Rice is trending the other way. In Mississippi the historical rice base is between 400,000 acres and 500,000 acres, Murphy said. "It was probably the number two value crop in Mississippi in the mid-1970s and 1980s."
Last year growers in the state planted 126,000 acres of long grain rice, and this year's planting intentions report puts the crop at 110,000 acres.
"The rice people say it's a really political crop," Murphy said. Governments around the world intervene in rice markets. So does the U.S., with Treasury Department restrictions on credit sales to Cuba hurting U.S. exports. "That's a huge natural market for the United States," Murphy said.
As U.S. domestic cotton milling has fallen to foreign competition, the cotton industry has become more dependent on exports to China, India, and Pakistan. Some 80% of the U.S. crop is now exported. China also has large stocks of its own cotton in storage.
In Mississippi, cotton remains an important crop, but growers there are planting 270,000 acres, just over half as much as last year. Nationally, cotton planting could be off 19% from 2012, to 10 million acres.
"There's a reason we've grown cotton in Mississippi for 150 to 175 years," Murphy said. "Our climate is well adapted to it, but it's an industry with a cost of production we've had to move away from."
Because of a World Trade Organization challenge to U.S. cotton programs by Brazil, cotton has its own separate program in the crop insurance title of the Senate bill. Called the Stacked Income Protection Program, it's a shallow loss revenue protection program, written to attempt to avoid more WTO challenges from Brazil. It is essentially the same as a cotton program in a bill released by the House Agriculture Committee last week.
The Senate retains its ARC revenue program aimed at other commodities, but it drops the band of protection from 79% to 89% of a revenue benchmark to 78% to 88%.
"Statistically, maybe that's enough difference that they save a billion (dollars) or two," Murphy said, referring to the government's projected 10-year savings from the bill.
The entire Senate bill is projected to save some $23 billion over a decade, vs. the House bill, which will save a projected $39.7 billion.
Last year's House bill had a target price program, which will be introduced in its updated version of a farm bill when the committee meets on Wednesday. Although the commodity titles of both bills appear to be closer than a year ago, they are further apart in the nutrition title, the most expensive portion of the five-year authorization for USDA spending. The House Agriculture Committee proposes cutting food stamp spending by $20.5 billion over a decade, five times as much as the Senate.
If the ag committees approve farm bills this week, as expected, the full House and Senate will debate them this year. If both bills pass, then the House and Senate ag committees will have to resolve big differences in such programs as food stamps when members of both committees meet to draft a final bill.
