Nostalgic prints of cotton farming scenes hang from the walls of Danny and Jo Anne Murphy's farm home outside of Canton, Mississippi. In one, families crowd a country road to watch a crop duster swoop over the growing crop. In another, mule-drawn wagons with cotton bales gather at a cotton gin.The view from the Murphy home is hardly nostalgic. Wheat has headed out in their fields along Pisgah Bottom Road, next to some corn struggling in waterlogged soil. Danny Murphy is the current president of the American Soybean Association (ASA). He hasn't grown cotton since 2006 on his 1,500-acre farm.
Yet, as a Southerner, Murphy understands the challenges facing rice and cotton, crops that remain a significant part of Mississippi's economy. Northern members of Congress who oppose efforts to raise their farm bill subsidies sometimes malign them. Last year's Senate version of a farm bill dropped the counter-cyclical program.
This year, with Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi as the ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee, something similar, called the adverse market payments (AMP) program, is back in as part of a bill the committee meets to consider tomorrow. The bill has a slightly less expensive version of agriculture risk coverage (ARC), a revenue protection favored in the Midwest. It also has a stand-alone revenue protection program for cotton in the crop insurance title of the bill.
The Senate's bill doesn't give farmers a choice between AMP and ARC. If those programs wind up in the final version of a farm law, you would be in both. But the new AMP program uses the target prices from the 2008 farm bill for a "reference price" for all covered commodities except rice and peanuts. They get a higher "alternative price." The new reference price keeps the target prices of $2.63 a bushel for corn and $5.80 a bushel for soybeans. For rice, the Senate's bill puts the alternative price at $13.30 per hundredweight, a 27% increase from the 2008 farm law's $10.50 target price. For peanuts, the new alternative price of $523.77 per ton is almost 6% higher than the 2008 loan rate of $495 a ton.
"Really, the target prices are kind of designed for those crops," said Murphy, pointing out that he hasn't gotten a counter-cyclical payment for his crops for eight or nine years.
ASA and some other commodity groups opposed linking target prices to planted acres. Instead, the Senate bill ties them to a crop's historical base acres.
"We were really happy to see it was not tied to planted acres," Murphy said. The concern was that in some years when prices are depressed, farmers might decide what to plant partly to get adverse market payments.
Soybeans "have really benefitted from freedom to farm," said Murphy, referring to the 1996 Farm Bill that decoupled payments.
The national crop base for soybeans is about 50 million acres, Murphy said, but this year the planted acreage is 77 million. "It may be more with the weather," he added.
