In September this year, a new Farm Bill will be on the table for Congress to vote on. While this is typically a sleepy bill that goes under the radar, this year, the Farm Bill (which gets revised every five years) will include changes that impact American farming practices, implement tracking of agricultural land purchases from Chinese buyers, and make efforts to make consumer grocery bills affordable.
The Farm Bill was first enacted in 1933 following a decade of farmers struggling during the 1920s. President Coolidge vetoed the Farm Bill, which was proposed to guarantee that the government would buy commodities for export to stabilize the market for farmers. During this time, desperate farmers had abandoned basic practices to maintain healthy soil and had been farming land not suitable for large crops.
Coolidge called the Farm Bill price fixing, which would create a vicious economic circle that farmers would never recover from. Roosevelt called Coolidge’s wording “violent and abusive” and, upon his presidency, passed the bill under The New Deal shortly before the Dust Bowl took place. Arguably, measures to preserve the soil and sustainable agricultural practices were too late to prevent a massive depletion of fertile farmland.
Today, the Farm Bill receives $1.5 trillion in government funding and allocates 76% of budgetary spending into food assistance programs like SNAP the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and 6.8% into land conservation. Usually, passing the updated bill is bipartisan and passes with little contention. According to NPR, “On Capitol Hill, there has long been a quiet alliance between lawmakers who support farm subsidies and those who support food stamps, or SNAP. Together, they’ve supported the budget of the USDA, which runs both programs.”
The bill that will be voted on next month should have been voted on in 2023, and it is highly possible it will be pushed back again due to heightened partisanship. The last time it was passed in 2018, it rolled out the most serious land conservation measures to date. The current bill has not been adjusted to adapt to economic changes during and after the pandemic.
In the words of a Colorado farmer, “Today it feels like — for the very first time in my farming career — we have a very red farm bill and a very, very blue farm bill, and there’s an ocean apart between the two. I’m 25 to almost 30 years into my farming career, and this is the first time I felt that.”
Over the years, there are consistently more farmers who want financial subsidies to afford using sustainable practices than the current budget allows. Additionally, there are several signs of corruption and mismanagement in how these sustainable funds are used. According to FarmAid, “critics have noted that conservation programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are working against their aim to integrate conservation into working lands by using taxpayer dollars to pay for factory farm pollution costs.”
One of the key reasons the Farm Bill is in place is to prevent another Dust Bowl from happening again. The bill allocates some tax money towards sustainable practices such as using cover crops and pasture-raised livestock. Recently, it also funds research on how to “store” carbon emissions in the soil. This is a two-fold method. It’s both environmentally friendly and promotes soil health. In theory, cover crops and strategic planting of trees take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it in the soil making it fertile for the next crop. However, there is not yet an effective way to quantify how much carbon can be stored in soil or how much it reduces atmospheric carbon.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 gave the USDA $300 million to put into improving carbon testing in soil. Soil is arguably the most complicated biome on the planet and testing it can be immensely complex. It can also vary widely depending on soil composition, microclimate, and other factors. This leaves a gap between the benefits scientists project and having little concrete evidence to give to farmers. While this investment into carbon testing soil might be an exciting venture that can lower CO2 emissions in the environment, history has shown that simply using time-tested agricultural techniques and not overusing the land with factory farms is usually sustainable. Europe’s regulation to protect it’s soil health is why the food is of a higher quality.
It’s common to imagine soil as just dirt, but it is very much alive and can change quickly due to environmental factors. Recently, a breakthrough study in Australia effectively used eco-acoustics to measure soil health which looks promising. The study used soundwaves to detect worms, millipedes, and nematodes crawling in the depths of healthy soil. The microphone used is accurate enough to hear the difference between the different creatures crawling around. A lack of diversity in the soundscape of the soil consistently correlated to degraded soil. The costly endeavor of preserving healthy soil may or may not be fixed by listening to it, although it’s an interesting idea.
In the meantime, the upcoming Farm Bill will have an impact on the affordability of groceries, protecting small farms, and sustaining the longevity of agricultural soil health. This is bill that carries a significant portion of taxpayer money that in recent decades has been inefficient at protecting farmers, consumers, and the future of America’s agricultural resources.
