Farm Bill Seeks More Flexibility, Competition : Agriculture: Clayton K. Yeutter says his proposals are intended to make existing legislation work better for farmers.

Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter sent Congress new farm proposals on Tuesday that he said will allow farmers to be more flexible in their practices and more competitive in the marketplace.

But when it comes to federal benefits for America’s farmers, the proposed farm bill is really a modification of the expiring 1985 bill that it will replace, Yeutter said.

“The 1985 act put American agriculture on the right course by helping us become more internationally competitive,” Yeutter said, “and it improved our domestic farm support programs by making them more oriented to market signals.”

The job now, as the Bush Administration sees it, is to make the existing legislation work better, Yeutter said.

He did not, however, offer any advice for financing the proposals. “We’ll have to legislate in cooperation with Congress,” he said. “We don’t intend to make specific recommendations on how to meet budget requirements.”

Budget proposals released last week by President Bush call for a cut in fiscal 1991 commodity spending of $1.5 billion. When asked specifically about those cuts, Yeutter said, “This document doesn’t deal with budget, it deals with policy.”

To give farmers the planting flexibility that Yeutter said they consider the most important part of any new legislation, he has proposed a “normal crop acreage concept.” This would allow farmers to plant crops based on market demand without loss of farm program benefits.

The bill defines crops that could be substituted for program crops, authorizes crop-specific acreage reduction programs and provides authority to plant on idled acres in exchange for giving up specified payments.

The Administration proposals follow the introduction Monday by the House Agriculture Committee of its 1990 farm bill.

After a glance at Yeutter’s recommendations, the House Agriculture Committee chairman, Rep. Kika de la Garza, (D-Tex.), said he thought Congress would come up with legislation acceptable to the White House without much trouble.

But Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said that without dollar figures the “heart of the farm bill is not there.”

“American farmers don’t know what their income will be and Congress does not know how much the Administration will be willing to spend on farm programs,” Leahy said.

Leahy also found fault with the proposal’s environmental component, he said.

“While I am pleased that the Administration is proposing no backsliding on the 1985 farm bill conservation gains,” he said, “the Administration still refuses to actively help farmers cut pesticide and chemical use. And the Administration has failed to include a significant proposal to protect our ground water from pollution, from pesticides and fertilizers.”

Don Lipton, a spokesman for the American Farm Bureau Federation, took a wait-and-see attitude toward Tuesday’s proposals, although he was concerned about how budget cuts will be achieved in the agriculture budget.

“The President’s budget last week counted on $1.5 billion in cuts in agriculture programs, and there’s nothing in the farm bill proposal presented today that indicates how that cut would be achieved,” Lipton said. “That’s going to pose initially a credibility problem for Yeutter.”

Information from Times wire reports was included in this story.