House Panel Advances Drought Bailout for Farmers Around Ohio

By Nick Evans

The past year hasn’t been good to many Ohio farmers. In August, a handful of southeastern counties received drought disaster designations. Before the month was out, that list had ballooned to 22 counties throughout Appalachian Ohio. As of early November, the total has risen to 52 counties, cutting a diagonal swath from Northwest Ohio to the Southeast.

The U.S. Drought Monitor ranks drought conditions on a five-point scale running from D0 (abnormally dry) to D4 (exceptional drought). At that highest level, you can expect “exceptional and widespread” crop or pasture losses, and water emergencies stemming from shortages in reservoirs, streams and wells.

In the latest drought map, Ohio has a patch of D4 drought situated over Guernsey and Noble Counties that looks something like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Rep. Don Jones, R-Freeport, represents some of those highly impacted areas, and he’s co-sponsoring a measure to help farmers.

“The stories are endless,” he told the House finance committee earlier this month.

“People are paying as much as $80 a bale for a round bale of hay — if they can find it, sometimes more than that. Many farmers have also been forced to sell off livestock because they don’t have the feed to take care of it, so it’s either buy hay or sell the livestock.”

He and committee chairman Rep. Jay Edwards, R-Nelsonville, have proposed a $10 million appropriation to the Ohio Department of Agriculture, to provide additional money through soil and water districts to support farmers dealing with drought. There’s some federal support available, but Jones and Edwards argue that’s not enough.

But the appropriation they’re proposing is significant — nearly doubling the funding already budgeted to soil and water districts in the state. And Jones argued even that might not be sufficient.

“I think we’re going to have to take a look at this again after the first year, because we don’t know what the winter is going to be like,” he said. “We have a budget coming up that we’re going to probably have to look at doing some more — this is just the first bite at the apple.”

Stakeholder Perspective

Ohio Department of Agriculture Director Brian Baldridge described how the drought has been particularly hard on people raising livestock. Drought means less forage in their own pastures and tightening supply of hay. It also means depleted groundwater which many farmers have supplemented by trucking in water. Federal programs can soften the blow he argued, but they come with prerequisites.

“Yes, you can get paid for hauling hay if it’s more than 25 miles,” he said, “Yes, you can get paid for hauling water and get reimbursed for that water that you purchase, but there’s a lot of gaps in between there, and it’s not fully reimbursed.”

He added that federal programs, which serve farmers across the entire country, don’t have the same understanding of local needs and dynamics.

Ashley Kasler serves as an organization director with the Ohio Farm Bureau in Southeast Ohio. Her family also runs a cow-calf and hay farm.

In her telling, the past year has been a rollercoaster for farmers in her area. Early spring, there was enough rain many farmers worried if they’d be able to plant.

“Then the rain stopped,” she said. “Fields that we’re once worried about being too wet, now looking like they had never seen water at all.”

The first cutting of hay was a bit dry, but OK; by the second cutting, yields were down significantly, and a third was “all but an afterthought,” she said. That meant many farmers began digging into hay stores meant to carry their livestock through the winter.

“We would normally start feeding hay in mid-November,” she said. “Now we have been feeding hay since mid-June. Normally, for those needing to buy round bales, you would pay about $40 to $45 per round bale. It’s now close to $80 to $85.”

“Think what your business would go through in six months if unexpected overhead costs popped up out of nowhere and the price doubled,” she added.

Lawmakers’ Questions

In committee, lawmakers primarily asked different versions of why aren’t we doing more?

“I mean we needed it this summer, right?” Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Twp., asked. “Shouldn’t we do something more now, if we can, versus coming back and waiting until we get into drought season again?”

Jones stressed that “we don’t know where this ends,” and said he didn’t want to ask for too much now and risk lawmakers souring later when the need might be greater.

Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, cautious not to actually mention climate change asked if an ad hoc approach is really the best way to address the problem.

“This is not the last time this is going to happen,” he said. “Unfortunately, this is going to get worse. It’s going to get more frequent.”

He asked Baldridge if the department is thinking about a climate mitigation fund or some state level version of crop insurance, and what approaches other states are considering.

“Because right now, it’s these farmers who are acutely impacted,” he said. “In the future will either be other farmers (or) it could be, honestly, if it goes the other direction, it will be basements in places in Cincinnati that people can’t afford to fix, right?”

Rep. Bob Peterson, R-Washington Court House, jumped in a few minutes later to warn against “irrational exuberance,” and attempting to recreate crop insurance when the federal program is “very robust.”

“The one gap probably that exists right now in federal crop insurance is is these haying grazing operations. And I appreciate the work that the administration and you have done to try and address that gap that’s out there, but I don’t see need to step into what the federal government does very well.”

Whatever the quibbles on the margins, lawmakers on the panel had no qualms with advancing the funding. The measure was introduced and reported favorably in the same hearing. It still needs approval of the full House and the Senate, but given its rapid rollout and broad support, the measure seems to likely to be a priority in final weeks of the legislative session.

Follow OCJ Reporter Nick Evans on Twitter.

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