While Iowa stands to gain millions of federal dollars from the Ag spending bill that passed the U-S Senate last night, not everyone’s happy with it. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin says the legislation contains three-point-six billion dollars in emergency bailouts for farmers.With this bill, Harkin says Freedom to Farm will have paid out a total of 25-and-a-half-billion dollars in emergency aid since 1996. The emergency disaster relief money is for crop losses or severe economic losses due to damaging weather or weather-related conditions. Harkin, a democrat, says it’s clear the Freedom to Farm Bill is doing much more harm than good.Harkin says the Ag spending bill isn’t all bad, by any means, he says there’s money in it for the National Animal Disease Lab in Ames.Other funding includes: a soy-oil research project at U-N-I, biotech research at the University of Iowa, and an Iowa State effort to make anhydrous ammonia useless for makers of methamphetamine. There’s also three-quarters of a million dollars to stop soil erosion in the Loess Hills.
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