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USDA’s Barbre, AFB’s Newton comment on cover crop rule change
The administrator of USDA’s Risk Management Agency says the rule change allowing more flexible cover crop usage starting September 1st should help farmers with a forage shortage. “Knowing that producers need these changes across the country for forage needs, I’m just proud that we’re able to make these changes for this year.”
Director Martin Barbre tells Brownfield program changes were requested because of the expected high number of prevented-plant acres combined with winterkill impacts on hay. “We had requests from different areas all over the country that combined with the late plantings and the forage shortages all over the country that this was a needed change for 2019.”
American Farm Bureau’s John Newton tells Brownfield they’ve been working with USDA on this issue for several months. “We had many of our state Farm Bureau’s reach out, indicating that the challenge they were having with winterkill and the fact that they needed to put a forage crop on these prevent plant acres or they were going to need to move livestock outside of the state and in many cases long distances.”
The rule change is also being praised by the National Milk Producers Federation, Edge Dairy Farmers Cooperative, and FarmFirst Dairy Cooperative.
Barbre says the farmers must still use approved cover crops on the prevented planting acres. For the 2019 crop year, cutting for silage, haylage, and baleage will be treated the same as grazing and the date for accessing these crops has been moved from November 1st to September 1st without a reduction in prevented plant payments.
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