WASHINGTON — Dairy farmers face a fiscal cliff of their own if Congress fails to approve a farm bill or extend the current one before the end of the year.
"The honest answer is there's lots of uncertainty now, and nobody likes uncertainty," said Eric Ooms, who milks 450 cows along with his father and two brothers on a farm near Kinderhook.
Without an operative farm bill, "we'd be in no-man's land," said Ooms, whose father, Adrian Ooms, emigrated from the Netherlands and started the farm in 1952. "We haven't made any contingency plans."
Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the original Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933 at the height of the Depression, the farm bill has turned into a ritual exercise in which Congress seeks to prop up U.S. agriculture through a combination of price supports and safety nets.
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