New York State of Politics reports that Congress may have extended federal spending into November to keep the government running, but they let the current Farm Bill expire without voting for a new bill. Christopher Wolf, an agricultural economics professor at Cornell University, said some program are reauthorized automatically, while other parts of the bill are not. He said, “Some of them are permanent and don’t require any extension, like crop insurance. Some of them need reauthorization, and some of them are authorized, but need funding.” A government-funded program to offset the cost of milk, for instance, will end soon and revert back to a 1949 law that would set prices relative to the 1910s, Wolf said. That would send milk prices 2.5 percent higher. “If it were to happen, that would cost billions and billions, but that’s not going to happen,” Wolf said. “It’s really not that unusual to go past the fiscal year expiration date.” New York Farm Bureau spokesperson Steve Ammerman said, “It is too soon to predict what will happen, and we are hopeful to avoid a repeat of years past that took us towards the so-called ’dairy cliff’ where critical risk management programs would be left unfunded and agricultural policy would revert to those in the 1940s.”