Authors: Joe Outlaw and Bart Fischer
While pressure for an enhanced crop producer safety net was reduced when Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) last summer, there still remains work to be done to pass a new farm bill by September 30th of this year when the current extension of the 2018 Farm Bill expires. Farm Bill 2.0—or the Skinny Farm Bill as some call it—is still important to producers and rural America for what it does beyond commodity programs. Farm Bills are far more than the producer safety net programs contained in Title I. For example, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (Farm Bill 2.0) passed out of committee in the House of Representatives on March 5th and contains 12 titles (commodity, conservation, trade, nutrition, credit, rural development, research, extension, and related matters, forestry, energy, horticulture, marketing and regulatory reform, crop insurance, and miscellaneous) and is 802 pages. For comparison purposes, the 2018 Farm Bill also contained 12 titles but was only 529 pages.
The House Committee-passed bill included 181 marker bills that were introduced by Members of Congress. The bill also addresses California’s Prop 12, clarifying that “producers of covered livestock have a Federal right to raise and market their covered livestock in interstate commerce and therefore no State or subdivision thereof may enact or enforce, directly or indirectly, a condition or standard on the production of covered livestock other than for covered livestock physically raised in such State or subdivision.” Among a whole host of other changes, the bill also reauthorizes the Conservation Reserve Program at 27 million acres and increases farm credit borrowing limits—both of which are needed during this downturn in the farm economy.
So, what is next? House Agriculture Committee Chairman GT Thompson is looking to leadership in the House of Representatives to find time on the House calendar to begin considering the bill in hopes of passing it out of the House. Senate Agriculture Committee leadership would need to mark-up their version of Farm Bill 2.0 and then pass it out of committee and the Senate before the two bills could be conferenced to work through any differences. This is the normal process for getting bills passed into law. One thing that surely makes this effort different is the November mid-term election which, as history has shown during the mid-term election year, reduces the amount of legislation that is considered and passed in Congress—generally for political reasons. With that said, the most recent farm bill—the 2018 Farm Bill—was signed into law in December 2018, immediately following the mid-term election during President Trump’s first term.
Outlaw, Joe, and Bart L. Fischer. “Prospects for Farm Bill 2.0 or the Skinny Farm Bill.” Southern Ag Today 6(12.4). March 19, 2026. Permalink
