Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley says his top Farm Bill priority in the 115th Congress is to preserve a vigorous crop insurance program, noting there is no safety net more valuable to farmers and taxpayers.

“It not only saves the taxpayers money, because obviously if we didn’t have crop insurance and you had disasters in agriculture, the taxpayers would be 100 percent of it,” Sen. Grassley, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, noted in a press conference last week. “In addition to saving the taxpayers money, we also are encouraging farmers to plan ahead and to manage risk…95 percent of the farmers in Iowa do that.”

This is not the first time that Sen. Grassley has taken to the airwaves to tout crop insurance’s importance. In September, he was outspoken in an Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network interview about the importance of crop insurance as eastern Iowa began rebuilding in the wake of severe flooding.

And just two months later, he joined Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) in an interview with KIOW News and, again, emphasized that the policy works well for both farmers and taxpayers.

Grassley added in his recent press conference that Farm Bill discussions are set to begin soon with hearings in the Agriculture Committee