Get the News

The 2026 Farm Bill, A Century in the Making

Part One: The History of America's Agricultural Safety Net

by Sasha Estrella-Jones (she/her)
September 2026

2026 is a significant milestone in U.S. history, marking exactly 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. As we celebrate our nation's semiquincentennial birthday, I find myself reflecting on all that has and has not changed over the past two and a half centuries. One quote, from former President and Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, has continued to come to mind lately:

It was 1785 when Jefferson said this in a letter written to fellow Founding Father John Jay. Jefferson was praising farmers and arguing that their independence was essential to the country's success, both economically and morally. The deplorable hypocrisy of such language coming from a man who owned slaves and removed indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands doesn't go unnoticed. My condemnations of Jefferson aside, we have a shared respect for farmers and those who are stewards of the land.

In 1800, when Jefferson won the election to become the third president of the United States, roughly 83% of working Americans were involved in farming. Today, most Americans are completely removed from farm life, and less than 2% of the population are farmers. A United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) report from earlier this year calculated that 15,000 family farms were lost in 2025, with over 150,000 farms closing over the past seven years.

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, everyone eats.

We need farmers just as much as we need the food they produce. Legislation that impacts agriculture directly relates to all of us. So why, as a country, aren't we talking about farming the same way we talk about inflation, immigration, healthcare, war, or the climate?

While the Farm Bill is one of the most significant pieces of U.S. legislation, the average American has either never heard of the bill or has extremely limited knowledge of exactly what the Farm Bill is and why it matters. The first part of this two-part series focuses on building a solid historical framework, so that you'll be better able to situate current Farm Bill debates when we examine them in the second part of this series. We'll take a journey through the past, so that we can contextualize the present, and understand what's at stake for our future.

The Historical Context

The year was 1917. In April, President Woodrow Wilson officially declared war on Germany. By August, the United States Food Administration—headed by future president Herbert Hoover—was created to encourage Americans to conserve food supplies for the troops. The slogan "Food Will Win The War" was known throughout the country, and everyone had a role to play. We might have been far away from talking about veganism, but Hoover's administration was promoting "Meatless Mondays" and "Wheatless Wednesdays" in an effort to save food and unite Americans in support of the war.

Across the Atlantic, war was ravaging Europe and severely limiting its food production, leaving thousands of Europeans to face starvation. In order to feed our troops and allied nations, Hoover began guaranteeing farmers a profitable, minimum price for essential commodities like wheat and hogs to boost production. These factors created a substantial rise in the demand for and production of U.S. crops and livestock, leading to an economic boom for American farmers during WWI. This period, however, was short-lived.

Following the war, the U.S. government stopped guaranteeing farmers minimum prices for crops. Europe could also no longer afford to purchase food from America and over time recovered from the agricultural devastation caused by the war. Farmers went from a golden era to a period of economic despair seemingly overnight, as food prices fell, foreign demand dropped, and their debt grew.

The 1920s might have been referred to as the "Roaring Twenties" by most, with the United States leading industrialization, consumerism booming, and jazz music taking over the world, but American farmers weren't singing.

When the Great Depression hit in 1929, farmers had already been struggling for nearly a decade. If you add on the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl, which forced the migration of approximately 2.5 million people from the Great Plains, the 1930s was arguably the most devastating period for farmers in U.S. history. In just over a decade, farm income fell sharply, and nearly 750,000 family farms disappeared through foreclosure or bankruptcy between 1930 and 1935. Farming families became some of the most impoverished communities in the country.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the economic devastation American farmers were experiencing was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (AAA), which was part of the New Deal. Under AAA, farmers were given subsidies if they agreed to reduce the production of crops and commodities that were in surplus—namely cotton, corn, wheat, hogs, and dairy products. This allowed the U.S. government to raise crop prices and marked the first time the federal government paid farmers to reduce production, birthing the first ever Farm Bill, signed into law on May 12, 1933.

A Century of Expanding Scope

Since the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, there have been 17 subsequent Farm Bills — 18 in total counting the original. While originally designed to support farmers and control the price of crops, the Farm Bill has since grown into an omnibus legislation.

