Stabenow said she talked to a group of rice farmers by telephone last week. They wanted to continue existing commodity programs, she said, and she told them she was open to identifying ways to make the Senate bill's new Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) program work for them.
"With the huge deficit we have in this country, we can't afford to just have a government check," she said.
"My goal as chairwoman is to be fair to every commodity," Stabenow said at one point during a telephone press conference.
She said, an analysis of ARC by Ohio State University economist Carl Zulauf, showed that it would have compensated growers for some of the lost income on program crops in the late 1990s. Snd is fair to all commodities.
Zulauf's analysis also showed that rice growers would have benefited the most during the late 1990s slump, getting price protection on more than 20% of the five-year average, compared with less than 9% for corn.
Stabenow said that she's proud of a bill that had bipartisan support when her committee approved it in April, and again when 45 senators signed a letter urging Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to bring the bill to a vote.
"In our judgment this represents the most significant reform in agricultural policy in decades," she said. "The bottom line in the reforms is that the era of direct payments is over....We're not going to be paying farmers for crops they don't grow and we're not going to be paying farmers when they're doing very well."
The bill keeps conservation compliance for its marketing loan and ARC programs, but does not re-establish it for crop insurance eligibility.
Additional reforms include tightening up payment limits, she said, and closing a loophole that allowed urban farm owners to collect program payments by saying they're actively engaged in farming. "The managers have to be on the farm and farming," she said.
Stabenow said ending direct payments will save about $15 billion over the next 10 years, and that it's a real savings, not just transferring the savings to a new commodity program.
Altogether, the bill would save $23 billion over 10 years, she said. Additional savings come from consolidating conservation programs and from about $4 billion in nutrition spending.
