National Agricultural Law Center Creates Historical Farm Bill Database

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas School of Law recently published a comprehensive digitized compilation of U.S. Farm Bills and their legislative history. The information is available free of charge on the center’s Web site at http://NationalAgLawCenter.org/farmbills/.

The U.S. Farm Bill is the primary agricultural and food policy tool of the federal government. The first bill was signed in 1933, and there have been more than 60 enactments and amendments since. As the current U.S. Farm Bill debate continues in Washington, D.C., easy access to the full spectrum of farm bill legislation and legislative history is imperative for policymakers, legal researchers, scholars and others to have. These laws have formed the backbone of agricultural policy in the United States and will continue to be the foundation from which future agricultural policy will be shaped.

Through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library, the center’s staff invested several months researching, compiling and digitizing farm bill legislation and House and Senate conference reports that date back to the Great Depression era. The database enhances electronic resources for the Agricultural Network Information Center Alliance, a worldwide cooperative reference service in which the center participates, and it also becomes part of the National Digital Library of Agriculture and the U.S. Government Publication Digitization Initiative.

The database contains 32 items of legislation that are accompanied by more than two dozen legislative history documents. The more than 3,200 pages of digitized information provide a permanent legal foundation for future use in the agricultural community.

Harrison Pittman, director of the National Agricultural Law Center, said the center already had a database of Farm Bill information available on its Web site, but the latest project drastically enhanced the site’s content.

“This is a landmark addition to the agricultural community that will be of value to attorneys, policymakers, students and others for decades to come,” Pittman said. “This was a very significant undertaking and is a tremendous accomplishment for the center and its staff.”

Pittman said the project is part of the National Agricultural Law Center’s ongoing initiative to make agricultural and food law documents available to the public online. Other projects in the center’s plan have included 50-state digital compilations of animal cruelty legislation and recreational use statutes, in addition to the digitization of the Agricultural Law Bibliography, which is currently a static resource for agricultural law literature located on the center’s Web site.

“These digitization projects are important to enhancing the center’s role as a national resource for agricultural and food law research and information,” Pittman said.  “In addition, we are helping the U.S.D.A. National Agricultural Library in its mission to provide access to global information for agriculture.”