The 2018/2019 Farm Bill: An Early Assessment

Carl Zulauf, AEDE professor emeritus, will present the Tweeten Policy Seminar on Nov. 6th in Room 105 of the Agricultural Administration Building (2120 Fyffe Road) as part of the AEDE Applied Economics Seminar Series. His presentation will focus on: "The 2018/2019 Farm Bill: An Early Assessment."

The United States farm bill, a mammoth legislation governing an array of agricultural, food, and rural programs in the U.S., is passed every five years or so by Congress. The next farm bill process is anticipated to take place in 2018 or 2019. Zulauf, one of the nation’s foremost farm policy experts, will present an early assessment of the legislation in his AEDE seminar. While a professor at Ohio State, Zulauf specialized in commercial agricultural policy and commodity futures and options markets. He spent most of 1985 on assignment with U.S. Sen. John Glenn’s staff during the writing of the 1985 farm bill. He has testified before Congress on farm policy and wrote a paper that laid out many of the principles that helped guide development of the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) farm program enacted in the 2008 farm bill and the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) program in the 2014 farm bill.

His seminar will discuss key themes that have emerged in the last two farm bills and that likely will continue into the next farm bill. These themes include movement to flexible commodity assistance programs, lack of research based evidence on efficacy of conservation programs, movement to nutrition from caloric food programs, and marginal increases in spending on the other titles. For those interested in research that impacts policy, understanding key themes increases the probability that such an impact occurs.

His seminar will then focus on a narrower topic in the commodity and insurance titles: understanding the effectiveness of county based programs for individual farm risk management. Intent of this discussion is to illustrate the importance of research on specific policy parameters and programs.

The Tweeten Seminar is sponsored by funds from the Luther Tweeten Fund, which has been supported by Luther and Eloyce Tweeten since 1992. Luther Tweeten was a member of the AEDE faculty from 1988 to 2000. The Tweeten Seminar sponsors yearly a presentation at the AEDE Seminar Series focused on policy.

The event is open to the Ohio State community and RSVPs are not required. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Click here to view Carl Zulauf's seminar presentation.