The farm bill impacts farmers, low income families and rural communities and the bill influences trade, public health and much more.
Published: 10/05/18, Last updated: 2/28/24
The farm bill is the primary way for the US government to set agricultural and food policy. The bill is a comprehensive, multiyear piece of legislation that determines programs and policies about food, farms, forestry, fiber and rural issues and provides funding for these diverse areas of the food system. The bill has an enormous affect on farmers, on what and how food is grown, and for both low-income families and rural communities. All of these in turn impact local economies, public health, international trade, the environment, food safety and more.
Policies written into the farm bill can incentivize or restrict certain behaviors. The consequences of these actions, both positive and negative, travel throughout the food system. For example, the farm bill provides federal subsidies for commodity crops – namely corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and sorghum – which are then used as feed for dairy and livestock production or are converted into processed foods and beverage sweeteners. 1 A recent study demonstrated an association between consumption of these subsidized crops, or foods derived from them, with increased risk for metabolic disease. 2 While a number of factors influence what Americans choose to eat, availability and price are certainly critical. 3 Ultimately, the farm bill deploys taxpayer dollars to increase the supply and lower the cost of unhealthy foods, but does relatively little to support healthier foods; fruits and vegetables (termed “specialty crops”) receive less than one-percent the 2018 Farm Bill’s projected $428 billion five-year budget. 4
Passed approximately every five years by the United States Congress, the farm bill is a nearly-$500 billion piece of legislation, or omnibus bill, addressing agriculture and other policy issues under the purview of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The bill changes and adjusts parts of existing permanent law; reauthorizes, changes or repeals pieces of previous farm bills; and advances new policies and new programs.
The farm bill is made up of about a dozen sections, called “titles,” covering aspects of the food system from farm to fork. However, the most important basis of the farm bill, since the very first one in 1933, is that it includes two primary issues: 1) farm programs that support farmers growing storable commodity products like corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton and dairy; and 2) federal nutrition programs, including the food stamp program, known today as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 9
The first such bill, the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1933 was authorized as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the massive set of domestic programs designed to bring the country out of the Great Depression and make reforms in industry, agriculture, finance, labor, housing and infrastructure. 12 In an exciting move for sustainable agriculture advocates, the 2018 farm bill also provided permanent, mandatory – as opposed to discretionary – funding for a number of small but impactful programs, listed within the titles below.
TITLE I: COMMODITIES — Covers payment and loan programs for farmers who grow commodity crops like corn, wheat, rice and soybeans. Direct and counter-cyclical payments to farmers have been eliminated; instead, farmers must incur crop losses or damage in order to receive government payments. These programs work together with crop insurance to subsidize the growth of commodity crops. Title One also includes disaster programs for farmers and ranchers, as well as programs offering price supports for sugar and dairy producers. 16 The biggest hurdle in passing the 2018 Farm Bill was over the issue of cuts to SNAP benefits, specifically limiting work and eligibility requirements for recipients. 35 Outside of nutrition programs for low income families, on the whole, the farm bill largely supports and incentivizes the production of large-scale monocrops of commodities, dairy and factory farmed meat through its funding and grant programs.
In general, there are two types of legislation that Congress works on: authorization bills and appropriation bills. The farm bill is an authorizing legislation, meaning that it creates policies and programs, most of which must then be funded through annual appropriations legislation (government spending bills), which establishes discretionary spending levels for programs to be implemented. There are twelve annual appropriations bills passed by Congress each year. One of these bills is the agriculture appropriations bill, which includes most funding for farm bill programs as well as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agencies which implement those programs. Many farm bill programs are authorized but never appropriated, which means that they never get implemented even though they may exist on paper for years or even decades. Some programs are appropriated but never authorized, although this is rare. 36
The farm bill itself also controls about a half-trillion dollars in funding, referred to interchangeably as mandatory funding or direct funding. 37 The Commodity Credit Corporation — a federal government entity created to support and stabilize farm prices and incomes — provides funding to these mandatory programs as needed (or to the level prescribed in the farm bill), which are not subject to annual funding decisions by Congress. 39 However, funding levels for mandatory programs can be changed, but only by Congress through new legislation. 40 Examples of programs with mandatory funding include SNAP and most commodity and conservation programs. Programs without mandatory funding are vulnerable to being cut in future farm bill iterations. 43 Also recently, Congress has been adding policy riders (language that makes temporary policy and program changes) to spending bills, to make changes to programs established in the farm bill, like Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) and the Packers and Stockyards Act enforcement (the GIPSA rule, which protects small farmers and ranchers from being unfairly treated by big meat packing corporations). 44
When done in regular order (from drafting the new legislation to putting the programs into effect on the ground), the farm bill process encompasses three main phases: writing and passing the farm bill; funding the farm bill; and rulemaking.
Before the current farm bill expires, members of Congress hold hearings in Washington, DC and across the nation to get public input, while stakeholders voice their interests through the media and in meetings with specific senators and representatives. Both the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry and the House Committee on Agriculture then draft and mark up separate bills. Once the committees each agree on their separate proposals they are presented for a full vote in each chamber. If the bill is passed, House and Senate leaders appoint members to a joint conference committee that creates a single new compromise bill that can be passed by both chambers. When the final farm bill is approved it is sent to the President who has the choice to either sign it into law or veto it, forcing Congress to make further changes.
After the bill is signed, the legislation then gets funded through the appropriations process discussed above. The first step in the funding process is for the President to send his budget request to Congress. Then, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees send a budget to the Agriculture subcommittee to use to set funding levels for farm bill programs for the coming fiscal year. Once the House and Senate Agriculture Appropriations sub-committees have drafted, finalized and voted on their appropriations bills to fund farm bill programs, the bill is then sent to the larger Appropriations Committees to be “marked up,” or edited. Once the bill is finalized by both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the bill goes to a conference committee where the House and Senate bills are combined. It is then sent to the floors of the House and Senate for a final vote and then to the President for signing.
The final phase of the farm bill process is rulemaking. During this process, programs that have been finalized in the farm bill and funded through the appropriations process are now the responsibility of the USDA, which must figure out how to implement the programs in the bill. At this point, advocates usually meet with USDA staff to discuss the administration of new and existing programs. If a new program has been created under the farm bill, the USDA must put together rules for how to implement the program and make these proposed rules available for public comment through the Federal Register. By law, the comments sent to the USDA are all reviewed by USDA staff, who then incorporates the feedback they receive into the final plan for implementing the program(s). Then, the USDA publishes the finalized rule for how it will implement the program in the Federal Register. The USDA then starts implementing and managing the program according to the newly established rules.
Since the 1980s, funding in the farm bill has been impacted by the budget reconciliation process. Using this process, the agriculture committees cut mandatory spending for programs by the amount directed by the annual congressional budget. 45 The agriculture committee then sends a new bill to the Budget Committee reflecting those program funding cuts by a particular date. 46 The agriculture committee ultimately decides which farm bill programs to cut to reach the target budget number they’ve been assigned. The agriculture committee’s new bill is then combined with other bills reported back from other committees into a large omnibus budget reconciliation bill. This new reconciliation bill, unlike other pieces of legislation, cannot be filibustered in the Senate and can therefore be passed with a majority rather than a supermajority of votes. Budget reconciliation bills were used to cut funding for farm bill programs in 1982, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1996 and 2005. 47
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