After the expiration of the 2018 Farm Bill earlier this fall – and with midterm elections looming ahead – Congress has struggled to finish a new version.
Since 1933, Congress has passed a farm bill about every five years. This legislation establishes, renews and updates farm and food programs that insure farmers’ crops, promotes conservation, funds nutrition assistance and more.
Putting such a large package of issues together takes a lot of work and a lot of compromise.
The 2023 renewal of 2018’s Farm Bill expired on Oct. 1, 2026. While a new version has passed the House and a Senate version is awaiting a floor vote, this year’s farm bill process has been full of tension.
Arguments over funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as well as efforts to delay changes from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill stalled progress in the Senate’s Agriculture Committee in August.
After a tense hearing, Congress recessed for a month without moving a bill forward. Both Democratic and Republican senators levied blame at the other party for the inaction.
A version without Democrats’ requested changes eventually passed the committee on party lines in September with a Republican majority. It’s likely to face more opposition on the Senate floor and as both chambers settle on a final bill.
Addition and subtraction
For decades, getting a farm bill passed required a unique balancing act that brought together legislators from both parties and vastly different backgrounds.
“Over the years, farm bills have been primarily split on regional differences, or by crop, or where a particular part of agriculture is headed versus another, and that oftentimes has not been along party lines,” said Mike Stranz, the National Farmers Union’s vice president of advocacy. “It might be far north versus the South, or the Corn Belt versus everybody else, or urban versus rural.”
Stranz, who worked as a staffer for the House Agriculture Committee from 2014 to 2020 said, historically, legislators have bridged these divides by creating coalitions across a wide swath of agriculture topics.
“Bringing in nutrition, bringing in conservation, bringing in any number of other topics from energy to forestry to biotechnology and emerging specialty crops – that gave it more stakeholders, gave it more support, and that's how it got done,” he said.
From forestry to farm loans, the current farm bill has 12 titles that each authorize from dozens to hundreds of federal programs, grants and initiatives.
In 1973, Congress added SNAP to the farm bill, creating legislation that impacted the field to the dinner table. Bringing these stakeholders together ensured multiple groups could share their input to boost American agriculture and food production.
“I think for political reasons, and frankly just math, it makes a lot of sense to build a coalition that's centered around food systems and agriculture and farming,” Stranz said.
However, Stranz said that coalition has been more prone to partisan fighting over the last decade.
“In the last few cycles, it's focused mainly on subtraction rather than addition,” he said.
‘Political dynamite’
SNAP now makes up most of the farm bill’s funding. In the 2018 Farm Bill, the program accounted for about three quarters of the bill’s $428 billion in planned expenditures.
Republicans have tried to reduce the size of the program for multiple legislative cycles.
Jonathan Coppess, an agriculture law and policy expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said deeply partisan fights over farm and food policy emerged in the last two decades.
“For the first time since 1962, the farm bill got defeated on the House floor in 2013. So that was the first break,” he said.
Coppess saw this process firsthand. He served as counsel to the Senate Agriculture Committee from 2011 to 2013 and advised former Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson on agriculture policy during his 2006 term.
After the 2013 defeat, a farm bill was completed in 2014. The 2018 Farm Bill faced similar struggles after the House Agriculture Committee attempted to cut SNAP funding. In 2023, the 2018 bill was renewed with few changes after more disagreements over the program.
“Once Republicans had the trifecta – the presidency and both chambers of Congress – then they used the reconciliation budget procedures to do the cut to SNAP and a boost in farm payments,” Coppess said.
Farm assistance programs were addressed in HR1, the reconciliation bill dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Other “orphan” programs are waiting for reappropriation in the new farm bill.
Though Senate Agriculture Committee lawmakers landed on a partial compromise to delay benefit cost-sharing for states if their SNAP error rates are too high, Democrats are still attempting to reverse more of HR1’s cuts to SNAP.
Now, Coppess said, things like rural development and research funding are “held hostage” due to the SNAP debate and the larger budget processes of Congress.
