Center at UA compiles farm bill history online
Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008
A comprehensive digital compilation of U. S. farm bills and their legislative history is now available.
The National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas School of Law recently published the compilation, which is available free on the center's Web site, www. nationalaglawcenter. org / farmbills /.
The database contains 32 items of legislation that are accompanied by more than two dozen legislative historical documents. The more than 3, 200 pages of digitized information provide a permanent legal foundation for future use in the agricultural community.
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.
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.
"We've been doing this for a couple of years on and off," he said.
The second wave of work on the database included a lot more of the statutes and added significant parts of the legislative history, he said.
"It gives you a window to understand why something was put in place," he said.
He said the center's farm bill digital compilation is a landmark addition to the agricultural community that will be of value to attorneys, policy makers, students and others for decades to come.
He said it was a significant undertaking and is a "tremendous accomplishment for the center and its staff."
The database enhances electronic resources for the Agricultural Network Information Center Alliance, a worldwide cooperative reference service in which the National Agricultural Law Center participates. The database also becomes part of the National Digital Library of Agriculture and the U. S. Government Publication Digitization Initiative. The Agricultural Network Information Center helps users find quality information on specific specialties, Pittman said, essentially serving as a clearinghouse for information gathered from universities.
Farm bill importance The 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 that time. Pittman talked about why easy access to the full spectrum of farm legislation and legislative history is imperative for policy makers, legal researchers, scholars and others to have.
"One of the main reasons is that the policies we have today literally are rooted in the Great Depression era," he said.
From one amendment to the other, one enactment to the other, he said," these interrelate."
"If the current farm bill were to expire, some of the legislation that dates back to before 1950, that technically would become law," Pittman said. "There's this very unique interrelationship between these policies."
He also talked about the importance of having access to and understanding these laws and policies that "have operated for decades"during the current period in U. S. agricultural policy, particularly with the influence of globalization and international trade.
The information available in the database, in a sense, has always been available if a person would go to the law library and trace all of it, he said.
But "the farm bill gets a bit confusing," he said. "It sometimes amends statutes not in the farm bill."
The database is available to people worldwide who need to know this information at the touch of computer buttons, Pittman said.
"You could be in China. You could be in South Dakota. You could be in Fayetteville," he said. "As long as you have access to the Internet and, basically, a PDF file, you don't have to go to the library."
He said the digital compilation also preserves a part of the historical record in this country. Agriculture is "such an important part of our history," Pittman said. "This is part of a legal history of the United States, and it's now encapsulated."
' Unique entity'The digitization compilation 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. (Those are state laws and are intended to help protect landowners who allow members of the public on their property for recreational purposes without charging. )
• Digitization of the Agricultural Law Bibliography, which is a static resource for agricultural law literature located on the center's Web site. Most of the information goes back to 1950, Pittman said, and it is updated quarterly.
These digitization projects are important to enhancing the National Agricultural Law Center's role as a national resource for agricultural and food law research and information, Pittman said.
The UA National Agricultural Law Center is a "very unique entity," he said.
In 1987, Congress recognized the UA School of Law for its expertise in agricultural law and called for the creation of the National Center for Agricultural Law Research and Information at the Law School. Since then, the National Agricultural Law Center has been funded with federal appropriations through the National Agr icultural Librar y, an entity within the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA.
The National Agricultural Law Center is the only agricultural law research and information facility that is independent, national and international in scope and directly connected to the national agricultural information network.
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