Lawmakers race to avoid farm bill disaster

The stopgap farm bill is set to expire next week — and the congressional coalition that the massive legislation has relied on for half a century is on the verge of breaking down.

Now congressional negotiators are desperately racing against long odds to minimize the damage before benefits run out at the end of the year.

The bill’s expiration marks the second straight year of Congress’s failure to pass the typically five-year piece of legislation, which for almost a century has underpinned the U.S.’s agricultural sector and food aid programs.

“Our farmers need [a deal],” House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), one of the signatories, told The Hill this week. 

“We are facing, by all metrics, a farm and food crisis that’s only going to get worse — unless we show some leadership and provide some hope and certainty.”

But Congress’s chambers and caucuses are divided — both across and within parties — over what steps to take to keep support for the sector.

Typically, the two parties haggle over how much to increase subsidies to farmers and how much to provide in food aid to struggling Americans, with both sides coming to a compromise.

This year, however, that compromise has eluded negotiators.

“We’ve gotta get going,” said Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), former chair of the House Agriculture Committee who remains a senior member. “Because a status-quo farm bill, an extension, doesn’t address the weaknesses of the safety net.” 

The looming risk is that one of Washington’s last great bipartisan deals — a project of food aid for farm subsidies that has underpinned the American farm sector for half a century — is on the verge of breaking down.

“Most people don’t realize how broad the jurisdiction of the farm bill is,” Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member John Boozman (R-Ark.) told The Hill. “It’s essentially all Grow America and Nutrition — and … those are not necessarily easy problems to get everybody on board with.”

“It truly is a grave situation.”

Where things stand

The 2018 version of the farm bill — a five-year omnibus that supports a staggering array of agricultural and nutrition programs — expired last September amid the chaos in the House, which was hampered by a bitter insurgency against then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) by members of his own party.

Only a one-year stopgap bill kept American agriculture support from suddenly resetting to the days of former President Truman.

That second bill expires Monday, and while most of the funding won’t run out until the end of the year, Congress must decide whether to try to get a farm bill done this year or pass yet another stopgap and hope the next batch of lawmakers is up to the job.

The House Agriculture Committee in May advanced a version of the farm bill largely along party lines but with some Democratic support. The Democratic-controlled Senate has not advanced its own version of the legislation.

In the House deal, the $20 billion in climate and conservation money offered by the Inflation Reduction Act remains earmarked for conservation; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, know as SNAP, remains at current levels, plus adjustments for inflation; and new support will go out to some of America’s biggest growers of crops like cotton, peanuts and rice.

Thompson told The Hill Congress should “make that the bill we work with.”

“There’s no bill in the Senate, which is fine,” Thompson said. “But we’ve got a bill that we’re trying to test for bipartisanship — and it’s certainly bipartisan in its construction.” 

But most congressional Democrats disagree. The House bill presents what the party has characterized as a stealth cut: no immediate cuts to food aid now, but a permanent freeze on the ability of future presidents to raise levels of food support.

And in an issue that divides both parties, it also would end America’s five-year experiment with legal cannabis.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said the bill’s SNAP reforms make the bill “dead on arrival.”

“A $30 billion cut to nutrition? I mean, really?” he said. “I’ve said to people I’m willing to compromise. My compromise is that I’ll vote for a farm bill that doesn’t increase hunger. But $30 billion will make hunger worse.”

McGovern also criticized the GOP bill for what he says is a prioritization of big corporate farms over smaller family operations.

“The way the bill is written hurts my farmers. Basically, this is a bill that says: Go big or get out,” he said. “I have a lot of small and medium-sized farms in Massachusetts and New England, and all throughout the country. And one thing I came to appreciate during COVID is the importance of local food systems.” 

What happens if the bill fails?

There are two possibilities if the bill fails, both of which are bad — although to different degrees, according to a May report by the Congressional Research Service.

In the nightmare scenario, the farm bill expires entirely, triggering a reversion to midcentury programs that only provide subsidies to certain crops and only kick in at certain price levels.

