Contact: Laura Zaks

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

press@sustainableagriculture.net

Tel. 347.563.6408

Release: Hundreds Call for Strong Investments in Farmer-Led Research, Urban Agriculture, and Conservation in FY2027 Appropriations

Washington, DC, April 16, 2026 – Yesterday, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), alongside hundreds of organizations, delivered letters calling for strong investments in Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Agriculture Appropriations legislation. The letters, which focused on the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP), and Conservation Operations and Conservation Technical Assistance, arrive as Congressional Appropriators are drafting spending legislation, and several weeks after the Administration released its own FY2027 budget proposal.

The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program is the only regionally based, farmer driven, and outcome-oriented competitive research program that involves farmers and ranchers directly as the primary investigators in research and education projects. SARE provides grants directly to producers, which removes the financial risk of testing new ideas for making their operations more economically viable, productive, and sustainable. To meet the current demand for farmer driven research, stakeholders are requesting full funding for SARE at its authorized level of $60 million.

“Farmers and ranchers are at the center of everything SARE does, from important leadership positions at the national level, to participating in the regional grant review process, to designing and implementing projects for on-farm research. This farmer led model that SARE champions ensures that funding continues to go to America’s most innovative farmers and ranchers,” said Nick Rossi, NSAC Policy Specialist. “Despite nearly 40 years of helping farmers develop and adopt cutting edge practices and systems, SARE has yet to receive its fully authorized funding, and every year more than half of eligible farmer/rancher grants go unfunded.”

The Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP) offers programs and services that support the unique needs of agricultural production in urban, suburban, and indoor settings, ensuring business success and an ample supply of nutritious foods in their communities. OUAIP grants, cooperative agreements, and programming have reached 43 states and Puerto Rico, despite being significantly underfunded. This year, stakeholders are requesting funding at the authorized level of $25 million.

“The combined effect of US Department of Agriculture (USDA) staff losses and cuts to nutrition programs makes OUAIP awards and timely implementation even more essential for organizations and local stakeholders to fill the gaps left in communities. Previous awards have funded incubator farms and community garden infrastructure, as well as producer training and youth education; all of which have been difficult for producers to access in traditional USDA service centers,” commented Hannah Quigley, NSAC Policy Specialist. 

Conservation Operations and Conservation Technical Assistance (CTA) funds facilitate the administration of USDA conservation programs by supporting our conservation workforce, conservation planning, and the extension of specialized technical assistance to producers. According to USDA, CTA funds supported over 4,400 full time NRCS positions in every state in the nation in 2025, as well as TA providers at third-party organizations. This year, NSAC partnered with the National Associations of Conservation Districts, as well as a long list of stakeholders, in requesting $1.05 billion for Conservation Operations.

“Producers across the country depend on the availability of on-the-ground technical assistance to implement effective conservation practices. These funds support conservation professionals providing detailed, unbiased agronomic advice to producers in every state, most often at the county level. It’s no surprise to see such strong support from organizations and producers alike for these investments at a time when producer access to TA is so dramatically reduced,” said Jesse Womack, NSAC Policy Specialist.

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About the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC)The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is a grassroots alliance that advocates for federal policy reform supporting the long-term social, economic, and environmental sustainability of agriculture, natural resources, and rural communities. Learn more: https://sustainableagriculture.net/

The post Release: Hundreds Call for Strong Investments in Farmer-Led Research, Urban Agriculture, and Conservation in FY2027 Appropriations appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Contact: Laura Zaks

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

press@sustainableagriculture.net

Release: FY2027 USDA Budget Proposal is a Historic Setback for Farmers and Rural Communities 

Washington, DC, April 3, 2026 –  Today, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) responded to the Trump Administration’s release of the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Budget Proposal. The Administration’s FY2027 discretionary funding request for USDA is more than $2 billion below the Administration’s FY2026 USDA request.

“The Administration’s USDA budget proposes one of the most staggering disinvestments from farmers and rural communities in recent memory. Amidst rising farm bankruptcies and unprecedented instability in American agriculture, this budget proposal would double down on the damage and radically reduce USDA’s ability to serve farmers. The budget entirely eliminates funding for farmer-led agriculture research, conservation support that helps farmers build productivity and resilience, and investments in urban agriculture and rural small businesses alike,” said Mike Lavender, NSAC Policy Director.

