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A Farm Bill at Last
Today President Obama signed into law the 2014 Farm Bill. After more than a year of debate, headlines have herlalded the passage of this compromised bill. For specialty crops, including grapes, this bill makes significant improvements in availability of key programs, including value added producer grants, increased funding for pest and disease control, extension of the Market Access Program, as well as Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops and re-authorization of the Clean Plant Network. Great work on the part of those organizations in the specialty crop industry which lobby Congress!
The news is equally significant on research programs important to specialty crops. Specialty Crop Block Grants (with funding from the Agricultural Marketing Service and administration by state Departments of Agriculture) will see funding increase from $55 million per year to $85 million per year. Included in the Congressional conference committee report is language to encourage multi-state grants under the program. This should be of benefit to the grape industry, where pest and environmental issues such as drought know no boundaries and span several states.
And the Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) is once again authorized as a mandatory-funding program - but now this program has a "permanent budget baseline." This means that if the Congress fails to pass a Farm Bill five years from now, the program will continue. (For the past year, there has been no funding available for SCRI because it lacked a budget baseline.) SCRI will now total $80 million per year, although $25 million of that will be cordoned off to address Citrus Greening.
Perhaps just as important as the fact that SCRI has been re-authorized at a higher funding level, Congress also enacted important reforms to make the process of grant allocation more responsive to the industries' research prioritization. A two-step review process will be implemented, in which the affected specialty crop will rank projects by relevance and impact to the industry, in addition to the current scientific merit review.
There also have been some technical improvements in the SCRI language. One clarified that the program recognizes the importance of "quality and taste of processed specialty crops" such as raisins, grape juice or wine. Another spelled out the importance of research on remote sensing, an unfunded priority of the National Grape & Wine Initiative for the past four years.
The National Institute of Food & Agriculture (NIFA) has let us know that it will be working as quickly as feasible to put this program, along with the changes in its administration, into place. NGWI will be working closely with the Agency as it moves through this process.
In the meantime, the NGWI Theme Committee's will be firing up to outline work on two on-going priorities: sensor & mechanization technology, and continued funding on trunk diseases. In addition, work on cold tolerance and wine grape quality are also under consideration for NGWI research project sponsorship.
Our work is cut out for us, but the action by Congress is welcome news as NGWI continues to prioritize the grape and grape products industry's key research interests, and leverages industry research investment by attracting public sector funds.
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