Renewed approximately every 5 years, the expansive Farm Bill impacts nutritional programs, crop insurance, international food aid, conservation, food safety, rural development, and agricultural trade exports - just to name some of what the bill governs. With a 10-year mandatory-spending baseline of roughly $1.4 trillion and 12 titles in the most recent (2018) bill, the Farm Bill has undergone many changes since the days of FDR.

The transition from being focused on economic relief for farmers to a vast, all-encompassing bill happened over the course of nearly 100 years. In this section, we'll be analyzing how the Farm Bill developed into what it is today by examining the evolution of 2 distinct chapters of the bill: the Conservation title and the Nutrition title.

While today talks about conservation are highly polarized, it wasn't always like this. Contrary to what we might believe if we turn on the television or browse social media, there was a time when politicians from both sides were actively concerned with understanding the science behind and economic cost of human-driven environmental changes.

The original Farm Bill was birthed during the Dust Bowl, a period of agricultural and economic catastrophe in the Great Plains, due to prolonged drought and overfarming. The damage caused by the Dust Bowl was so widespread because farmers had severely overplowed the land and removed native grasses that were protecting the soil for decades.

The Farm Bill was concerned with conservation from its inception because politicians witnessed firsthand the interconnection between the environment, agriculture, and the economy. FDR understood that when a farming crisis and an ecological disaster collide, it could devastate the economy.

In the years following the Dust Bowl, the Farm Bill actively encouraged and paid farmers to participate in regenerative farming. Regenerative farming takes a conservation approach to agriculture with a heavy focus on restoring and improving soil health, integrating livestock, and increasing biodiversity.

Only five years after the first Farm Bill, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 compensated farmers who focused on preventing further soil erosion. Farmers were paid to grow crops that added nitrogen to the soil, like legumes and certain grasses, over corn and wheat that deplete soil of vital nutrients.

Fast forward almost 50 years, and the Farm Bill of the 1980s continued to focus on soil conservation, along with wetlands preservation. The 1985 Farm Bill (the Food Security Act) created a dedicated conservation title — Title XII — establishing the Conservation Reserve Program along with the "sodbuster" and "swampbuster" provisions, with the understanding that long-term agricultural success is dependent on American farmers and ranchers employing conservation methods.

It may be hard to imagine, but former Republican President George H.W. Bush called himself the "environmental president" during his 1988 presidential campaign. When President Bush passed the 1990 Farm Bill, it included a title known as Title XXIV, The Global Climate Change Prevention Act of 1990. This act required the Secretary of Agriculture to study how climate change impacted forestry and agriculture, and it was the first ever formal mention of climate change in any Farm Bill.

During his presidency, Bush also signed the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which mandated the National Climate Assessment, a government report on the impact of climate change, which still exists to this day. He even signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, which was a groundbreaking international treaty aimed at stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. The United States was actually the first industrialized nation to ratify the treaty (and the fourth nation overall).

In 2002, under another Republican president, George W. Bush (the second Bush), Title IX: Energy, was added to the list of standing Farm Bill titles. Title IX of the Farm Bill focuses on expanding U.S. renewable energy and educating farmers to produce biobased products like bioenergy. Granted, it was complicated, but it is important to note that climate change was not always a dirty word, and once upon a time conservation was viewed as a non-partisan issue.

We cannot have a booming agricultural sector without supporting farmers to use regenerative farming methods and getting real about the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity.

While the Conservation Title significantly impacts the Farm Bill, there is another category that has the largest influence on both debates and budget: the Nutrition title—specifically nutrition assistance programs (SNAP). FDR's New Deal-era efforts that birthed the Farm Bill also led, around the same time, to the creation of our nation's first food stamp program. The histories of agricultural policy and nutrition assistance in our country were and are forever linked, though most people don't know how that came to be.

Imagine if you had survived WWI and upon returning to the states married your high school sweetheart, the same woman who sent love letters across the Atlantic while you fought for your country in France. The two of you were happily in love with 3 little ones and had recently begun talking about moving out of New York City to the suburbs of Long Island, maybe even purchasing your very first car.

