Conaway: Farm Bill Will be Done On Time

House Ag Committee Chairman Mike Conaway used center stage at the 2017 Commodity Classic to talk about the SNAP program as it relates to 2018 Farm Bill negotiations:

3-3 Conaway 1a                :28            …”to that.”

But, Conaway did say that if the commodity titles and the nutrition titles had to be separated to achieve a workable piece of legislation, then that would be what would happen.

For more from House Ag Chair Mike Conaway visit SFNToday dot com

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30 acres along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Watauga County are now permanently protected thanks to a partnership between Conservation Trust for NC and Blue Ridge Conservancy. CTNC is working with Blue Ridge Conservancy to donate this land to the National Park Service for inclusion in the Parkway’s official boundary.

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A flock of more than 73,000 birds will be depopulated after an H7 strain of HPAI was discovered in lab testing. But Dr. John Dunn, the Tennessee deputy state epidemiologist, says the bird flu found at a chicken farm in Lincoln County should not affect humans.

Dunn 1

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests nearly half of the deaths from common causes can be tied to diet. AP correspondent Warren Levinson reports.

Levinson

Large Family Farms Continue to Dominate U.S. Agricultural Production

Nearly all farms in the U.S. are designated as family farms, according to new data by the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. USDA found that in 2015, farms designated as family farms accounted for 99 percent of U.S. farms and 89 percent of production. On family farms, the principal operators and their relatives, by blood or marriage, own more than half of the business’s assets. In 2015, 90 percent of U.S. farms were small family operations with under $350,000 in annual gross cash farm income, a measure of revenue that includes sales of crops and livestock, government payments and other farm-related income. These small farms, however, only accounted for 24 percent of the value of production. By comparison, large-scale family farms with at least $1 million in gross annual cash income made up only 2.9 percent of U.S. farms but contributed 42 percent of total production. Nonfamily farms accounted for only 11 percent of agricultural production.