The budget proposal includes significant staffing cuts at the Farm Service Agency, a USDA agency that is essential to supporting farmer viability in county offices across the country. Similarly, the budget would siphon significant funding directly from farmers by using popular conservation programs – such as the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program – to pay for Natural Resources Conservation Service staff. 

Additionally, the following programs would receive zero discretionary funding in FY2027 under this budget proposal:

• Conservation Technical Assistance
• Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program
• Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach Program:
  • Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program
  • Outreach and Assistance to Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Program
• Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production
• Local Agriculture Market Program:
  • Farmers Market Promotion Program
  • Local Food Promotion Program
  • Value Added Producer Grants
• Organic Transitions Research, Education, and Extension Program
• Healthy Food Financing Initiative
• Rural Energy for American Program
• Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program
• Rural Business Development Grants

Stay tuned to the NSAC blog for deeper analysis of the FY2027 USDA budget in the coming days.

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About the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC)

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is a grassroots alliance that advocates for federal policy reform supporting the long-term social, economic, and environmental sustainability of agriculture, natural resources, and rural communities. 

Learn more and get involved at: https://sustainableagriculture.net

The post Release: FY2027 USDA Budget Proposal is a Historic Setback for Farmers and Rural Communities appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

While the longest federal government shutdown in US history has finally ended, its impacts on farmers, families, and communities nationwide are complex and ongoing. No two government shutdowns are identical since each Administration makes their own determination about what essential services and staff will continue to operate during the shutdown. Some federal services remain in operation, while many others go dark, though there is a consistent throughline – the longer a shutdown lasts, the more severe the disruptions become. 

In a previous post, published near the start of the shutdown, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) outlined how the pause in government operations and furlough of employees at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) would impact agricultural programming and many important functions of the government, such as farm loan application approvals, conservation program reimbursement processing, appeals of terminated grant funding, and ensuring that vulnerable families receive nutrition benefits. 

In this post, we highlight specific examples of how farmers and other food and agriculture stakeholders across the nation were impacted by the 43 day lapse in government services. The post concludes by examining how other changes at USDA – from staffing cuts to a proposed reorganization – can interrupt services in much the same way as a government shutdown, underscoring the need to center farmers, their families, and the most vulnerable in our communities in all of the Department’s decisions.

Conservation Assistance

A core part of USDA’s mission is to preserve natural resources through conservation. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) works with farmers across the nation to implement conservation practices that make farms more self-sufficient and resilient. During the shutdown roughly 95% of NRCS staff – which had already been drastically reduced – were furloughed, resulting in significant disruptions. Most conservation programs involve financial incentives, but are typically structured to require the farmer to pay out-of-pocket and receive reimbursement later. This, combined with razor thin production margins, means any delays in payment processing not only add to the stress farmers are already experiencing, but threaten farm viability. For example:  

• Molly, a rancher at MoSo Farms in Ohio, shared that they were owed $4,000 for a conservation contract with NRCS. During the shutdown, USDA personnel could not come to her farm to confirm that the work was carried out as agreed upon in the contract. “We could really use this cash right now during our most lean time of the year when we’re paying for over $30,000 in processing fees to have our more than 50 hogs and 10 cattle butchered,” she explained. 
• Lindsay, who farms at Trouvaille Farm in Ohio, was unable to communicate and coordinate with NRCS during the shutdown. They were expecting another $5,000 from NRCS for a Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) contract but could not get any information from their NRCS officer, who was presumably furloughed. To make ends meet, she found herself having to put expenses on a personal credit card.

