Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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The U.S. Senate will be focused on agriculture policy next week as the five-year, $288 billion Food and Energy Security Act — better known as the 2007 Farm Bill — goes up for a vote. Debate on the bill is expected to begin on Monday, Nov. 5.
The bill was passed last week by the Senate Agriculture Committee under the chairmanship of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.
Several key battles are expected to play out on the Senate floor, and one to watch will be the fight to curb high farm program payments to wealthy land-owners who never set foot on a farm.
Some new restrictions on payments were included and passed in the committee bill, which would exclude individuals from farm program payments if their annual income is higher than $750,000. A relatively similar provision was included in the Farm Bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in July.
But those efforts don't go far enough to please the bi-partisan duo of Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa,who want a hard cap of $250,000 on all commodity payments. Grassley has often said that the income-based limits are nothing more than "window dressing," and "don't accomplish much at all." Dorgan and Grassley are not newcomers to this debate, fighting for the same hard caps on farm payments in 2002. Their efforts were successful in the Senate five years ago, but the caps were removed from the 2002 Farm Bill when it went to conference with the House.
Grassley has said he is hopeful that this time around will be different, as the ideological makeup of the House is quite different now than it was in 2002
Another of Grassley's pet issues that did pass as part of the committee bill is a ban on meatpacker ownership of livestock. It is anticipated that some efforts will be made to strip that provision from the bill, either on the Senate floor or in conference committee with the House.
One other major amendment, which is much less likely to succeed, will be presented by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. Lugar hopes to effectively replace the committee's Farm Bill with with his own legislation, a bill that would radically reduce subsidies and replace them with a new crop insurance program.
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