dr. Bart Fisher, who spent eight years with the House Agriculture Committee, and today is a professor of ag policy at Texas A&amp;M. The lack of a farm bill brought up a lot of questions for me about this legislation. Like what are the impacts of not having this bill in place? What causes these types of delays and are these farm bills which have been around since the 1930s even still relevant?</p><p>"It's just incredibly important for the productive capacity of this country that we maintain a safety net for growers because it costs so much to produce."</p><p>Bart gives me quite an education about the past, present, and future of the farm bill. We talk about some of the nuances to getting these bills passed, and what goes into these farm bills from support programs to crop insurance, to conservation and beyond, and we cover the impacts of the policies on farmers and rural economies. </p><p>"Farm bills aren't written for the good times. They're written for the bad times. One of the challenges though is that even though they're written for the bad times, they're often written during the Good Times." </p><p>Dr. Bart Fischer is a research assistant professor and co-director of the Agricultural and Food Policy Center in the Department of Agricultural Econo