Farm Safety Net 

Another vital function USDA provides is resources to support farmers as they navigate external factors like droughts, natural disasters, and market volatility. Most of these services are administered by the Farm Service Agency (FSA), which furloughed 67% of its staff during the shutdown. Farmers reported being unable to access payments allocated for disaster assistance and being unable to complete loan applications, leaving them in the dark about the status of their application and adding to their financial stress and uncertainty. For example: 

• Antonio submitted an FSA loan application before the shutdown, and then received a response asking him to address a few things on his application with a new deadline of October 15th. After resubmitting the revised application, he received no response from FSA staff. At the time of this writing, he has not heard back and presumes the application is still in queue as incomplete. 
• Jane, of Wheelers Orchard, a fruit farm in Tennessee, reported having been awarded an Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) contract in addition to the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP), which provides financial assistance to farmers growing crops that are ineligible for traditional crop insurance. “We had crop failure in our orchard and are waiting for our NAP insurance payment, which is now in hold.”
• Celeste, of Free Range Flowers in Washington shared that they rely on an annual $50,000 FSA operating loan to get them through the slow, cold season. She pointed to what this means not just for their operations, but their workforce as well. “We are not able to predict how we will staff in 2026, which leaves our coworkers adrift.” Her story highlights the thin margins on which small and mid sized farms operate and how critical it is to have a responsive and well-staffed USDA to timely process loan applications. Her story also illustrates how connected USDA services are to a strong and robust agricultural workforce, which is essential for farm viability and longevity.

Nutrition 

The shutdown delivered significant impacts that delayed and reduced Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for children, the elderly, and our most vulnerable community members. A lesser known result of a SNAP benefits lapse is the impact to farmers and small food retailers. There are several USDA programs that are designed to leverage nutrition benefits to increase both access to healthy, high quality local food and improve local farmers’ bottom line. When nutrition benefits are cut, farmers experience that impact. For example:

• Caroline, of Chez Nous Farm, a fruit and flower farm in Ohio, said the government shutdown was impacting her on a more personal level. She is a SNAP benefit recipient while those funds were also suspended. Her farm demonstrates how to produce the best food while also caring for the entire ecosystem and all its components. As a responsible and ethical land steward she has an active CSP contract, but the NRCS conservationist she works with had been furloughed. Her annual payment was suspended until federal employees return to work. It’s not uncommon that farmers and farm owners, with thin profit margins and revenue varying significantly month to month, also rely on federal benefits like SNAP. 
• Bradley runs a small certified organic vegetable farm called Full Hollow Farm in Michigan. They proudly use earth-friendly, sustainable growing practices to encourage biodiversity and soil health. They typically see about $500-$800 worth of produce purchased with SNAP at farmers markets each month, and anticipate taking a serious financial hit in November due to the government shutdown and SNAP benefits being delayed. 
• Carine, of Sun Tracker Farm, a diversified vegetable and egg farm in California, was concerned about the impact the lapse in nutrition benefits would have on both her and the community at large. As she wrote in the Napa Valley Register, it “will mean a hit in our sales, and for many of our fellow farmers,” and that “people will go hungry without programs such as CalFresh,” California’s state SNAP program.
• The lack of reliable access to USDA services does not only impact farmers. The Broad Street Food Pantry’ in Ohio anticipates increased demand from folks in need of food, but few opportunities for them to increase the amount of food available. Food banks are intended to be short term support for families who need assistance to get back on their feet. As community needs grow in size and urgency, food banks may not be able to meet the demand, which we could prevent through intentional investments in USDA resources and capacity.

We Can and Should Prevent Further Harm 

Now that the federal government and USDA have reopened and resumed normal activity, essential services for farmers and food and agriculture stakeholders are once again widely available. However, other ongoing changes at USDA still threaten to impact services for farmers.

USDA will continue to carry out the massive reorganization plan proposed this summer, which they claim will, “consolidate, unify, and optimize functions within [the Department].” As NSAC has noted, the reorganization proposal was developed without input from farmers and other stakeholders, raising significant and legitimate concerns about how it will impact USDA program and service delivery. Without meaningful stakeholder input and significant revision, we are deeply concerned that the damage done during the shutdown will be compounded if the reorganization moves forward as proposed. USDA must take the time to ensure that programs and service delivery for farmers and stakeholders will not be further disrupted by gathering public input through a fully transparent process and fully assessing potential impacts before moving forward with any proposal. We can and must do better by our farmers.

Unfortunately, the proposed reorganization isn’t the only ongoing threat to essential services for farmers – since January 2025, USDA has significantly reduced its  staff across the Department – roughly 20,000 employees have left USDA. Every agency at USDA has experienced staff resignations and separations. Some have been hit particularly hard, like the Rural Development mission area losing 36% of its staff, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) losing at least 22% of its staff.

