Hal McCabe and Lucy Shephard of the Legislative Commission on Rural Resources meet with NEAFA members as part of the annual NEAFA lobby day.
Members of the NEAFA lobbying team met with Assembly Agriculture Committee Chair Donna Lupardo
In conjunction with NEAFA’s Annual Meeting, twenty four volunteer advocates worked together to lobby Albany lawmakers for important state supported agricultural programs on February 4th, 2020. The April 1st budget deadline was on the minds of legislators as NEAFA advocates competed for space in the halls of the Legislative Office Building with dozens of other special interest groups.
The Governor’s Executive Budget, introduced in mid-January, includes funding for many significant agricultural programs, including PRO-DAIRY, Integrated Pest Management, and NY FarmNet. However, the Governor’s current proposal leaves an approximately $4 million deficit between his numbers and current budget appropriations. Therefore, lawmakers must prioritize their budget options, and the ag community is actively working with them to ensure legislators have their spending priorities straight.
The NEAFA budget priorities includes $1.201 for PRO-DAIRY, $2.9 million for NY Farm Viability Institute: $2.9 million, $900,000 core program and $500,000 mental health component for NY FarmNet, $200,000 for Farm Labor Specialist, $842,000 for FFA, $18 million for Ag Non-Point Pollution Control, and $1 million for IPM.
In addition to advocating for budget priorities, NEAFA volunteer lobbyists warned legislators about the perils of banning pesticides. Several bills have been introduced in the NYS Legislature that would ban pesticides ranging from glyphosate and neonicotinoids to atrazine and simazine. These bills ignore the Department of Environmental Conservation’s authority to review and register pesticide use in New York, and the bills remove the science driven decision-making process currently employed by DEC experts. NEAFA advocates advised state lawmakers to avoid playing politics and keep DEC in control of pesticide use.
Another budget item this year is legislation to fix the farm labor law that was passed in 2019. The agricultural community has been aggressively promoting amendments that will address issues that are the subject of a lawsuit brought against the state by the Northeast Dairy Producers Association and the NYS Vegetable Growers Association. Legislative fixes are essential to making the new law viable in context to farm family members and salaried supervisor employees. NEAFA actively supports these legislative amendments.
Despite the new hurdles created by the COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers are working aggressively to meet the April 1st adoption deadline for the state budget. NEAFA will continue to work with legislators to make sure that the economic needs of the agricultural community are met within the state budget.