Crop Insurance extension crucial to protection of food security

BUT FIRST: Before you dive into today’s newsletter, your MA team wants to hear from you. As farm bill negotiations heat up, we’re starting a new weekly segment called “Fielding Questions.” Have a burning question for a Capitol Hill lawmaker about the farm bill? Let us know, and we’ll do our best to track them down and ask them for an answer. We’ll feature one Q&A in each Monday newsletter until a farm bill is passed. Send questions to gdowns@politico.com.

DRIVING THE DAY

FIRST IN MA: House Ag member Feenstra and Craig’s Crop Insurance for Future Farmers Act would help new farmers and veterans gain better crop insurance protections, providing them better access to the critical farm safety net program while securing the next generation of U.S. landowners and producers.

Details: The bill would define a “beginning farmer” to match most other programs for the group, extending crop and livestock insurance protections to 10 years for new and beginning farmers. The current rules only allow five or fewer years.

The extension would apply to all federal crop insurance programs, including livestock policies.

The next generation: Lawmakers have been warning about the aging population of U.S. producers and barriers to access for beginning farmers, and how it will shape the next generation of landowners.

Those headwinds, worsened by inflation and high production costs, are hitting young farmers just as foreign-owned companies, hedge funds and the wealthy are buying up more and more land in the U.S.

“We don’t know when that big hail storm is coming through, or that next derecho, or the next drought. And if you didn’t have crop insurance, it would be all over,” Feenstra told MA.

“Literally, none of the farmers would be around. And frankly, that scares me more than anything because that’s where your foreign investors would come in and start buying up land,” Feenstra added. “We are the breadbasket of the world and we gotta protect it.”