On top of trade turmoil and a U.S. government shutdown, Congress has still not passed a new Farm Bill, the primary legislation that sets a majority of U.S. food and farm policy and funding. The future of the Farm Bill is still unclear. In the following Q&A, IATP’s Michael Happ explains what we know, what we don’t, and what might be coming next.
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What’s the status of the 2018 Farm Bill?
The 2018 Farm Bill was intended to be a five-year bill, expiring on September 30, 2023. Congress extended the bill for one year in 2023, and again in 2024. This year, the Republican-controlled Congress split the Farm Bill in two and passed a few sections of the Farm Bill as a part of their “One Big Beautiful” budget bill — namely crop subsidies, crop insurance, a diminished nutrition assistance section, and some conservation. The rest of the Farm Bill, from research to forestry and local markets programs, has been left to expire, with no new Farm Bill to take its place.
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What are the chances of a new Farm Bill being passed? And how would that bill look, now that nutrition assistance programs previously housed under the Farm Bill were brought into the Republican budget bill?
We may be living in a post-Farm Bill world, where instead of a bill every five years that keeps farm policy stable and predictable, policies that used to be passed in a Farm Bill become subject to yearly budget bills that give farmers less certainty. I don’t have a lot of faith that we’ll again see a Farm Bill as we’ve known it for the past 90 years, one that fuses nutrition, commodity, and conservation policy together, along with the other nine main parts of the Farm Bill, known as “titles.”
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How are lapsed programs like the Conservation Reserve Program impacted? Are existing contracts for farmers still being honored?
Before the government shutdown began, the lapse of the 2018 Farm Bill would have meant no new CRP contracts could be signed, but existing contracts would be honored. Now with the combined effects of an expired Farm Bill and the shutdown, farmers with CRP contracts haven’t been paid. It remains to be seen if recent actions by USDA to reopen county Farm Service Agency offices with one or two staff members each will change this.
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How can future Farm Bills better serve small and mid-sized farms and on-farm conservation programs?
Farm Bill policies are definitely biased against small and mid-scale farms — crop insurance programs only serve a fraction of farmers and are designed with large-scale farms that grow only a handful of crops. Same goes with commodity subsidies in the Farm Bill — they not designed with small and midscale farms in mind, especially those that are highly diversified. Same goes with conservation programs — IATP’s research shows many of the costliest practices funded through conservation programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are those that serve large farms. One thing Congress could do to better target EQIP for small and mid-sized farms is include the Small Farm Conservation Act and the EQIP Improvement Act into the Farm Bill. The first bill would ensure EQIP is administered with small farms in mind, and the second would place a cap on the amount any one producer could receive from EQIP, freeing up funds to serve more farmers, among other needed reforms to the program.
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Between the expiration of the Farm Bill, the reorganization at USDA, the government shutdown, and market uncertainty from ever-changing tariffs, how are farmers being impacted as harvest season is underway? What kind of response have you seen from farmer groups?
I don’t want to sugarcoat this: we are in the midst of a farm crisis in the United States, and the chaos from the government is not helping. It didn’t happen overnight — status quo farm policies have slowly eroded farm country for decades, but recent actions have turbocharged it. Farmers at all scales are struggling. Input costs are high, crop prices are low, export markets are evaporating, and the administration has kicked the legs out from key programs that help farmers sell into local markets, diversify their operations, and explore alternatives to the commodity markets that have shortchanged farmers for generations. Farm groups representing cattle producers and soybean growers especially have been clear in how current policies hurt them. Many more have spoken out about the need for stability.
This shutdown is badly timed — we’re in the middle of harvest for a lot of the country, and local USDA offices are either closed or operating at bare minimum capacity. There are additional risks to rural hospitals, schools, and those on nutrition assistance programs that have outsized effects in farm country.
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What are the best- and worst-case scenarios for ag legislation moving forward? What policies would we want to see in a new Farm Bill?
A best-case scenario would be for Congress to realize the federal government needs to be a source of certainty for farmers — to craft policy with a long-term vision. This policy would target support for those who need it the most, help farmers steward their land, be nimble enough to keep pace with changing markets, and provide a real safety net for all farmers – not just those who farm in one kind of way.
The worst-case scenario would be an abandonment of farm policy altogether by the federal government. In an ideal world, the Farm Bill would act as a counterweight to corporate consolidation and land degradation. In a vacuum, we would likely see even more consolidation of farms and farmer-serving industries such as seeds, grain, machinery, beef, and poultry.
In a new Farm Bill, IATP would like to see policies that help farmers farm with climate resilience in mind, making farmland more adaptable to increasing climate-related events like droughts and floods. One example of a positive vision is the Agriculture Resilience Act, which incentives farmers to enact climate-resilient practices on their land. Additional support for community food systems is also crucial —farmers should have the tools to feed their community, and consumers should be able to access nutritious, local food. And it should be simpler to become a farmer — we currently treat farmland like the stock market and not as the place to raise and grow our food, and this system gets in the way of new and beginning farmers. Reforms such as the New Producer Economic Security Act would be a step in the right direction for increased land access.
