Farm & Food File: Here comes the 2024 farm bill, there goes any reforms

The slowest dance on Capitol Hill, the writing of a new farm bill, gained tempo May 1 when both the House and Senate Ag committees released versions of their bills.

The House bill was a broadly worded, five-page “outline;” the Senate’s, a detailed 94-page report. Noting the differences in both heft and direction, veteran Senate Ag boss Debbie Stabenow told reporters that “We have a bill. They have a framework.”

Ouch.

In fact, both bills are simply a starting point for the committees to cobble together the estimated $1.5-trillion, five-year law.

Despite his brevity, House Ag Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson says his bill is done and has set May 23 for its “mark up,” or full committee meeting to push the stalled process forward.

It sounds silly to argue — especially after almost a year’s delay — that Thompson is hustling his bill through the Republican-dominated committee, but he is.

The House bill contains classic GOP priorities: a $28-billion cut in SNAP food aid, rule changes to make the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s climate change billions available for conservation projects unrelated to climate change and a huge boost to reference prices — shorthand to substantially increase federal subsidies — for crop insurance.

The Senate’s farm bill doesn’t feature any cuts to food assistance, leaves USDA’s “Climate Smart” initiatives untouched and raises crop insurance reference prices a modest few percent.

The differences between the two are no surprise; Thompson and Stabenow have been waltzing around each other’s priorities for months.

Thompson, however, is at an institutional disadvantage. His party’s paper-thin House majority means he must advance a bill attractive to both GOP and Dem moderates to increase its odds of success.

And while Michigander Stabenow must work around a similarly slim Dem majority in the Senate, she has the advantage of experience.

Stabenow shepherded the past two farm bills through Congress from her Senate perch after House ag leaders dug in on never-going-to-happen changes. They lost.

All of this, of course, presumes some House/Senate deal that marries the competing bills before this year’s extension expires Sept. 30.

Lost in loud talk and likely compromise is a question few in Congress — or, in fact, in farm and commodity groups — dare confront: Is this the best legislation to ensure the food and fiber future of America given what the next five years might bring?

What, for example, in these two bills addresses our rapidly evolving climate, foreign challenges to America’s role as a leading ag exporter, ethanol’s fading market, looming trade wars with China and Mexico and the likelihood of more political dysfunction at every level of government?

If the past is prologue, the answer is very little because today’s farmers, ranchers and ag legislators are wedded to 40 years of ethanol production, 30 years of “decoupled” farm programs, 20 years of no conservation cross compliance and over 10 years of increasing reliance on crop insurance.

Moreover, powerful new interests now promote wildly expensive, highly dubious variants — subsidized carbon pipelines, subsidized sustainable aviation fuel, subsidized solar farms and even more subsidized crop insurance — as solutions to problems caused by these aging, taxpayer-dependent predecessors.

In the meantime, rural America continues its downward slide. By almost any social measure — increased poverty rates, the rising reliance on public sector income support, poor water quality, fewer rural hospitals, the loss of senior care and child care, the lack of food options — rural America is worse off now than in 1990.

Indeed, our increasingly popular, increasingly expensive federal farm programs have delivered far fewer, far bigger farms and an abundance of cheap ag commodities.

But these same farm policies have also squeezed the lifeblood out of our small farms and ranches and nearly every rural community.

And nothing in either the House or Senate legislative proposals addresses that.