Congress leaves a long ag to-do list

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With help from James Bikales

PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off for Thanksgiving this Thursday and Friday but back to our normal schedule on Monday, Nov. 27.

QUICK FIX

— Congress is out of town for the first time in 10 weeks. Lawmakers in both chambers left themselves a lot of work left on two must-pass agriculture bills.

— President Joe Biden suffered another bad poll, but performed better with rural voters than he did in a New York Times and Siena College poll earlier this month.

— A POLITICO investigation finds the Biden administration’s Colorado River deal may be paying users a premium to save water they would have conserved anyway, driving up the cost of a long-term deal.

HAPPY MONDAY, Nov. 20. I’m your host, Garrett Downs. Send your hot tips to [email protected], and follow us at @Morning_Ag.

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Driving the day

CONGRESS’ LONG AG TO-DO LIST: Among the items on lawmakers’ to-do list after 10 straight weeks in session are two must-pass agriculture bills: the farm bill and the Agriculture-Food and Drug Administration appropriations bill.

Farm bill extended: Congress extended the 2018 farm bill through September 2024 as part of a stopgap spending measure to avert a government shutdown, which passed last week. The extension keeps a number of key programs from careening over funding cliffs and allows USDA to continue operating farm programs under the 2018 law.

Neither chamber’s Agriculture Committee has introduced a new farm bill, or even circulated text, as they continue to work through various funding disagreements.

Farm bill outlook: Congress now has an extra 10 months to pass a new farm bill. However, one big disagreement threatens the legislation: missing funds to increase spending on commodity support programs.

Republicans for years have eyed nearly $20 billion in Inflation Reduction Act money for conservation and climate-smart agriculture to boost reference prices in USDA commodity programs — a top ask from commodity trade groups. House Agriculture Committee Republicans have also proposed future updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, a benefit calculator for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to free up additional funds. But Senate Ag Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) ruled that out last week.

“We absolutely are going to continue to keep that money in there,” Stabenow told your host. When asked where money could come from to meet Republican demands, Stabenow said bluntly: “We’ll see, but it’s not coming from conservation, and it’s not coming from nutrition.”

Stabenow did strike a cheerier tone about a farm bill in 2024, a presidential election year with limited work weeks for Congress.

“I’m laser-focused on getting that done,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of different speakers of the House, we’ve had a lot of issues … but I’ve never taken my eye off the ball on getting a five-year farm bill.”

Ag-FDA outlook: Congress extended fiscal year 2023 appropriations in two tranches. The first bucket will expire on Jan. 19, the second on Feb. 2.

Ag-FDA falls under the earlier deadline. The Senate has passed its version of the bill. But the House remains snared as farm-state Republicans won’t support the bill’s double-digit cuts to agriculture programs and centrist Republicans oppose its ban on mail delivery of the abortion pill mifepristone. As we’ve reported, the House bill’s author, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), has suggested the House should abandon its draft and proceed directly to conference with the Senate.

THE RURAL VOTE 2024

POLLING THE RURAL VOTE: Biden trails former President Donald Trump by 2 percentage points in a hypothetical general-election contest, according to a new national poll from NBC News.

A silver lining: But compared with an NYT/Siena poll released earlier this month, Biden actually gained some ground with rural voters. That poll showed Biden trailing Trump by 26 percentage points among rural voters. But according to NBC News, Biden trailed Trump by a lesser 23 percentage points in the new poll. Biden’s total support among rural voters, according to NBC, was 35 percent — up 6 points from the previous NYT/Siena poll.

Remember: Earlier this month, Biden and his top administration officials kicked off a tour of rural areas to tout his administration’s achievements for rural communities.

As your host and Elena Schneider reported then, Biden’s allies are hoping his policy victories — which include hundreds of billions of federal dollars heaped on rural America — can help him lose by less in rural stretches that Republicans have dominated in recent years.

Scoring more votes in rural areas than Democrats have in recent elections could help Biden close margins in key states, votes he might need in an election expected to be neck-and-neck.

But, but, but: It’s worth noting that the NBC News poll was a national poll, whereas the NYT/Siena poll polled only battleground states expected to determine the outcome of the election: Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Water

COLORADO RIVER WINDFALL: The Biden administration brokered a historic deal earlier this year for Colorado River users to conserve nearly a billion gallons from the shrinking river through 2026 — at a cost of $1.2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funds.

But our Annie Snider found in an investigation that many of those cuts would have been made anyway under existing conservation deals and water-saving practices — at a much cheaper cost to the taxpayer. And with the focus turning now to a broader, long-term deal to save the river after 2026, the government’s payments today could drive up the price of conservation for the future.

“There’s sort of a rumor in the water community that a lot of people are getting paid to do what they would have done anyway,” Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the Colorado River District, told Annie.

In California alone, at least a third of the state’s conservation commitment comes from water that was already available under prior, less expensive agreements. And sources told Annie that the Imperial Irrigation District, the single largest user of Colorado River water, has agreed to make new cuts in the ongoing negotiations, but at a rate more than double the standard $400-per-acre-foot price other users are being paid.

In an interview, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton acknowledged that the new conservation contracts will be more expensive, but argued that rather than sending it to another user, the new deals will keep water in Lake Mead.

Row Crops

— USDA has its trade missions planned for 2024, including multiple stops in the Indo-Pacific.

— The Bipartisan Policy Center urged lawmakers to pass a new farm bill early next year, warning of new delays and budget updates that could hamper the process.

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