Guest post: Forget Project 2025. We need a better Farm Bill

When it comes to farm policy in 2025, we don’t need Project 2025. We need a new Farm Bill that acknowledges the challenges we face, tackles them head on, and puts our rural communities before corporate profits.

Reading about the recent round of layoffs at John Deere’s Ottumwa plant got me thinking about the future of farming and the critical role of farm policy. Nearly 2,000 Iowa workers laid off in the past year is a lot of job loss, but sadly not terribly surprising.

Last year was difficult for many family farmers with low prices and high input costs. Fertilizer and fuel costs are as expensive as they’ve ever been. Seed costs are through the roof, and let’s not even get started talking about the cost of new equipment. Making ends meet is hard in these conditions, especially when we have no definitive direction for where federal farm policy is headed.

A major task facing Congress this year will be passing a new Farm Bill. They have until September, but if the past two years offer any guide, it won’t be easy to get it done – let alone done right for farmers, eaters, farm workers, and our ag economy. And I think we can all agree we don’t need yet another extension of the 2018 Farm Bill; heck, we did that twice already!

We’ll see if a new year brings a new perspective and urgency to Iowa’s federal delegation, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve gone to D.C. with other Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement members and met with staff for Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst about mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for beef. COOL would help consumers choose homegrown beef and build a better market for U.S. farm products. It’s a no-brainer, yet our senators and representatives remain missing in action.

In addition, Iowa’s legislators seem more concerned about appeasing corporate agribusiness by supporting a policy that would strip our ability to oversee factory farm rules and regulations through the proposed EATS Act. EATS would create a race to the bottom, incentivizing factory farm expansion in new areas.

Equally concerning, the Republican House Agriculture Committee drafted a Farm Bill last year that would lead to large cuts to SNAP, also known as food stamps. Around 40 million people depend on SNAP to help pay for their groceries; that’s 1 in 8 Americans. It doesn’t make sense to gut such a critical program that feeds people struggling to pay for food.

These measures seem like something out of Project 2025’s playbook, and that’s essentially a recipe for failure for our rural economies, family farmers, and more. Project 2025’s proposals would terminate USDA programs that help farmers survive weather disasters, lower-than-average yields, and low prices. And it would decimate programs for land conservation and wildlife habitat, as well as slashing food benefits for working-class people.

That’s the wrong direction for federal farm and food policy.

We need fair farm prices from the marketplace and supply management. We need a Farm Bill that supports effective conservation practices. We need aggressive leadership and action to break up corporate agribusiness control over farm and food markets. And we need a Farm Bill that works for family farmers instead of Tyson, Smithfield, JBS, Cargill, and the other agribusiness giants.

When it comes to farm policy in 2025, we don’t need Project 2025. We need a new Farm Bill that acknowledges the challenges we face, tackles them head on, and puts our rural communities before corporate profits. The clock is ticking.

Barb Kalbach is a fourth-generation family farmer, retired registered nurse, and board member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. She can be reached at [email protected].