Few have kept as keen an eye on agriculture through their lives as Darrell Monfort.
His interest has been whetted by growing up on the family farm, two miles northwest of Iola, and tending to untold numbers of farm animals since earning a degree in veterinary medicine from Kansas State University in 1976.
As Allen County Farm Bureau’s policy chairman, he has watched closely as congressmen have wrestled to fashion a new farm bill.
Monfort, 59, has some thoughts about what would be good for farmers and all in the nation.
Times have changed, he said, to the point that price support is a dinosaur. Financial advantage for those who raise enough to feed the nation’s 320 million and many others around the world is likely to be more of a safety net to deal with disastrous conditions, such as the drought that has gripped the mid section of the country this year.
That’s found in crop insurance, around for years and subsidized by the federal government. Monfort expects a new version to be more comprehensive.
If he were to have a say, cattlemen and those who grow fruits and vegetables also would be targeted.
Stanley Dreher, who has been on both sides of the issue as a farmer and state representative, albeit a farm bill is federal legislation, agrees.
“We need to expand crop insurance,” he said. “It has been a lifesaver the last two years. Some farmers wouldn’t be in business today if it weren’t for crop insurance.”
Dreher agrees that expansion to things other than core farm crops — corn, soybeans and wheat locally — “would be great.”
“WE HAVE unprecedented prices today,” Monfort said.
Corn prices in the $8-a-bushel range and soybeans selling for twice that much or more, have precluded the need for price support, he opined, although “if you don’t have a crop the price doesn’t mean anything.”
That is where insurance enters the mix, along with disaster relief measures.
Monfort thinks all-encompassing aspects of federal participation in the nation’s single largest industry is particularly important because of what shakes out at harvest — for any commodity — and when it’s time to send livestock to market depends on forces a farmer can’t control.
Pure and simple, farmers are at the mercy of the weather.
“Cattlemen got hammered two ways this year,” Monfort observed. “Grain prices were forced up by the drought,” which increases finishing costs in feedlots, “and the drought dried up pasture grass and ponds and cut into hay production.”
