By Richard R. Oswald

Here at the house outside of Langdon, my wife has a Trumpet Vine problem in her flowerbeds.
Linda likes flowers. We have wild flowers, geraniums, petunias, roses, hyacinth, yucca, cornflowers, and a bunch of others I can’t begin to name. You get the picture. Linda never met a flower she didn’t like, until she planted Trumpet Vine.

It all started with a couple of trellises that the roses just weren’t in the mood to climb, so she planted the Trumpet Vine there. There simply weren’t any other plants in her garden willing to do the work she wanted done. At first it was great. The vine grew and bloomed, covering the trellises and the arbor.

Mission accomplished.

But the vine kept growing.

It took over the corn flowers. Next it crept along to the yucca and the lilac bush. It engulfed the roses. When she finally realized all the harm the runaway vine was doing in the garden, it was wrapping itself around the whiskey barrel planter where the miniature petunias and coleus were planted.

Some things are sacred. Threatening the whiskey barrel was the last straw. When we started trying to extract the vine from all the other plants, we realized we had let it go far too long. Almost everything but the trumpet vine was stunted, or worse. By next spring, if we hadn’t acted to uproot it, the ecology of the flower bed would have been ruined and only the trumpet vine would have remained.

* * * * * *

When Congress passed the 1996 farm bill, it promised to be a beautiful thing. We had a safety net of sorts, and for the first time a little bit of planting flexibility without acreage setasides. But some producers thought we needed something better. Without setasides, we had blank spots that CRP couldn’t fill, and there were some who felt we would never grow fast enough to cover it all. Not without a little added incentive.

So the call went out to increase payment limits. That was like planting trumpet vine in the garden. We hear a lot about payment limits in the farm bill. Some of us think they’re too large, others say they don’t matter, or that payments shouldn’t be limited at all.
Some say nature should take its course.

At first it was great. Some farms grew very fast, and covered all the extra acres freed up by Freedom to Farm. Congress had expanded payment limits, so that large farms didn’t really care that their extra, added production was as cheap as the first. Their risk exposure was covered. They used that advantage aggressively to gain control of an ever growing segment of the available productive land either through cash rent or outright purchase.

Low grain prices made corporate livestock operations very happy. They couldn’t possibly grow all the feed they needed, so as grain became cheaper, more and more government help flowed from the Treasury to grain farmers while livestock feeders got the advantage of prices below the cost of production. As big agribusiness kept growing, USDA, and many in Congress, admired the way it bloomed and covered the land.

Throughout the tenure of the 1996 and 2002 farm bills, the average American farmer has continued to age to the point that he is now nearly 57 years old. While my own age is typical of the average farmer, young farmers have never been fewer than they are today. The average rural per capita income lags the urban average by nearly 28% (http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/US.HTM).

We are being choked in the garden.

In the House version of the 2007 farm bill, Members offer to rectify the situation by taking payments from millionaires, but pulling Manhattan millionaires with legitimate Midwestern investments from the payment rolls is like pruning the trumpet vine on the trellis. Being in possession of money is no reason to curtail payments. The effect of payments on working farms should be confronted. Taking payments from the wealthy whose prosperity may stem from other sources doesn’t address the problem where it lives, even though it may appear to break the stalemate.

Through times of low prices, large farms have been well supported. Now that grain prices have improved, most of the payments we’re talking about will remain a moot point until prices fall again ( http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FarmIncome/nationalestimates.htm ). Now is the perfect time to place reasonable limits on farm bill price supports while working to strengthen crop insurance protections that can act as a viable safety net for all agricultural producers.
Some in the Senate are thinking of adding a Competition Title to the farm bill, so that small livestock producers can be free to profit again. Over the last few years, USDA has failed to enforce both the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, and the Agricultural Fair Practices Act of 1967. Senate action now could reverse that trend.

With the growing importance of the environment and the emphasis our government places on large livestock operations, EQIP (environmental quality incentives program that pays for manure disposal systems among other things) will take on even more importance. Manure lagoons for large CAFOs can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Limits should be placed on EQIP payments so that large animal confinements must bear responsibility for their own cost of doing business.
Now is the time to prune the vine, so that the all the rest of the inhabitants of the garden can bloom.

Healthy plants need room to grow.
Healthy farms do too. RO