Wisconsin Congressman Derrick Van Orden (R) doesn’t pull any punches about the possibility of a new farm bill coming out of the lame-duck session of Congress.

“Absolutely not. You’re not going to see a farm bill at the end of the year, and you can thank Senator Stabenow for that. She was two years late getting the Farm Bill text to us, and that’s completely and wholly unacceptable from the Democrat-controlled Senate. Say what you want. Say that’s political or not, but that’s the truth. So, Senator Stabenow was two years late getting us the text of the Farm Bill, and I say two years because they started working on the farm bill before I got elected to my first term of Congress, and we passed that farm bill last year. Is it a perfect bill? Absolutely not. Is it a great bill? It sure is. So, you can lay that at the feet of the Democrat-controlled Senate, and that’s just the truth.”

However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any assistance for farmers coming out of the session.

“What we’re going to try to do is there’s a farm aid package that we need to get through and a disaster relief package we need to get through, and then, we’re looking at taking Title One and Title 11, so that’s the commodity and the crop insurance, and attaching it to those bills. The reason is that people are getting denied credit right now because they don’t know if the money is going to be around there. You need to have Farm Insurance sitting there in case there is a huge event the lenders want to know that they’re going to be made whole if there’s some event that’s outside of the control of the farmers. So, we’re working on taking title one commodities, so stabilize it, get rid of that dairy cliff, and make sure that everybody understands and crop insurance is available so our farmers can get money lent to them.”