At absolute minimum, that likely means higher prices for both consumers and producers in a country where food prices are rising and where more than 140,000 family farms went out of business between 2017 and 2022.

The more likely scenario — another continuing resolution, which keeps programs at their current level for another year — is less dire. 

But it leaves the farm sector in disarray for another year and makes it hard for farmers, bankers or conservationists to make long-term plans.

Earlier this month, 300-plus farm groups flew to Washington to urge lawmakers to pass a full five-year bill. In a letter, they warned that even the passage of “a simple extension of current law, would leave thousands of family farms with no options to continue producing for this nation in 2025 and beyond.”

Boozman, in comments to The Hill, was even more stark. 

A “lot of farmers are in a very difficult situation, and a lot of farmers will not be found in the future if we don’t do something,” he said.

That’s true, he said, for two reasons. One, “they’re just not going to have the resources. And then secondly, the banks simply aren’t going to loan the money because there’s no crop insurance, no safety in place that would cover these catastrophic losses.”

An extension also doesn’t do anything to help farmers meet the increased costs of climate change-induced extreme weather. So far in 2024, there have been 20 disasters each costing at least $1 billion in damage, many of which have pummeled farmers.

“You have hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, wind events, you have volatility in the market. American farmers have been hit really hard. We are in a crisis mode here, the loss of acreage, loss of farms, and so the supplemental disaster relief bill is, is appropriate and is warranted,” Thompson said.

State of negotiations

The “four corners” of congressional agriculture policy — Thompson, Agriculture Committee ranking member David Scott (D-Ga.), Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and ranking member Boozman — met on Thursday to discuss an emergency plan to avoid catastrophe.

“Everybody’s really, really negotiating in good faith,” Boozman told The Hill. The fly-in earlier this month by the hundreds of agriculture groups “really helped explain how difficult it is in farm country, how much is needed — that made a big difference.”

Also on Thursday, dozens of House Republicans wrote a letter urging Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to schedule a vote on the farm bill before the end of the year.

Thompson told The Hill that while Johnson has asked him to prepare draft language for a one-year extension, he’s hoping not to have to use it.

“We don’t want an extension even to the end of the calendar year,” he said. “We don’t need that. We worked with the USDA, we identified, I think, the four things that would be impacted [if they pass] this continued resolution. And we — the four corners — do not want to send the wrong message that we will not get a farm bill done in lame duck.”

That’s a message echoed on the other side. Heading into the long pre-Election Day recess, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) singled out three priorities he’s hoping Congress will tackle in the lame-duck session: funding the government, reauthorizing defense spending and passing the farm bill.

“It will be important to see if we can find a path forward and reauthorize the farm bill in order to make sure that we can meet the needs of farmers, meet the needs from a nutritional standpoint of everyday Americans, and also continue the progress that we’ve been able to make in terms of combating the climate crisis,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol.

Lucas, a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee, said any progress in the lame duck will necessarily require the involvement of top leaders. He’s urging them to get cracking on the negotiations that could lead to a breakthrough deal. 

“I’m hopeful that we’re on the verge of that, because now we’ve addressed funding the government, we’ve gotten past everything else we need to do. The only real heavy lifting that’s been done is the House passing a version of the bill in committee. So we’ve gotta get going,” he said.

“I’m an eternal optimist, we’ll see in six weeks,” he added. “But I hope the Big Four have an opportunity to lay some groundwork while we’re out [for the elections].”

McGovern — another senior member of the Agriculture Committee, was less optimistic. 

He predicted that the stark policy differences between the parties in the House — combined with the lack of movement on the farm bill in the Senate — mean that Congress will inevitably have to pass another extension of the 2018 law in the lame-duck session.

“We’ll have to do an extension when we get back,” he said. “I’m aware of no serious conversations, and the Senate hasn’t passed anything.”

Alex Bolton and Aris Folley contributed reporting.