Joco Today

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D., appeared on Market Day Report on RFD-TV to discuss the Senate Republicans’ Farm Bill framework. The framework emphasizes crop insurance, increases reference prices, removes certain climate-related regulations introduced by the Biden administration, and invests in rural infrastructure.

Senator Marshall highlighted key aspects of the bill during his interview:

On the Farm Bill:

“We’ve been working on this for three years. What we did is we put the ‘farm’ back in the Farm Bill. When we released our Republican priorities today, we prioritized crop insurance and increased reference prices for those commodities. We’ve been trying to fight to get that increase on commodity reference prices for five years so at least we’ve got it in our framework; there’s no cuts in the SNAP program, so the Democrats should like our framework as well, and the last thing I would mention for your listeners is that we take some of those guardrails off of the conservation programs.”

“There are no cuts in our SNAP programs. What Senator Stabenow is actually wanting are steep increases in the SNAP programs. Listen, we went from $60 billion a year for the food stamp programs to $120 billion a year, from the last Farm Bill to this Farm Bill; we’ve doubled the funding baseline for the SNAP programs. That should be plenty.”

On rural development provisions in the Farm Bill:

“High-speed internet is top and foremost to me. The consistent funding for the next five years—those broadband funds will be continued—trying to get those speeds up to 100 or over 100 [Mbps]. Again, your listeners out there, for precision agriculture, are downloading volumes of information every day so that we continue to be good stewards of the land. We are growing more with less. And it’s that data that allows us to do that for precision agriculture.”

“There’s increased funding for mental health for farmers, as well as rural hospitals…and rural housing as well.”

On Farm Bill negotiations with Senate Democrats:

“I think that the Democrats’ priorities continue to be a little bit different than ours. They want even more funding for SNAP; they want to put tight guardrails around conservation programs. If we would follow their rules, Kansas livestock and dairies would be put out of business because of air quality controls that they want to put on constraints on that particular industry as well as those raising hogs. So we've still got some negotiating to do here but we'll try to get it done sometime this year.”

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