Mutiny bubbles up inside rural America over GOP's ailing farm bill

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Last Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell returned to Congress after a three-month absence and promptly cast a deciding vote in the Republican-led agricultural committee. Back in August, Democrats on the committee blocked the Senate’s version of the farm bill from progressing to a full vote.

But even after McConnell’s vote, the way things are going, it’s unlikely that Congress will pass a farm bill this year — which would mark the fourth straight year that lawmakers have failed to renew the nation’s cornerstone of agricultural policy.

The issues that made Democrats oppose the farm bill last month are still there, meaning the path to surviving a vote on the Senate floor remains unclear. With 53 seats, Republicans hold a majority in the chamber, but they need 60 votes to pass a bill — so they would need to sway several Democrats to their side in a relatively short amount of time. Midterms, after all, are in November.

Democrats mainly oppose the current draft of the bill because it doesn’t reverse cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Changes to SNAP are typically implemented through the farm bill, which historically was passed every five or so years. However, last summer, President Donald Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashed funding for SNAPby $186 billion.

Democrats in the Senate agriculture committee have refused to support a farm bill that doesn’t restore SNAP funding; they have also pushed for a delay in a crucial change to SNAP that would increase states’ administrative costs for running the food assistance program. Since the farm bill that advanced out of committee does neither of these things, it remains difficult to see how Senate Democrats would support this package in a floor vote.

The cuts to SNAP have wide-reaching impacts for millions of low-income families and individuals across the country who rely on it to buy groceries. But it also has implications for the farmers whose customer base includes SNAP benefit users. “The farmers in our network live in rural areas,” said Jody Osmund, a founding member of the FACE Ag Network, a coalition of pasture-based livestock producers. Rural areas, Osmund continued, “have a higher uptake of SNAP participation than urban areas. So it’s hurting our community.”

Because the Senate farm bill also doesn’t delay a change to the cost-sharing structure of SNAP, states could end up with less funding overall for their own agricultural programs. “States are gonna have to rethink their budgets,” said Mike Lavender, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “That could mean that states are looking at, ‘Hey, do we fund education at this level or do we fund SNAP? Or do we fund transportation or SNAP?’ So this is forcing really difficult decisions that could impact departments of agriculture at the state level.”

These kinds of decisions will hit small- and medium-sized farmers much more than large corporate farms, making the financial calculus of growing food even harder at a time of rising input costs and unstable trade markets.

There is one bright spot in the latest Senate farm bill for many farm groups, and that’s the exclusion of the Save Our Bacon Act, a provision that would have made it easier for livestock producers to employ some of the least humane practices for caging and confining animals on their farms. “It’s encouraging,” said Osmund.

He and other coalition members flew to Washington, D.C. ahead of the Senate agricultural committee vote and met with lawmakers in hopes of convincing them to oppose the Save Our Bacon Act. Other pieces of the Senate farm bill that are unpopular with certain agricultural groups include cuts to conservation programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, as well as the Conservation Stewardship Program, or CSP. Yet Osmund argues that these conservation programs don’t just suffer from a lack of adequate funding; they need to be redesigned in order to direct the most amount of money possible to the most sustainable farming practices. He’d like to see fewer conservation dollars going toward, for example, managing animal waste on industrial livestock operations and more money going toward climate adaptation on farms.

Which is why, from Osmund’s point of view, the Senate farm bill’s unlikely path to becoming law might be a good thing. In the absence of bipartisan cooperation to pass this bill before the midterms, many federal agricultural programs will continue to be funded by stopgap measures. “A continuation of the 2018 farm bill may be better,” he argued. “It’s not good. It is not ideal, but no deal on the current versions of the farm bill, in our opinion, is much better than a very, very bad deal.” And no deal this year means Congress will be back to the drawing board in 2027.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/has-the-farm-bill-hit-a-dead-end/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.