Farm bill article wins award for Texas A&M AgriLife co-authors
American Agricultural Law Association presents Professional Scholarship Award for policy analysis
Two Texas A&M AgriLife and Texas A&M Department of Agricultural Economics faculty members were recently recognized by the American Agricultural Law Association, AALA, with a Professional Scholarship Award.
Each year, AALA presents the Professional Scholarship Awards to recognize members’ writings in scholarly articles or practice-related works such as appellate or trial-court briefs. It is given to the authors of an article that demonstrates outstanding legal writing and analysis on a topic of equal importance to academics, policymakers and private practitioners.
This year, the award went to Tiffany Lashmet, J.D., Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service agricultural law specialist and professor, Amarillo; and Bart Fischer, Ph.D., research associate professor and co-director, Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University, Bryan-College Station, along with co-writers Shannon Ferrell, J.D., professor, Oklahoma State University; and Brad Karmen, Karmen Consulting LLC.
Their article, “Paved With Good Intentions: Unintended Impacts of Farm Bill Payment Limitations on Farm Risk Management and Farm Transitions,” appeared in the Drake Journal of Agricultural Law.
Helping to understand farm bill complexities
The awards committee said the article would be perfect for anyone who wants to learn about the history of farm-program payment limitations and to understand the complexities of the current payment limitation system.
The authors state in their article that payment limitations have become more complex, perhaps with unintended consequences for the rules enforcing them.
They stated that the decades-long debate over who should be eligible for assistance — and once they are deemed eligible, how much assistance they should receive— has resulted in almost impossible regulations for even the most astute attorney to follow.
Eligibility for farm safety net
They stated: “While the intent to make sure the farm safety net is only accessible to those who really need it may be laudable, we argue that the execution has made both risk management and farm transitions unnecessarily more challenging for family farms.”
According to the 2008 Farm Bill, both individuals and legal entities may only qualify for a single payment limit. The “legal entities” implicated by this provision include limited liability companies, LLCs, and corporations, both of which are restricted to a single payment limit regardless of the number of members of the farming operation that individually qualify as eligible for payment limits.
The article notes this is in sharp contrast to the treatment of general partnerships, which may, in effect, combine the payment limits of their individual partners. As a practical matter, family farming operations comprised of multiple stakeholders must be structured as general partnerships or some other form of joint venture to avoid being forced into a single payment limit.
The article concludes that Congress has an opportunity in the impending farm bill debate to help facilitate farm transitions from generation to generation by modernizing payment limitations to ensure they are not disincentivizing the use of LLCs.
