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If you care about farm subsidies or crop insurance, you need to read this column:

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 7, 2024 reprinted with permission.

Farm Bill politics 2024 lean toward Project 2025

Alan Guebert

This year, like last year, is a Farm Bill year and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver any Farm Bill.

The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics. Most Congressional Republicans aren’t interested in passing any bipartisan farm and food assistance bill when they believe a delay might deliver a GOP-controlled House, Senate, and White House which then would write and pass a Farm Bill that might well resemble something out of the 1980s.

If you think that’s hyperbole, read the 30-page blueprint for U.S. agriculture included in Project 2025, a mostly unexamined, deeply conservative initiative that “if enacted,” explained Newsweek in late June, “would bring significant changes across various aspects of American life…”

In fact, the 920-page, highly detailed, deeply partisan plan–written and issued by the Heritage Foundation, not the Trump campaign–outlines “a radical transformation of the executive branch… replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president.”

According to Project 2025, a second Trump White House–and by extension, an already Trump-loving Congress–should enact a wholesale overhaul of the 2018 Farm Bill and its implementing agency, the 163-year-old U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

For example, according to the plan, a new Republican majority must kill the sugar program and with it, presumably, the high fructose corn syrup industry which uses, on average, 6 percent of the U.S. corn crop.

“The federal government should not be in the central planning business, and the sugar program is a prime example of harmful central planning,” explains Project 2025.

Next, “ideally” Congress should repeal the two principal crop insurance programs used by most farmers, the Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) and the Price Loss Coverage Program (PLC), the twin pillars of U.S. farm policy that farmers use to insure an estimated 81 percent of all eligible food-producing acres.

But, if both somehow survive the planned gutting, “Congress should prohibit… farmers [from] receiving an ARC or PLC payment the same year they receive a crop insurance indemnity…”

On top of that, the Heritage plan continues, Congress should “Reduce the premium subsidy rate for crop insurance” from “about 60 percent… to no more than 50 percent” because, “(a)fter all taxpayers should not have to pay more than the farmers who benefit from the crop insurance policies.”

Moreover, “The White House and the USDA should make it very clear that the farm bill process, including reform of farm subsidies, must be conducted through an open process with time for mark-up and the opportunity for changes to be made outside the Agriculture Committee process.”

Translation: Big Ag can save the $165 million–or thereabouts–it spends lobbying Congress during Farm Bill years because the $1.5 trillion legislation should be written in the clear sunlight of high noon on Capitol Hill.

And, of course, Project 2025 includes that oldie-but-goodie, “Separate the agricultural provision of the farm bill from the nutrition provisions… (A)gricultural programs should be considered separate legislation distinct from food stamps and the nutrition part of the farm bill… [because] when it comes to American agriculture and welfare programs, they deserve sound policy debates, not political tactics…”

But wait, there are even more changes an incoming Republican White House and Congress should implement.

“Champion the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program,” eliminate commodity checkoff programs “when possible,” “eliminate or reform dietary guidelines,” allow state-inspected meat to be sold across state lines, repeal export promotion programs, and “repeal the federal labeling mandate”–whatever that means.

Could Project 2025 become the guiding hand for Farm Bill 2025?

Of course it can. Continued foot dragging by today’s House leadership to even schedule a Farm Bill vote and a long-stalled Senate already has Washington discussing another extension of the 2018 law until after–you guessed it–January 2025.

The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, recommended reading, and contact information are posted at

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Alan Guebert: Farm and Food File column. Reprinted with permission.

“We in agriculture have a long tradition of marketing our bounty by more pleasant, if not less-than-truthful, names in hopes that less-informed eaters buy the sizzle rather than the fact.

For example, the beef checkoff has spent millions urging people to purchase something called flat-iron steak that isn’t steak at all but just a plain old chuck roast sliced thicker and grilled.

Likewise, the pork checkoff’s slogan, “Pork: The Other White Meat,” is often cited as a brilliant stroke of barnyard marketing: “Look, hogs are chickens!”

No they aren’t: U.S. per capita consumption of pork was 51 lbs. in 1989, 51 lbs. in 2005, and 51 lbs. in 2022. Over the same period, poultry–the real white meat–saw its per capita consumption more than double.

Still, facts be hanged, we bu**er on with our word games. Indeed, the House Ag Committee’s proposed 2024 Farm Bill is so filled with euphemisms, misdirection, and flat-out untruths that it’s hard to tell if its sponsors are serious or seriously out to lunch.

For instance, early on House Republican ag leaders were urged to protect food assistance programs, the biggest being SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, if they hoped to attract needed Dem support for their bill. When their draft was released, however, it showed a $27 billion (some analysts estimate $30 billion) slice in food assistance, the steepest cut since welfare reform in 1996.

When the butcher’s bill hit Capitol Hill, however, it was quickly condemned by everyone who could read. GOP staffers swiftly reframed the cuts as “cost neutral” and moved on.

After a network of non-profit food banks pointed out the obvious–that cuts usually aren't “cost neutral”–a baloney-filled House Ag staffer called anyone who objected to the SNAP cuts “hunger weirdos… in the business of poverty.”

Then there’s the GOP proposed changes to today’s principal “farm program,” crop insurance, that, “As expected,” notes farmdocDAILY, “... increases statutory reference prices for all covered commodities but with significant differences across commodities.”

Translation: Most of that “cost neutral” $27 billion in SNAP cuts are going directly into fatter government subsidies for crop revenue insurance programs that, all things being equal, are often very far from equal because some feature “significant differences…”

Translation of the translation: Some “Crop [insurance] supports would be set so high… by House Republicans that cotton, peanut, and rice growers, and probably wheat and sorghum farmers too, ‘would receive a payment every year,’” FERN noted May 21 quoting an Environmental Working Group analysis of the proposed, even more fattened crop insurance program.

Equally remarkable is how few people who grow U.S. rice, cotton, and peanuts will benefit from this bigger helping of GOP-supplied, all-but-guaranteed gravy.

In fact, the U.S. Rice Federation counts just 5,563 rice growers, the National Cotton Council says in “2023, the cotton farming industry employed 14,921 people,” and the National Peanut Council estimates there are “7,000 peanut farmers.”

The cotton group’s use of the word “employed,” rather than the other groups’ more definitive “growers” or “farmers,” hints at its legendary command of semantics.

For example, after Brazil filed claims with the World Trade Organization (WTO) that challenged U.S. cotton subsidies in 2002, the U.S. settled in 2009 by paying Brazil $300 million in reparations and steeply cutting government subsidy programs for “cotton.”

Shortly thereafter, however, a new U.S. support payment scheme emerged for something called “seed cotton,” the industry’s euphemism for plain cotton that hasn’t been ginned to remove its seeds–like, in fact, all just-harvested cotton worldwide–carries no WTO oversight.

It’s a clever, words-only way to avoid trade sanctions while guaranteeing American cotton growers’–sorry, “employees”–income from now until taxpayers catch on that they are paying for steak and getting sausage.”

© 2024 ag comm

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