A few years later everything changes. You lose your job and all the investments you had made in the stock market. You're at risk of being evicted and your wife now stands in lines at soup kitchens, so your children can eat a hot meal. And at the same time, across the country in California over 2 million watermelons are rotting simply because no one can afford to buy them.

Then, you learn that in Nebraska the federal government is paying to have pigs slaughtered for fertilizer, with no intention of using this surplus food to feed hungry families. You risked your life for your country and now you're desperately struggling to keep your family afloat. All while the government is allowing millions of pounds of produce and livestock to go to waste. It's fair to assume you'd be pissed and that's exactly what happened.

It was the height of the Great Depression when Roosevelt started to pay farmers to reduce the production of crops and destroy livestock. Millions of Americans were struggling to feed their families, and the unemployment rate was near 25%. While the first Farm Bill was designed to aid farmers and boost the U.S. economy, it didn't directly target the hunger crisis or the soaring price of basic food staples that was plaguing Americans.

Public outrage at the waste of food during a time of widespread hunger led to the creation of the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation in October of 1933 — renamed the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation (FSCC) in 1935 — just 5 months after the first ever Farm Bill was signed into law. The agency bought surplus food from farmers and redistributed food to those most in need.

By 1939, the FSCC was piloting its first ever food stamp program in Rochester, New York. With its system of orange and blue stamps, residents of Rochester could purchase orange stamps at $1 each and receive a blue stamp worth 50 cents for free. The pilot program worked so well for both Rochester residents and grocers that food stamps were expanded to other cities across the United States throughout the next decade.

Problems that arose because of what the first Farm Bill failed to address led to the formation of a new government agency that would go on to create the first federally funded food stamp program. While originally a solution to a problem, ironically the relationship between the Farm Bill and nutritional assistance would prove to be a source of great political contention in the following years.

For decades, the Farm Bill and food stamps had overlapping histories, but weren't necessarily directly dependent on one another for funding. That all changed in the 1970s. The 1973 Farm Bill legally required states to establish a food stamp program in every county by mid-1974. Prior to this, food stamps were a voluntary nutritional program with individual counties opting into the program as they saw fit. With the passing of the 1973 Farm Bill, food stamps became a nationwide mandated program, and the USDA became responsible for covering 100% of food stamp benefit costs.

To some, this change might not seem significant; however, legally linking food stamps to the Farm Bill drastically impacted the bill's budget. Currently, over 70% of Farm Bill funding is allocated to nutrition assistance programs. With the Congressional Budget Office estimating that the 2026 Farm Bill programs will cost approximately $1.4 trillion over 10 years (FY2027–2036), $985 billion of that will go towards SNAP.

These figures are not to be used in support of rolling back federal government funding of the program; a substantial share of Americans receive food assistance benefits and are dependent on SNAP to feed their families. And in that same breath, it is essential to note that the Farm Bill having grown into such a diverse piece of legislation means coming to an agreement regarding funding is no easy political feat—especially when party politics are the status quo.

Currently, we're still operating under the 2018 Farm Bill, which was originally set to expire in 2023, but faced fierce partisan gridlock. That Farm Bill has been extended three times, with an expiration date of September 30, 2026, fast approaching.

The 2026 Farm Bill has been debated for nearly 3 years, and the Senate Agriculture Committee's most recent attempt to advance the bill was a markup on August 6, 2026, which failed to move the legislation forward. Once again, there was a political stalemate across party lines with senators deeply divided on the funding of both conservation policies and nutrition assistance programs. With senators having taken their August recess, midterms around the corner, and track records that don't speak to bipartisan compromise, the probability of passing a new Farm Bill by the end of the month is unlikely.

We're left to ask ourselves: what is it that politicians cannot reach a middle ground on when it comes to the 2026 Farm Bill? And what does this mean for you and for farmers?

The second part of this series seeks to answer those questions. Now that you have a stronger historical framework for the origin and evolution of the Farm Bill, we can take a deep dive into how the current debates and proposed Farm Bill legislation impacts us all. I hope you'll join us for the next part of this journey.