While farmers and gardeners have been busy tending their crops and livestock this season, Congress has been busy working on the next farm bill.

Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) released a farm bill framework from the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry on May 1st. Two weeks later, in the House Agriculture Committee, Chairman G.T. Thompson (R-PA) published a full farm bill draft. After a marathon 13-hour “markup” session, the House bill advanced out of committee by a 33-21 vote, with all Republicans and four Democrats voting in favor of the bill.

Eventually, these two versions of the bill will have to align to pass into law – but for now, the Senate framework proposal and the House bill have several major differences.

Let’s take a look at how NOFA’s farm bill priorities fared in each committee’s proposal.

Priority: Expand Opportunities in Organic

The House bill continues support for critically important organic programs, including the National Organic Program, the Organic Certification Cost Share Program, and the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI). However, advocates of organic agriculture are disappointed that the House bill doesn’t increase funding from 2018 Farm Bill levels for these and other programs, despite the organic sector growing notably over the last six years. Additionally, the House bill lacks funding to further organic sector growth, like organic market development and USDA partnerships with nonprofits to help farmers transition to organic agriculture.

Meanwhile, the Senate framework put forth by Sen. Stabenow includes several provisions sought by NOFA and its partners. This framework:

addresses organic certification costs;
funds organic oversight and enforcement by increasing funding for the National Organic Program;
continues to support farmers transitioning to organic;
addresses regulatory bottlenecks with organic regulations;
maintains funding for OREI; and
raises the payment cap for organic producers participating in the National Resources Conservation Service’s Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP). The EQIP program pays farmers for each of several approved conservation practices they implement, like planting cover crops and buffer zone habitat areas.

EQIP pays farmers for practices that NOFA/Mass has long advocated for, like cover cropping.

Priority: Demand Climate Action

The House bill removes climate guardrails from Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding, opening the door for those funds to be appropriated for projects unrelated to conservation and climate-smart agriculture.

The House bill also limits the Secretary of Agriculture’s ability to use Commodity Credit Corporation funds at their own discretion, instead requiring congressional approval to use those funds. NOFA and its partner organizations strongly oppose these two propositions.

Sen. Stabenow’s framework before the Senate committee is much more aligned with NOFA’s climate priorities.

Most importantly, it protects conservation and climate funding included in the IRA. The Senate framework also adds much more language regarding greenhouse gas emissions reductions to the popular working lands conservation programs administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) like EQIP and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP).

Both the Senate and House proposals include the creation of the State and Tribal Assistance for Soil Health Program. The Senate proposes that the program be housed within the Regional Conservation Partnership Program; however, the House bill establishes the program within CSP. The CSP already suffers from serious oversubscription. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), of which NOFA/Mass is a member, believes that it would be a mistake to draw from CSP’s already limited supply of funds for this new program.

Priority: Support Organic Dairy

Both the Senate and the House are calling for improvements in the collection of organic dairy market data. This would enable the USDA and farmers to better understand the costs associated with producing organic milk.

While not specific to organic dairy, the Senate bill proposal also reauthorizes and increases funding for the Dairy Business Innovation Initiatives program, and both bills make improvements to the Dairy Margin Coverage Program.

Priority: Secure Equitable Access to Land and Credit

The House bill raises the limits that any individual farmer-borrower may owe to a lender, in hopes of keeping pace with the increasing costs of inputs and assets. It also makes small improvements to streamline access to farm ownership loans for beginning farmers, including a pilot program for farmers to receive advanced pre-approval on farm ownership loans.

Unfortunately, the House bill does not include most of the provisions from the Fair Credit for Farmers Act, which NOFA and its partners support.

The Senate framework similarly increases lending limits and reduces experience barriers for qualification for farm ownership loans. It also removes barriers to underserved farmers’ ability to access credit directly from the USDA. The Senate framework also lacks the vast majority of the provisions in the Fair Credit for Farmers Act.

Image Courtesy of Big River Chestnuts Farm

Priority: Protect Farms from PFAS

NOFA applauds the inclusion of the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act in Sen. Stabenow’s Senate framework.

While the House bill does set aside funding for greater research on PFAS, the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act is missing from the bill.

Priority: Protect and Expand Nutrition Programs

Most notably, the House farm bill blocks USDA and executive branch power to improve the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), the lowest cost of the four food plans used by the USDA to determine SNAP benefit amounts.

The food costs in the TFP are reviewed on a 5 year basis, but an executive order by the Biden Administration in 2021 sparked an abbreviated review that resulted in increased benefits for SNAP recipients. The House bill prevents executive reviews like Biden’s, and prevents changes to the TFP outside of a narrow band of inflation-related adjustments – ignoring changes in nutrition guidance and other factors affecting the price of food.

While Chairman Thompson, of the House Ag Committee, claims that the bill would prevent presidents or other individuals from acting to severely cut SNAP, anti-hunger advocates and others have raised alarms about how this proposal could leave some SNAP beneficiaries with even more limited access to food.

Conversely, the Senate framework ensures that SNAP reflects the realities of Americans’ food costs and habits by continuing the regular 5 year re-evaluation of TFP.

The Senate framework also makes strides in creating opportunities for convicted felons to receive SNAP benefits (as does the House bill).

Lastly, the Senate framework improves access to nutrition assistance for college students, increases access to fruits and vegetables by expanding The Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP), increases funding for food banks, and increases funding for nutrition education.

The Path Forward

All of the provisions mentioned above are subject to change. Despite already being a full year behind schedule (the 2018 Farm Bill expired in 2023, and a temporary extension was passed last year), we are still quite early in the process of passing a new farm bill. After all, we have yet to see a full draft from the Senate Ag Committee.

So, what happens next? That is very much up in the air. While Chairman Thompson is adamant about passing a new farm bill this year, Sen. Stabenow has voiced that the provisions in the House Markup have no realistic path forward. She’s gone a step further by stating that she will not hold a markup in the Senate Ag Committee until there is bipartisan agreement on certain crucial policies, such as SNAP and climate spending.

Partisan politicking has played a big role in the farm bill deliberations thus far and will continue to be an important factor. House Democrats had loose plans to hold off on negotiating a farm bill until after the election and start of the next Congress, when they hoped to have a majority in both chambers. Others believe that a farm bill will be passed during the lame duck period after the election. The current farm bill is set to expire, once again, at the end of September. If Congress isn’t confident that a new bill will be passed before then, work on an extension will need to begin soon, especially considering that Congress will be out of session for the entire month of August.

More Resources

In conclusion, there is still much to be determined for the contents of the next farm bill, and when that will happen remains murky.

If you’d like to follow the developments, we recommend following updates from two coalitions NOFA/Mass belongs to:

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC)
National Organic Coalition (NOC).

Politico’s Weekly Agriculture newsletter is another great way to stay up to date on what’s happening with the farm bill, as well as the rest of the national agricultural landscape.

Please reach out to NOFA/Mass if you have any questions or would like more information.