“What really happens is we force one side to take from somebody else – from another group. That's just political dynamite,” he said. “It blows up a coalition.”
Jordan Dux is a policy analyst and advocate for the Nebraska Farm Bureau. He agrees that addressing farm bill issues in HR1 made the conversation more partisan, but those arguments tend to appear in all large legislation.
“I wouldn't say the coalition is fractured,” Dux said. “Every bill presents its own unique and different challenges … Even as partisan as the House of Representatives can be, and as partisan as that vote was, there were still Democrats that voted for it. There's still bipartisanship there.”
Plus, Dux said, legislators agree on a lot about the current farm bill.
An amendment package added to the Senate version of the bill passed unanimously in the committee. Lawmakers have also been collaborating on expanding year-round 15% ethanol gasoline and reevaluating state animal welfare standards like California’s Proposition 12.
“It's where you get to the end, where there are larger issues that become sticking points, and that part is not unique,” Dux said.
‘Nothing really changes for farmers going forward’
Stranz, the policy advocate for the National Farm Bureau, said partisan farm bill fights have real consequences for America’s farmers and ranchers. That’s especially apparent in a time of high costs driven by tariffs and rising diesel prices.
“There are not major reforms to the farm safety net, and that's a spot for the farmers' union that we're particularly concerned about, especially as we've gone about 10 years now with ad-hoc temporary disaster assistance or economic assistance programs that have totaled more than $100 billion,” he said.
Stranz said building better policies will help the government avoid high costs for those payments – such as the $8 billion President Donald Trump recently set aside to make up for high diesel prices.
“We need to have a farm bill that tackles those bigger problems, while also building out a stronger local and regional food system, while also being sure that corporate monopolies are reined in and don't have undue market power, while also making sure that those who need the most help having access to food can do so, rather than cutting from it,” he said.
Stranz does believe it’s possible to create that strong legislation – and so do farmers.
“We've got the ability and the history to make those sorts of big moves, but congressional leadership hasn't been there, and that's what we're hearing from a lot of farmers across the country,” he said. “We need to have a better farm bill. There's solutions out there, and they’ve just got to jump at them.”
Dux said there’s a lot of fatigue surrounding the current farm bill, and it’s time to get something passed.
“Maybe I'm just projecting, but I think agriculture is ready for this bill to be done, so we can start having larger conversations on the next thing,” Dux said.
He said it’s unclear what will happen to the farm bill following the midterm elections, but he does expect it to make a difference.
“Whoever comes out of the election here in a couple weeks – who has control of the House, who has control of the Senate – that will have a direct impact of what Republicans may decide to do in these last few weeks of this Congress in terms of trying to get this farm bill done,” Dux said.
He said Republicans likely want to finish the bill, but Democrats may have other priorities. If Democrats take control of Congress, Dux guesses that the GOP may be more willing to compromise. However, either party could choose to table the bill as well.
Either way, Dux said, the Senate still needs 60 votes to pass their version.
“There's some talk that they may try to do things a little different in pre-conference a little ahead of time before it hits the Senate floor,” he said. “But, I think ultimately, you will need some bipartisanship. You will need some give and take on both sides.”
Whatever the outcome of this farm bill, Coppess said the current draft of the bill won’t overhaul all the farm and food policies the industries have asked for.
“I think the real issue is that these updates do not appear to really address the challenges farmers are facing,” he said. “The bottom line is nothing really changes for farmers going forward – at least through 2031.”
Coppess said it’s time for Congress to take a closer look at the farm bill coalition and evaluate its strength.
“Maybe if we stop fighting a little bit and step back, we can say, ‘Okay, we got to fix a lot of things, and so the only way to fix these things is, to some degree, work together and find those solutions,” he said.
“Maybe we've hit that point, or we're close to hitting that point. I don't know, but it will take a lot of creativity.”
The Farm Bill must pass the Senate before both chambers can agree on a final version to pass.
Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
