Policy experts: Finishing farm bill still important

While much focus has been on the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, tariffs and New World screwworm, farm policy experts hope that Congress will turn its attention to a farm bill.

The current farm bill was passed in 2018 and is running on extensions. In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that addressed many challenges that farmers and ranchers face, but not all of them.

Brad Lubben, an Extension farm policy specialist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said Congress in the OBBBA approved nearly all of the money that dealt with commodities, crop Insurance, conservation, and food assistance.

“The other 1% we didn’t include in the budget bill. They could not be included for parliamentary reasons. They weren’t big spending questions. They weren’t germane to the bill.”

Those programs are left to temporary resolutions and extensions, he said. That means, as examples, investments in research, rural development and specialty crops require a long-term perspective the funding mechanism lacks.

“Leadership within the ag committees will certainly champion the cause and fight for formal farm bill legislation to get it completed,” Lubben said, adding that unfortunately “the path of the last three years has been to essentially wait it out past the one-year extension, and one could envision that this will be a pathway almost indefinitely, until we have to tackle the big programs again too.”

The OBBBA reauthorized the major parts of the farm bill, including commodity programs through 2031, which means Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs in place for six years, Lubben said. “That means that ARC and PLC have effectively become the new semi- permanent farm bill.”

The ARC and PLC provisions have lasted longer than any other program since the 1980s, so that has represented stability for many producers. “It’s hard to imagine it dramatically changing, because it’s the program that gives a producer a choice, and any major reform that would sort of strip that choice has been a non-starter among ag groups.”

Chad Hart, an Extension policy expert at Iowa State University, said OBBBA and various other bills has meant, “We’ve kicked the ag policy can down the road.”

He said farmers need to do their homework and look at their costs and let lawmakers know where the shortfalls are occurring without the completion of the bill.
“I would argue Congress also needs to do its homework and really start looking at our ag policy,” he said.

Simply tweaking the existing farm bill does not effectively address today’s challenges.

“Let’s actually have a real discussion. Let’s put together some new policies to address the issues we want to address today. I would rather have them really talk about a farm bill rather than doing it piecemeal at the last minute, which is what we basically done with OBBBA and annual extensions of farm bill. By doing that, we’re doing a disservice to federal agricultural policy.”

Lubben said political infighting over food assistance programs remains, but for farmers and ranchers, the big picture about commodities, crop insurance and conservation has ended. Now the expectation should be to get the remainder approved this year.

“The pessimism is we have a history of putting them off now,” Lubben said. “What will change the story now? The rest of the farm bill used to be relatively easy, that’s not the thing that we got hung up on.”

The farm bill is also the mechanism to address language that, for example, could pre-empt state regulations, and they should be debated. A full farm bill debate could also address year-round E15, Lubben said, which right now has bipartisan support from Senate and House members.

From a livestock perspective, the OBBBA did provide expanded coverage for the Livestock Indemnity Program that included authorizing additional payments for loses of unborn livestock, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

David Anderson, a professor and Extension specialist at Texas A&M, said Livestock Risk Protection, which is managed by USDA’s Risk Management Agency is an example of a financially helpful tool for the industry.

“I think people are managing risk all the time,” Anderson said. “We have relatively new price risk management tools like LRP.  I generally think these are good tools.  It gives people more tools to help manage the risks that are out there.”

The ability to manage prices risk would have come in pretty handy over the October to November period of 2025, he said.

Dave Bergmeier can be reached at 620-227-1822 or [email protected].