In the last year we secured new funding for rural small business development, helped beginning and family farmers and ranchers access new programs, secured and promoted new conservation initiatives, continued our efforts to reform farm programs to support family farms, and ramped up our work on energy policy.

Early in the year, we won a major new commitment of federal funds for rural small business development when the president recommended and Congress adopted an increase in funding for the Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program, a program we helped win in the 2008 farm bill. After a long delay, we anticipate that the program will be fully launched before the end of this summer with $13 million in funding available in the first year.

While we won new federal funding for small business development, we fought against budget cuts to a similar program in Nebraska. The Nebraska microenterprise development program suffered two cuts in 2009, reducing investment in Nebraska entrepreneurship by more than a million dollars. On a more positive not, we successfully fought off efforts to cut the Nebraska Value Added Agriculture program.

We launched our Farm Bill Helpline to help family farmers and ranchers better use farm bill programs we helped win in the 2008 farm bill. The Helpline focuses on programs to assist beginning farmers, encourage conservation, implement sustainable production systems and develop new markets. It provides valuable insights on how these programs are working on the ground, enabling us to identify needed refinements and make the case for them to the Department of Agriculture.

The fight to target farm payments to family farmers focused on administrative rules last year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had the opportunity to close loopholes that allow megafarms and nonfarm investors to collect unlimited payments. But in a rebuke of President Obama’ s own campaign pledge, the Department instead issued rules that once again utterly fail to institute sensible restrictions on farm program payments.

The debate over climate and energy legislation reached a new level in Washington and in our home statehouse this year. At the national level, we worked to promote a federal standard to require 20 percent of the electricity generated in our country to come from renewable sources. Such a requirement would spur wind development throughout the country, creating good paying jobs in rural communities. We published analysis showing that Great Plains states would gains tens of thousands of new permanent jobs.

At the state level, we are proposing policies to ensure wind development benefits rural people and communities – not just large investors. Our proposal would create tax incentives for wind developers to contribute stock to a new Nebraska Rural Trust to invest in the future of our rural communities. It also includes incentives to establish employee stock ownership plans so employees can build a long-term ownership stake in the wind farms where they work.

On each front – farm, small business and energy policy, our work will continue in 2010.

For more information: Contact Traci Bruckner, Assistant Policy Program Director, tracib@cfra.org or 402.687.2103 x 1016; or Brian Depew. Assistant Director, briand@cfra.org or 402.687.2103 x 1015.