For the past two and a half years, the House Agriculture Committee has been working on formulating new farm policy to replace the 2002 farm bill, which expired last September. While the expiration has come and gone, we continue our efforts to put together a farm bill that the president can sign into law. The Agriculture Committee farm bill may be the most reform-oriented farm bill our committee has ever produced, and I was proud to support it at the committee level.

Unfortunately, the farm bill process has been plagued with funding problems that have prevented the Congress from finishing its work on the farm bill. The 2007 farm bill contains real reforms, and if the critics who’ve relied on old arguments and tired criticisms take a good, hard look at this bill, they might just be surprised at what they find.

Agricultural policy enables U.S. farmers and ranchers to produce the safest, most abundant, most affordable food and fiber supply in the world. Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food — less than any other country in the world. The farm bill creates a safety net for agricultural producers to ensure that they can continue to produce and meet the food and fiber needs of our nation even in the face of incredible risk such as weather, extreme market fluctuations and disease. In many cases, when a farmer goes out of business, his or her production is not picked up by someone else and it is lost for good. The purpose of the safety net is to make sure that our food is produced domestically, which has significant national security ramifications, and that American consumers can count on affordable food to feed their families.

Farm policy has certainly been dealt its fair share of criticism and some of it has been well deserved. It is important to recognize that calls to eliminate farm programs in their entirety are not realistic nor are they in the best interest of the American consumer. We need to be clear on what reform actually means: Reform is an improvement in or a correction of an unsatisfactory policy or law. The House Agriculture Committee took a hard look at our farm policy and did make significant improvements to the operations and implementation of a variety of programs authorized by the farm bill. The result was a modern, forward-looking farm bill that maintained the safety net for producers and also improved some of the same problems that often plague large, comprehensive policy.

To ensure that the farm safety net continues to be effective for agricultural producers, as well as an efficient use of taxpayer dollars, we revised some of the eligibility standards for farm programs including direct attribution, lowered the total amount of payments producers can receive, introduced a revenue-based countercyclical program, and included provisions to prevent payments from going to landowners not engaged in farming. For the first time in farm bill history, we dramatically reduced the income eligibility level. Additionally, the bill strengthens the crop insurance program with provisions that ensure the program can be operated efficiently without excessive cost to the taxpayer.

Beyond the commodity programs, other reforms were enacted to streamline conservation programs and target spending on programs that garner the greatest environmental benefit.

The 2007 farm bill contains a wide range of reforms to improve the integrity and efficiency of U.S. farm policy while preserving an adequate safety net for our nation’s farmers and ranchers. Our efforts to enact reform did not stop with the House passage of the farm bill. As we work through the differences between the House and Senate bills, we continue to look for ways to improve current policy. Farm programs account for roughly 13 percent of the total farm bill budget. In comparison to nutrition spending, which account for 66 percent of the total farm bill budget, farm programs have born 100 percent of the reform provisions in this bill thus far though we continue to seek reform in other areas.

We have made great strides to reform and improve our farm policy and I will continue to work with my colleagues, Republican and Democrat, to balance the many competing goals of agriculture policy. The 2007 farm bill maintains a strong safety net for agriculture producers and contains many significant reforms that reduce excess spending and improve the integrity of our agriculture policy.

Goodlatte is the ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee.