Details are expected this week for a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. Many ag groups are waiting the House’s legislation, including the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA).
“There’s some good wins in there for agriculture,” said Chris Edgington, first vice president of NCGA. “We’ve got some money for locks and dams and money for roads and bridges. That’s great they’re not coming after small individual businesses to pay for it. That’s always a win for our industry.”
Edgington will take the helm of the NCGA on Oct. 1. The bill has passed through the Senate, a move the organization applauded.
“People sometimes take for granted how [products] got to the store, where they bought it, or ordered it off Amazon,” he says. “There’s a tremendous infrastructure logistics challenge on the back side—whether it’s trucks, boats, cars, planes, you name it. They all got to have something—we need a lot of good infrastructure, but we don’t need to necessarily pay for it off a small business.”
He says NCGA is working with Call-To-Action groups to encourage their members’ representatives to get this historic bill passed.
“There’s about 40,000 corn grower members, so we get some attention when everybody calls their local representatives, [telling them] we need to get this through—we need to get this done,” says Edgington.
Last month during the Farm Progress Show, Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois said she doesn’t anticipate many changes and anticipates a vote by the end of this month. Edgington is optimistic it will make it to President Biden’s desk.
“This one’s got some pretty good opportunities and it seems to have traction on both sides of the aisle, which is sometimes a challenge,” he says.
