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This Policy Report column was published Sept. 10, 2026, by Nebraska Farmer, and is excerpted here with permission.
Congress has made significant progress on farm bill legislation in 2026, getting closer to the finish line than in any year since the comprehensive legislation was last passed in 2018.
Whether they can close the deal remains to be seen amid significant policy issues and political uncertainty.
The last full farm bill to be passed by Congress and signed by the president was the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018. When it expired in September 2023, Congress had not moved any new farm bill legislation forward and instead approved a one-year farm bill extension of existing legislation.
In 2024, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., moved a farm bill out of committee with bipartisan support, but it did not receive any floor time for debate.
The Senate did not even begin committee debate and produced no formal proposal until Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., released her proposed mark-up bill as chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.
The fact that she released it in November after the 2024 election with just a month left in the session suggests there was no plan for actually addressing the farm bill during the session. Before the end of the year, Congress again passed a one-year extension of farm bill legislation.
Movement in 2025
In 2025, after two years of delay, Thompson switched strategies to push major farm bill legislation into the budget reconciliation process. What became known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act included substantial increases in commodity and crop insurance program support, budget reallocations in the conservation title, and substantial reforms or cuts (depending on which party is describing them) to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the nutrition title — along with some new funding for trade promotion, ag research and animal health.
The budget reconciliation process provided an alternative pathway to get farm bill legislation approved, but it also created some interesting challenges.
Reconciliation bills are not subject to filibuster, so they provide for more partisan legislation given no need to achieve bipartisan support that gets over a 60-vote filibuster-proof threshold in the Senate.
Budget reconciliation bills also must follow certain budget rules, including limits or instructions on net changes in spending and on any legislation that is not germane to the budget instructions.
The reconciliation process meant farm bill language could be included that made substantial spending changes to certain titles as noted above, but it could not include the rest of the farm bill that did not directly propose changes to existing spending levels.
The reconciliation process also meant that the bill could include substantial increases in farm safety net programs while food assistance spending was reduced. That would normally have been a nonstarter for the decades-old coalition of farm and food interests, but a bipartisan coalition was not needed to get the bill done and the bill moved forward on partisan lines.
A little certainty
In the end, the budget reconciliation bill did provide some certainty for farmers and ranchers with farm safety net programs reauthorized through 2031, but it also raised substantial questions about the future of farm bills and farm policy. What was left behind has been called the “skinny farm bill” or “Farm Bill 2.0,” and it expired again in September 2025 before another one-year extension was passed to push it to 2026.
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