WASHINGTON — Inside the Longworth House Office Building, lawmakers on the Agriculture Committee worked until 2 a.m. one night earlier this month, until they passed a roughly 800-page Farm, Food, and National Security legislation, better known as the farm bill.
The Republican-backed bill was approved 34-17, including votes from seven Democrats, on March 5.
Farm bills typically authorize agriculture and food policy for periods of five years. But the last farm bill was passed in 2018 to govern through 2023. Congress has extended the law three times in three years, rather than passing a full reauthorization.
Each time, lawmakers continued essential programs through temporary extensions. Most recently, in 2025, the budget reconciliation package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act changed many programs that would be covered in a “normal” farm bill. One notable change was cutting funding for the anti-hunger program SNAP by $186 billion through 2034, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Because that 2025 law already altered portions of agricultural and food policy, the new farm bill proposal focuses largely on programs that were not addressed in last year’s budget legislation.
Several Washington policy experts said that while they supported passing a farm bill this year, they were concerned about how last year’s budget law reshaped the proposal expected to face votes on the House floor later this spring. The bill would still have several hurdles after that, including consideration by a Senate committee, the Senate and then approval by President Donald Trump.
Conservation programs
A chunk of every farm bill goes toward “conservation,” helping farmers better care for their land through methods such as soil health improvements and water-quality protections.
For example, conservation funds might be used to limit the environmental harm of fertilizer.
Fertilizer is both costly and essential for crop production, which often takes a financial toll on farmers, said Precious Tshabalala, a researcher for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Tshabalala said reducing the impact of fertilizer is a win-win because it reduces the monetary strain on farmers while protecting the environment.
Conservation programs in the proposed bill would receive $6 billion annually, which is not dramatically different from the allocations in the 2018 farm bill. However, experts were concerned that the funding would not keep up with inflation. Tshabalala warned that the proposal could shift money away from scientifically backed conservation practices and shrink the amount of conservation work that the programs can support.
Tshabalala said a lot of farmers front the cost of conservation projects themselves.
“These programs are in demand. Farmers actually want to implement these programs,” Tshabalala said.
As they submit for reimbursement through these programs, a lot of them could be deemed ineligible for funding because there would be less money to go around, Tshabalala said.
Commodity programs
The 2025 budget bill changed the federal payments for 23 crops labeled “covered commodities,” including corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.
“This particular farm bill that was just passed out of committee has been referred to as a ‘skinny farm bill’ and ‘hollow farm bill,’ because it’s missing some of the largest programs, including commodities,” said Duncan Orlander, a policy specialist with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
But the proposal would raise reference prices in safety net programs for farmers, most importantly the Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs. This helps farmers when their crops fail or cannot be sold at a profit. According to the bill, these updated prices were supposed to reflect the years of rising production costs and years of inflation since 2018.
The proposal also would expand disaster assistance programs. In the case of the Tree Assistance Program, more growers would become eligible for help if their orchards and nurseries were hurt by natural disasters. The proposal would direct the Agriculture Department to develop a framework for delivering this emergency aid.
The committee bill also would expand access to federal crop insurance and disaster relief programs, which lawmakers said had become more important as farmers experience more extreme weather events due to climate change.
Nutrition assistance
SNAP usually accounts for as much as three-quarters of farm bill spending, making it the largest component of this legislation.
This time around, though, the SNAP fight already happened in the 2025 budget law. The current bill simply would tighten oversight of how SNAP benefits would be distributed and used.
In the 2025 law, Republicans supported cutting the SNAP budget in favor of supporting farms. But this approach doesn’t lower food prices, said Taryn Morrissey, a public policy professor at American University. She researches how SNAP benefits affect food insecurity in children and families.
“So it’s not that food is going to get less expensive. It’s going to be that low-income families shoulder that burden instead of the federal government,” Morrissey said.
Orlander said his team at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition tried but failed to make improvements to SNAP in the farm bill proposal.
Morrissey’s research has shown SNAP benefits reduce food insecurity and health care delays, she said.
Morrissey said she would closely watch whether Congress will successfully pass a five-year farm bill before Sept. 30, when the temporary extension of the 2018 farm bill is scheduled to expire.
“It’s a heavy lift, so it doesn’t often happen on schedule, which is true of many, many other things (in Congress),” Morrissey said.