Saying the Farm Bill is for farmers is like saying Ronald Reagan was a famous actor. It’s true, but it’s far from the whole story.
The Farm Bill helps farmers weather downswings in commodity prices, yes. But it also protects waterways and forests, provides groceries for needy people and supports the development of markets for local food. It even helps rural communities purchase police cars.
Congress is preparing to craft its 19th Farm Bill this year, the 90th anniversary of the original passed in 1933 to get farmers through the Great Depression.
From a controversial package of subsidies and production controls, the Farm Bill has grown, through renewals roughly every five years, to encompass a cornucopia of programs for both rural and urban America.
The 2023 Farm Bill will likely cost more than $600 billion over five years, according to numbers from the Congressional Research Service.
This year’s negotiations start with a Jan. 7 listening session at the Pennsylvania Farm Show and will ideally be done before Sept. 30, the expiration date of the 2018 version.
One sign of how much the Farm Bill has changed is that crop insurance and commodity supports now combine for less than 20% of the Farm Bill’s mandatory outlays. More than three-quarters of the bill goes to food aid such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
Conservation, with 7% of the money, is the other category of funding that’s big enough to see on a pie chart.
Since the Farm Bill’s inception, support for its programs has been driven by commodity groups representing corn, wheat, cotton and the like. But the emphasis placed on each commodity in a given Farm Bill can vary based on what’s produced where the members of the House and Senate agriculture committees live, according to the University of Illinois.
That could be good news for the Northeast this year, with U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania taking over as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. The Senate committee’s leaders are from the Midwest and South.
As long as the Farm Bill is called the Farm Bill, it will probably be known best for providing a safety net to help farmers through natural disasters and market downturns.
These programs have evolved over the years, but today they include Price Loss Coverage and Agriculture Risk Coverage for field crops, the Tree Assistance Program for orchards, the Livestock Indemnity Program and Dairy Margin Coverage.
Federal support for crop insurance is permanently authorized, so its existence doesn’t depend on the Farm Bill. But Congress can use the Farm Bill to modify crop insurance rules.
The 2014 Farm Bill created Whole-Farm Revenue Protection, designed to cover all of a farm’s crops and livestock under a single insurance policy.
Beyond payments to farmers, the Farm Bill funds research that could improve American farmers’ resilience to climate change and their competitiveness in the world economy.
U.S. public funding for agricultural research and development fell by a third from 2002 to 2019, while ag powerhouses like China, the European Union and Brazil boosted their spending, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service.
The Farm Bill also provides Specialty Crop Block Grants that states use to support their local horticulture industries. Projects funded in 2022 include studying control of phorid flies in Pennsylvania mushroom houses, training Maryland growers on food safety rules, and promoting New York-grown produce.
Another offering, the Local Agriculture Market Program, funds farmer projects in direct marketing, local food enterprises and value-added production.
In the conservation title of the bill, t he Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Stewardship Program are popular options for funding water-quality projects such as stream buffers.
Created in the 2014 Farm Bill, the Regional Conservation Partnership Program has provided millions of dollars to public-private partnerships in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and other areas across the nation. It is also helping to reforest former mine lands in the Alleghenies and improve coastal habitat for New Jersey aquaculture.
The conservation section of the Farm Bill even funds farmland preservation through the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program.
Lawmakers also spice up the Farm Bill with policy changes outside of the law’s mainstay programs.
The 2018 law adjusted the formula for milk pricing to help food businesses stabilize their input costs. Some dairy farmers soured on the provision when it contributed to negative producer price differentials in 2020 and 2021.
The current Farm Bill also legalized commercial production of hemp, opening farming and manufacturing possibilities across the country.
Nutrition programs, now the lion’s share of the Farm Bill, were added to the mix in 1973 and became part of the law’s fundamental bargain: Rural and urban lawmakers both get programs important to their constituents, and the urban members provide votes the farm programs might need to get passed.
While the omnibus nature of the Farm Bill can bolster bipartisanship, it risks battles for funding among crop, livestock, nutrition and environmental interests, and between regions of the country.
In one case, debates were so contentious and protracted that what was supposed to be the 2012 Farm Bill became the 2014 Farm Bill.
Part of the conflict, in that and the following Farm Bill, came from House Republicans seeking — ultimately without success — to tighten SNAP eligibility requirements.
Over the past decade there have even been rumblings about splitting the farm and nutrition programs into separate legislation. Daren Bakst, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argued in 2015 that the current arrangement discourages critical assessment of the programs’ merits in favor of political convenience.
Meanwhile, some SNAP supporters have mused that the program could pass on its own without ag lawmakers’ votes, according to Parke Wilde, a food policy professor at Tufts University.
No matter the tenor of negotiations, lawmakers have a major incentive to pass something and not let the Farm Bill simply lapse.
Without reauthorization, some programs would cease to operate, and farm commodity programs would revert to musty, expensive supply-control regimes that were given up decades ago.
Mired in the 2012-2014 negotiations, lawmakers extended the existing Farm Bill for a time rather than let it sunset.
While the Farm Bill includes SNAP and The Emergency Food Assistance Program, it does not authorize the Women, Infants and Children program or the National School Lunch Program.
Those are handled by a separate bill called the child nutrition reauthorization. The 2010 edition is familiar to farmers as the law that caused whole milk to be removed from schools.
In addition to the Farm Bill, Congress has been working on a new version of the child nutrition bill. Both bills run through the Agriculture Committee in the Senate, but in the House, the children’s bill falls to the Education and Labor Committee.
Though not the primary legislation for the topic, the Farm Bill still influences school meals. It can modify the USDA Foods program, which provides 15 to 20% of the food served in school lunches, as well as the Farm to School and healthy snack programs.
Any changes to SNAP eligibility will indirectly affect schools and needy children too.
“Children from families enrolled in SNAP are directly certified for free school meals, meaning their families don't have to fill out applications. Schools are having a hard time collecting applications right now,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association.
Along with the farm and nutrition programs, the Farm Bill authorizes a host of small but important efforts — on trade promotion, food relief to developing countries, forest management, rural broadband, biofuel development and the national animal vaccine bank.
The bulk of Farm Bill funding is mandatory, meaning the programs actually receive the funding in the legislation. Some programs, though, are only authorized in the Farm Bill and rely on annual appropriations bills for funding — which may be less than the amount suggested in the Farm Bill.
When the 2018 Farm Bill was enacted, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost of the mandatory programs over the law’s five-year life span would be $428 billion, or $2 billion more than if the 2014 Farm Bill had been extended.
On a 10-year basis, the agency estimated the cost at $867 billion — budget neutral compared to extending the 2014 version.
Later this spring, the budget office is expected to release an updated Farm Bill baseline. That is the amount of spending on mandatory programs assuming current law continues.
The most recent projection, from last May, put the baseline at $648 billion over five years and $1.3 trillion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Those numbers will help lawmakers determine which programs should see level, decreased or increased funding. Those will be complex questions, and the answers will affect farmers — and Americans of all kinds — in every part of the country.