The Farm Bill Tradition at a Generational Crossroads

Zach Helder, Senior Manager, Petersen & Company | May 30, 2025

After months of negotiations and setbacks, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its portion of the reconciliation process via the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” While agriculture closely tracked the reconciliation process for its starring player—tax policy—there have been signs for months that the legislation could blur the lines between the tax and farm bill reauthorizations. Last Thursday, the House confirmed that it would indeed seek to attach a “skinny” Farm Bill—handling agriculture’s largest ticket budget items—to the package, to be followed by a “Farm Bill 2” which hashes out the long list of smaller policies up for consideration.

If that procedural maze hasn’t already put you off you may be thinking,“A skinny farm bill followed by a trailer bill? Farm Bills 1 and 2? Aren’t these just legislative contortions to be expected of our maddening political system? Why does this matter to me?”

I encourage our industry to pay close attention to these process changes, which mark a significant departure from some 75 years of tradition. For agriculture, the process is the point.

The farm bill process has enabled a bipartisan group of experts—the House and Senate Agriculture Committees—to have unusual say in directing enormous sums of mandatory spending walled off from the typical partisan political process or annual appropriations. The farm bill process also creates an opportunity for producers and industry to weigh in with these expert lawmakers at a regular rhythm. As must-pass legislation, the farm bill is a privileged opportunity every five years for agriculture to update its safety net and policy more broadly. In other words, we enjoy a kind of mini-politics where, at its best, party identities are left at the door and serious people do serious work on serious issues—how to feed Americans and the rest of the world.

The Farm Bill Tradition

That mini-politics is facilitated by some unwritten conditions which have been broadly stable for half a century—production agriculture and hunger advocates combine forces and budgetary authority and work out their differences internally. Kansans will forcefully argue for stronger support for wheat, Southerners will fight for cotton support, and so on. Industry will disagree about how much support should be provided to conservation programs or export promotion programs. Hunger advocates will insist that support for production not be borrowed from existing support for needy families on SNAP benefits. When the bill gets to the floor, these groups have each other’s backs and safeguard the bill from attacks from the party fringes, whether on crop insurance premium support or food for the needy.

This process hasn’t always been so smooth and straightforward, especially when some Ag Committee members retreat to their partisan corners. But it has largely worked as designed, and we will miss it sorely when it is gone.

A Departure from the Farm Bill Process

The inclusion of most of the farm bill’s budget in the reconciliation process amounts to tossing dynamite into the farm bill process, closing our eyes, and hoping that we can pick up the pieces in six years when the funding expires. Make no mistake, there is plenty for agriculture to like in the substance of the bill, from the long-awaited increase in reference prices, the extension of 45Z, and the long-term expansion of conservation funding for popular working lands programs. But the House bill doesn’t just draw on SNAP funds for farm programs—the vast majority (nearly $240 billion in net) of SNAP funds are leaving the committee’s jurisdiction altogether to pay for tax cut extensions. That’s significant funding that would be cut from the farm bill “baseline”—jeopardizing about one fifth of the budget authority the Ag Committees will have when they write the next farm bill.

Just as importantly, there will be little motivation to attend to the many farm bill priorities which cannot, under the rules, be included in reconciliation—not just now, but for years to come. When the committees return to “Farm Bill 2” as well as the next full farm bill in 2031, the trust and good faith within the coalition which has carried the farm bill for a lifetime will surely be exhausted, encouraging whichever party is in the majority to push its priorities through partisan vehicles, rather than a predictable serious farm bill process, at the expense of the whole of agriculture.

Skinny Farm Bill Faces Senate Challenges

The threat to farm bill tradition is such that Senate Republicans appear wary of green-lighting the House Bill. Until we know the Senate’s counter, there is little reason to analyze the House Bill’s agriculture provisions too deeply—they may disappear altogether or be substantially diminished.

The first hurdle is that many provisions may be judged to violate reconciliation’s most famous restriction, the Byrd Rule: in principle, each provision must be strictly budgetary. Even a skinny farm bill must suspend “permanent law” the 1938 and 1949 farm bills to which we revert if a farm bill cannot be passed. These laws are so dated that they would be extraordinarily costly, if not impossible, for agriculture and the government to implement, so permanent law acts as a doomsday device motivating regular farm bill passage. Yet, while it is a practical requirement to suspend permanent law to extend the modern safety net, permanent law is also mostly made up of provisions which cannot be considered under the Byrd Rule, even if only to be suspended.

If the skinny farm bill can indeed survive rules challenges, its second hurdle is simply senatorial unwillingness to break up the regular farm bill process. Influential senators like Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman (R-AR) have offered some signals that their instinct is to protect the farm bill’s traditional procedure and coalition.

The Senate’s apparent interest in doing so should be welcome news. All in food and agriculture should be impatient for action on a farm bill, but not at the expense of the traditions which have for generations provided a predictable and privileged process for updating agricultural policy and budgetary support.