Raise your hand if you saw this coming. (We suspect many hands just went up.) It seems all but certain that Congress will not pass a new Farm Bill before the November 5th election.
Republicans blame Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans. Americans may blame both major political parties for refusing to find final compromise on a new blueprint that impacts taxpayers’ financial commitment to crop insurance, conservation, rural development, nutrition, environmental programs, and more.
Producers and investors are much too smart to bet the farm that Congress would agree on a multi-billion-dollar, five-year financial framework in an election year.
Generically speaking, Republicans have prioritized agriculture in the discussions, while Democrats have also stressed nutrition and climate change priorities.
The stalemate continues. For another year.
FLASHBACK: Watch this story from WCSC-TV in Charleston, South Carolina, from November 2023 as Congress prepared to belatedly agree to a Farm Bill extension. The story includes how the peanut, cotton, and the dairy industries would suffer if Congress failed to take action.
Congress should have agreed on a new five-year Farm Bill in 2023. After all, it was not an election year, where elevated partisanship can derail a commitment from lawmakers to work together with legislators from the other party.
Instead, members of Congress agreed on a one-year extension of the previous five-year plan that expired last September.
In 2024 Congress has split control with Republicans holding a slight majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Democrats -- aided by four Independents who generally support them – hold a slight edge in the U.S. Senate. That overall makeup requires the political parties and the two chambers to work together to pass legislation, especially something as massive as a Farm Bill.
But with each passing week, it looks more likely like Congress will again fail to compromise on a new agreement and will resort to extending, re-extending, the plan that expired in 2023.
RELATED: Mike Johanns, former governor of Nebraska and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, told the audience at the Indiana Ag Policy Summit that he doesn’t think prospects for a new Farm Bill in 2024 are promising and figures that Congress will agree on another extension. Read the story from Food Safety News here.
Marc Arnusch, a Colorado farmer, told Colorado Public Radio that Congress needs to pass a new Farm Bill this year that takes into consideration the economic forces that have weighed on producers.
“There's very little within my farm today that was the same as in 2018,” Arnusch said, “Whether it was the cost of production, input prices, commodity prices, even the way we manage our farm has changed significantly since 2018. National ag policy needs to evolve with our evolving farms.”
Crop prices have fallen, while costs have increased.
