Farm Bill Slowly Advances as Farmers Await Relief
By Josh Meeks
Louisiana Farm Bureau News
The highly anticipated Farm Bill continues its slow climb through Congress, offering hope to farmers facing mounting financial pressure, but many key details remain unresolved.
The legislation has the potential to level the playing field for producers grappling with soaring input costs and stagnant commodity prices. Still, major sticking points, including pesticide regulations, animal welfare provisions and food assistance programs, must be worked out before a final bill can move forward.
The last comprehensive Farm Bill was passed in 2018. In the years since, the agricultural landscape has shifted dramatically. The country has seen three presidential administrations, a global pandemic and growing geopolitical tensions abroad.
In the absence of a new bill, lawmakers have relied on smaller measures to support agriculture, such as Farm Bill extensions, emergency funding packages and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—but none have provided the long-term certainty farmers are seeking.
“I talked to some of our growers this week, and they use this line that, you know, they work in seasons or they work in days and weeks,” said Andy Brown, policy director for the Louisiana Farm Bureau. “A lot of times I have to work in months and even years in policy. And this has been a long time in the making. And so we have issues related to drought, hurricanes, quality losses of crops, all that we’ve developed bills for.”
Brown and his team work closely with members of Congress to ensure Louisiana farmers have a voice in shaping the next Farm Bill. While progress has been slow, he says momentum is beginning to build.
“It’s hopeful that, you know, all of these elected officials and the fight for Republican versus Democrat with a midterm election coming up, they want to go back home with a big win,” Brown said. “And we’re doing our best to show them that food security and national security, you know, food assistance programs, all of those things play very well back home.”
For some farmers, the policy process is no longer just something they hear about— it’s something they’re witnessing firsthand.
“I think we all know that we’ve been speaking about Farm Bill every year, so we know that it’s become repetitive to them,” said Laura Hebert, a crawfish and rice farmer from Vermilion Parish. “But I think we came here at a really neat time, that we’re here during the markup phase of the Farm Bill. Being able to sit in there and kind of be a part of history was really neat.”
Hebert, along with Tangipahoa Parish rancher Macy Rushing, had the opportunity to sit in on the House Committee on Agriculture’s markup of the bill, a detailed process where lawmakers debate, amend and refine the legislation line by line.
“To see all the policies and then them communicating back and forth and going back to the chairman and all the amendments and how they, like, really got into the verbiage of it—it was so interesting,” Hebert said. “It was so exciting to be a part of.”
Brown says those moments matter, not just for the farmers in the room, but for the industry as a whole.
“It was really awesome to have the connections and the network to get those young farmers in the room, late at night, deep into the night when those legislators were working on our biggest package that we fight for every five years,” Brown said.
As the Farm Bill continues to take shape, agriculture leaders are working to keep it at the forefront of lawmakers’ priorities, even as other national issues compete for attention.
“I know that our agriculture community has been calling for this for years, and we were able to accomplish so much in the One Big Beautiful Bill,” Brown said. “But we still need to finish up with this Farm Bill.”
Brown says the stakes are high— not just for farmers, but for consumers as well.
“We will be very aggressive getting wins, if you will, for the farmers of our state, which means for the people that buy their produce,” he said.
At the same time, delays are only adding to the urgency.
“The longer this drags on, the more urgency it puts on the next Farm Bill,” Brown said. “That’s what we’ve seen is all these issues have stacked up as Congress drags their feet. And so we’re really proud of the work that was done in the Big Beautiful Bill last summer. But even not even a year out from that, we’re already working on improvements that we think need to be made from the changes that happened there.”
For now, farmers and policymakers alike continue to wait, watching closely as the Farm Bill makes its slow but steady path forward.