House Republicans are relying on elimination of the Conservation Stewardship Program and tightened eligibility rules and work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to fund other priorities in the new farm bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Agriculture Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas, had no new funding sources outside of the bill to work with in writing the bill. More than 75 percent of the bill’s spending goes toward SNAP and other nutrition programs.
Eliminating CSP would save $12.6 billion over 10 years, of which $7.7 billion would go toward expanding the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, according to the analysis released late Friday by the CBO.
"We just think that EQIP is more efficient and a better use of the money," Conaway said Friday. Another $2.2 billion was put into the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, and $1.3 billion was added to the Regional Conservation Partnership Program. Some $795 million was removed from the conservation title and moved to other areas of the bill.
The bill's commodity title, as expected, was left largely unchanged from what was in the 2014 farm bill and augmented by the February budget agreement, which added cotton to the Price Loss Coverage program and enhanced the Margin Protection Program for dairy farmers.
CBO estimates that the bill would increase the cost of PLC by a relatively modest $408 million over 10 years. The bill would allow producers to update their program yields if they experienced severe drought from 2009 to 2013, the period currently used for calculating yields. The bill also includes an escalator provision to raise PLC reference prices should market prices rise significantly. CBO projected that the PLC program will cost about $44 billion over the next decade without the bill's changes.The yield update is expected to benefit growers in the southern Plains, and CBO estimates that cotton producers will see an extra $577 million over 10 years under the bill. Soybean growers are projected to see $107 million more. A number of other commodities will receive less, including wheat and sorghum. But the biggest shifts in farm bill spending are in the nutrition title, and they are a result of the effort to push able-bodied SNAP recipients into work and to tighten eligibility rules.