Update on the Farm Bill According to information we've received, the farm bill has again been vetoed and has been overridden in both the Senate and House. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been working to implement the new legislation as if it were already finished, planning to get the $5 billion in direct payments into farmers’ hands as soon as possible. Sign-ups have started in local offices and should be completed by mid-July. While most of the media focus on the farm bill has been on commodity title spending levels, conservation programs and funding were a high priority for the Iowa Soybean Association (ISA) as we lobbied for the farm bill over the past several months. ISA did influence some of the provisions in the new farm bill that hopefully will have positive results for soybean producers in the conservation arena. We were able to encourage shifts of funding from land retirement to working land programs, from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Conservation Security Program (CSP), and language providing for the Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative (CCPI), which is designed to support locally developed projects as proposed in our Discovery Watershed Program for the Upper Mississippi. The bill also includes a new Agricultural Water Enhancement Program, (AWEP) to address water quality and quantity concerns on agricultural land and provides an additional $40,000,000 in mandatory funding for the program. We also believe Iowa will receive an additional $5 million in EQIP for the 2008 fiscal year. In addition, ISA weighed in on two other important initiatives: a new pilot CRP program that will allow constructed wetlands on tile drainage systems for nitrogen reduction as an eligible practice, and an expansion of the Conservation Innovation Grants and Payments program. We will provide more information for producers to take advantage of these programs. For more information, contact Carol Balvanz at 515-251-8640.