The 2018 Farm Bill: America’s Next Chance for Change in Food

Considering not only the bottom-dollar cost of the Farm Bill in previous years (having topped $100 billion according to Bloomberg), the bill has provided supplementary programs and financial assistance for qualified individuals including women and children, seniors and farmers too. There has been much controversy about the, at times, expanding capacity of these aid packages, namely the question of whether the growing support is too much or not enough. Ultimately, the bill’s complexity has made any bipartisan coalition difficult to assemble for ‘getting it through the House’ and so on and so on.

Now, the “House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway said he’s delaying the release of a draft law renewing farm and nutrition programs to try and produce a bill with bipartisan support after intense Democratic opposition over cuts to the food-stamp program raised the possibility the bill could be imperiled.” – American Agriculturist, House Farm Bill Delayed Due to SNAP Cuts

Though the Farm Bill remains to be ‘stalled’, read below for recently proposed policy plans:

“One of the latest pieces of bipartisan Senate action is the Give our Resources the Opportunity to Work Act (S.B. 2557). The GROW Act, introduced by Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Bob Casey Jr., D-Penn, would maintain funding and acreage levels for the 2018 Farm Bill’s three largest conservation programs: The Conservation Stewardship Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Reserve Program. A similar bill, Strengthening Our Investment in Land Stewardship Act of 2018 (H.R. 5188), was also introduced in the House by Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn. The bills would incentivize cover crops under CSP, increase set-aside funds for conservation buffers within continuous CRP, and maintain EQIP water quality emphasis. Provisions that actually make it into the farm bill are anyone’s guess at this point.” Both of these sound pretty good to me! Read more online here. 

Rise and Resist Together: Water Protectors Continue in North Dakota

“The residents of Devils Lake, North Dakota have seen huge changes in recent years. The lake the town is named for has quadrupled in size over the last two-and-a-half decades, flooding thousands of acres of farmland. As a result, many of the farmers in the area have had to trade in their tractors to run campsites and other tourism businesses along the expanding waterfront. So when a farming family in a neighboring township applied for a permit for a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) last year, many Devils Lake residents were up in arms.” – Civil Eats, Putting a Face on the Rural Fight Against Corporate Farms

Read more from Civil Eats about how a small Native American tribe’s members and the Devils Lake residents plan to fight the state’s Health Department if they grant the aforementioned CAFO a permit to establish a “hog multiplier farm” that would supply up to 44,000 piglets a year to other large hog farrowing operations and require keeping around 2,000 sows on hand at all times. This is incredible for issues to do with industrialized meat production, in addition to the contamination to waterways and, ahem, lakes, all which comes from such a large operation.