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Bullish on yet another farm bill extension

A national farm group leader says he doesn’t expect a new farm bill to be completed this year.

Fred Yoder serves as a co-chair to the nonprofit Solutions from the Land and on the steering committee of the political action group AGree.

“We’ll just go ahead and keep extending this until we come to our senses and work together, we have to work together and that’s one of the things that is not happening right now,” he says. “We’ll wait till people are ready to work together and we’ll get a farm bill.”

He tells Brownfield recent actions by the Trump administration have only fueled a deeper political standoff.

“We got to get through this storm we’re experiencing now, the uncertainty of everything, the unpredictability of everything,” he says. “Let’s let the smoke clear. Let’s let USDA get fully staffed and implemented.”

Yoder says the deadlock only seemed to be intensified during meetings he had with leaders in the U.S. House and Senate Ag Committees last week.

The 2018 Farm Bill has been extended twice by Congress and is currently set to expire at the end of September.

The fourth-generation Ohio farmer was a member of the first Trump administration’s agriculture advisory committee and is a past president of the National Corn Growers Association.

Brownfield interviewed Yoder during the Ohio Conservation Tillage and Technology Conference, where he was a keynote speaker.