Farm Bills run in five-year increments, but it’s been almost five years since we had one in place. Will we ever have one again — and why does it matter?
Nearly a decade has passed since the last Farm Bill — a five-year, omnibus package of legislation that dictates farm and nutrition policy — was written and approved by Congress.
Now, more than two years after its September 2023 expiration date, farm policy experts say the U.S. could be entering a “post-Farm Bill” era that leaves farmers in the lurch.
“We might be living in a post-Farm Bill world right now where we just pass farm policy through budget bills and we leave out a lot of really important research and programs that help farmers,” said Michael Happ, program associate for climate and rural communities at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
House Agriculture Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) said last week that the agriculture committee plans to complete a new Farm Bill by the end of February, but experts warn getting it passed through the Senate will be extremely challenging because of bipartisan fractures in food and farming politics.
Cracks in the Coalition
The Farm Bill has long been touted as one of the few pieces of legislation that consistently garners support from both sides of the aisle, but fissures in the farming and nutrition coalition started to appear as early as 2013. That was the year the House proposed a split Farm Bill — one bill containing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding, the other containing farm policy.
SNAP has been funded by the Farm Bill since 1973, and typically gets the largest share of funding out of any other Farm Bill program. In recent years, though, SNAP has been a point of major ire for Republicans who want to cut funding to the program, which they achieved most recently through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
The 2013 proposal to split nutrition from farm policy passed the House and failed the Senate, but hinted at future rifts over what’s included in the Farm Bill. “I think a version of this [current stalemate] has been coming for a long time,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). Now, instead of a Farm Bill, food and nutrition policy has been wrapped into budget reconciliation bills that bypass the Senate’s filibuster rules. That’s what the OBBBA was, which slashed SNAP’s budget by 20 percent while doubling funding to subsidy programs for commodities like soybeans, wheat, and corn. More recently, the USDA greenlit $12 billion in one-time bridge payments for farmers affected by tariffs, which are expected to hit farmers’ bank accounts this February.
“We’ve been in a moment for the past few cycles where the party that was in control had to pass a budget reconciliation bill and couldn’t do things any other way,” Lavender said.
The Farm Bill has been temporarily renewed twice since the 2023 expiration date, but without the comprehensive overhaul that usually comes every five years. Now, almost 10 years out from when the Farm Bill was written in 2017 (the year leading up to its 2018 passage), experts say an overhaul is well overdue.
“There’s all these creative things that we could be doing to really help our soils and our water quality and our air quality, but the Farm Bill as it’s written doesn’t really allow that at all.”
“We’ve seen increasing impacts of climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, all the lessons we learned from that in the food and agricultural world,” Lavender said. “We’ve seen fewer and fewer farmers on the land, more and more land is in fewer and fewer farms. So all of this, it’s just increasingly outdated.”
Some farmers say this could be a transformative moment for agriculture. Wendy Johnson, a livestock and organic grain farmer in Charles City, Iowa, said that the Farm Bill has benefitted commodity growers more than any other farmer, and does not incentivize farm innovation.
“There’s all these creative things that we could be doing to really help our soils and our water quality and our air quality, but the Farm Bill as it’s written doesn’t really allow that at all,” Johnson said. She said that this could be an opportunity to rethink the Farm Bill, potentially splitting it into different bills that better prioritize the lesser-known programs it funds.
Nutrition programs and farm subsidies have become major flashpoints for politicians, even though they make up just two of the Farm Bill’s 12 titles, which include research, conservation, forestry, and rural development. The programs under those other 10 titles are what get neglected, Lavender said, hurting farmers and rural communities in the process.
“This narrowing of what people fight over in a Farm Bill has been a disservice not only to getting a Farm Bill done, but to everything, all those other important, smaller policies that make an impact in people’s lives,” Lavender said.
Without a Farm Bill, food and agricultural policy could be left to the whims of whichever party controls the White House, particularly if the House and Senate majorities remain as slim as they have for the past several election cycles.
Without a Farm Bill, food and agricultural policy could be left to the whims of whichever party controls the White House.
Examples of this have already occurred during the second Trump administration. For example, the Renewable Energy for America Program that provides grants to farmers and small business owners to install solar and make energy efficiency improvements was paused last summer with no renewal in sight. The gutting of that program is in line with the Trump administration’s attempt to revitalize the oil industry and slow renewable energy efforts.
Another example is the Conservation Reserve Program, which encouraged farmers to convert highly erodible land to native grasses and riparian buffers. The OBBBA failed to reauthorize the program, leaving some experts worried land that was being converted to grassland could be leased or sold.
Planning for the future is also a lot harder for farmers without a Farm Bill. “Because we have no Farm Bill, we don’t have a five-year plan locked in,” said Ben Lilliston, director of climate and rural strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
Many of the rural development and local and regional food system programs funded by the Farm Bill are now being renewed annually, rather than every half-decade, making it difficult for farmers to know what programs they might be able to apply to in a year from now.
“I don’t know how as a farmer you can really predict what’s going to happen next year,” Lilliston said.
What Now?
Experts are split over whether the current iteration of the Farm Bill is already dead. Jonathan Coppess, the former Farm Service Agency director under President Obama and now an associate professor of farm policy at the University of Illinois, said the modern Farm Bill had reached its end during a speech at the Iowa Farmers Union in December. He pointed to the changes made in the OBBBA to cut SNAP and double farmer subsidies as the final nail in the coffin for a bill that once united nutrition and farm policy.
But other experts aren’t as convinced the bill is a lost cause. “I’m not willing to say yet that the Farm Bill as we know it is dead, but I think the political ground underneath the Farm Bill has shifted and is shifting in really meaningful ways,” said Lavender of the NSAC.
“And so I think the opportunity or the imperative is, what is the right coalition of stakeholders and issues that can move a Farm Bill now?”
