Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — In her first speech to a farm group since President Barack Obama signed the Agriculture Act of 2014, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told the crop insurance industry here this week that they need to form alliances with other interests such as conservation to protect the farm program — and the industry seemed to listen.

After Obama signed the farm bill last Friday at Michigan State University, Stabenow traveled to the crop insurance industry meeting for a fundraiser and a speech. The convention is co-sponsored by the American Association of Crop Insurance and National Crop Insurance Services, the industry’s research group.

“Today, crop insurance is the foundation of this farm bill and the farm safety net,” she said, referring to the fact that government spending on crop insurance is expected to exceed spending on the commodity title that provides traditional programs.

Stabenow noted during the speech that the farm program including crop insurance had come under intense criticism. But she praised crop insurance as politically defensible.

“The farmer gets a bill, not a check with crop insurance … and they don’t get help unless they really need it,” she said, referring to the premiums farmers pay and the indemnities that they receive only if they experience losses and the losses are verified.

But Stabenow also noted that by making crop insurance more readily available to specialty crop growers, support for the program was strengthened.

As a sign of its growing relationships with the rest of rural America, the crop insurers invited not only key farm and commodity group representatives to speak at the convention, but also Ducks Unlimited, whose 645,000 members wanted to be sure that wildlife habitat was maintained in the farm bill.

Tom Zacharias
NCIS President Tom Zacharias said that the industry’s relationship with the conservation community “will be at the forefront” of building coalitions to defend the policy from critics in the future.

In an interview Zacharias acknowledged that achieving industry consensus on the issue of requiring farmers who get federal premium subsidies to comply with federal conservation standards had been difficult. The industry as a whole did not take an initial position, he said, because the member companies were split.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and conservation groups led the way in establishing a coalition that called for conservation compliance but opposed efforts to limit crop insurance benefits to large producers.

Although the farm-conservation coalition continued until the farm bill passed with the conservation compliance provision included, Farm Bureau’s board eventually withdrew from the effort.

Mary Kay Thatcher
Mary Kay Thatcher, a Farm Bureau lobbyist, noted that most farmers already comply with federal standards and said she believes that this is an issue that farm leaders have not explained well to their membership.

“Conservation compliance makes farmers nervous,” Thatcher said in a speech to the meeting of the Conservation Insurance and Reinsurance Bureau, which met here just before the industry convention. “We’ve done a bad job of explaining that most are already complying.”

There have been only 2,760 violations of federal conservation standards over the past 10 years that resulted in farmers losing their subsidies, Thatcher said, and of those 89 percent got their money back. Either the charge was wrong or the farmers complied, she said.

Zacharias noted that the conservation groups did not want big farmers to lose their subsidies because they might drop out of the program and not have to comply with conservation standards — and that the final bill did not contain the proposals to reduce premium subsidies for big farmers or to limit indemnity payments.

“I think we came out with a good solution — a good solution for everybody,” he said.

Dan Wrinn
Dan Wrinn, director of public policy for Ducks Unlimited told the convention on Monday, “We put this coalition together and it worked, but it doesn’t end here.”

“Our coalition drew a lot of attention [because people] saw what the potential was … if you get crop insurance, if you can get commodity groups, and if you can get the conservation groups to come together,” Wrinn said.

One crop insurance industry official said it is not easy to provide leadership to bring the farm community together because the industry is led by executives who often come from general insurance companies, not agriculture.

Crop insurance agents are closer to rural America and to their farmer clients, but some of them have offended farmers by living too well and also because they were leery about the idea of tying crop insurance to conservation compliance.

But one agent who attended the meeting said he understands that crop insurance has to have broader support if it is going to fend off attack and hopes that other agents learn that too.

Of Ducks Unlimited’s large membership of hunters, the agent said, “Anyone who has 645,000 members is a friend of mine.”