The funding bill that was enacted in November to reopen the government provided USDA with funding to last through the end of the fiscal year 2026 on (September 30, 2026), but did not take action to mitigate or rectify the problems farmers faced during the shutdown or as the result of ongoing changes at USDA. These effects will continue to ripple throughout the agricultural sector and in communities across the US, and could continue to worsen without intervention. The stories highlighted here offer a glimpse into the acute impacts farmers, families, and communities experience when government programs and services are disrupted – impacts that stand to be exacerbated if USDA’s staff loss and reorganization plan proceeds unchecked.

The post Voices from the Field: The Real Costs of the Government Shutdown appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Contact: Laura Zaks

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

press@sustainableagriculture.net

Tel. 347.563.6408

Release: Farm Bill Extension, USDA Funding Bill Underwhelm

Washington, DC, November 10, 2025 – After weeks of uncertainty, Congress has unveiled a one-year extension of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 as well as the fiscal year (FY) 2026 agriculture appropriations bill, a package that, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) could undermine conservation efforts and limit support for family farmers.

“After weeks of uncertainty, legislation unveiled over the weekend opts to needlessly restrict farmers’ ability to reduce input costs, invest in clean water, and build healthy soil. The FY2026 agriculture appropriations bill cuts nearly $100 million in support for conservation technical assistance, and the proposed farm bill extension fails to extend conservation program payment limits. Taken together, these bills make it harder for a wide variety of family farmers to enhance their productivity and protect natural resources, and bias federal conservation programs towards serving the largest operations first and foremost,” said Mike Lavender, NSAC Policy Director.

On Sunday, Congress released the text of an extension of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (2018 Farm Bill). In lieu of a much-needed five-year farm bill, this one-year extension would continue most farm bill programs unimpeded through at least September 30, 2026. It also suspends permanent price support authority for the 2026 crop and calendar year, ensuring that commodity programs do not revert to outdated 20th century law in the new year. 

The farm bill extension also includes:

• Extension of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), but fails to provide critical funding for the CRP-Transition Incentive Program which will no longer be able to offer incentives for land owners who rent or sell their land to beginning farmers and ranchers who commit to using sustainable grazing practices, resource-conserving cropping systems, or transitioning to organic production.
• Failure to extend payment limits for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), removing any cap on the total cost-share a single operation can receive through EQIP and CSP. Coupled with the removal of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) eligibility requirements in this summer’s reconciliation package, this paves the way for very large operations to consume disproportionate amounts of conservation dollars.

“The FY2026 Agriculture Appropriations Bill released over the weekend brings cuts to critical conservation, urban agriculture, and local and regional food system programs. While the bill manages level funding for many essential programs and avoids harmful riders that would limit USDA from promoting fair market competition for livestock and poultry growers, it nonetheless falls short of delivering meaningful progress,” said Lavender.

Of NSAC’s FY2026 Appropriations Priorities, the bill:

• Maintains level funding for the Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education ($48M) program; the Organic Transitions Program ($7.5M); and the Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach program
• Cuts funding for Conservation Technical Assistance by nearly $100M to $679.6M; for the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production by $2M to $5M; Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative by $2M to $8M; and the Local Agriculture Market Program by slashing Value Added Producer Grants from $11.5M to $8M and Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Grants to $7.3M

Finally, negotiations over the weekend have so far failed to make progress toward ensuring both access to affordable healthcare and timely disbursement of full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. 

In both instances, states have been forced to fill the gaps. Access to critical services – such as reliable internet – can be challenging or even nonexistent in many parts of rural America. Unfortunately, this also extends to access to fresh food and affordable health care. Healthy, thriving farmers, families, and rural communities are a foundational component of a sustainable, just food and farm system – and ensuring that all Americans can access quality, affordable healthcare and nutrition is a critical part of reaching that goal.

For further analysis, see NSAC’s FY2026 appropriations chart.

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About the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC):

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is a grassroots alliance that advocates for federal policy reform supporting the long-term social, economic, and environmental sustainability of agriculture, natural resources, and rural communities. Learn more: https://sustainableagriculture.net/

The post Release: Farm Bill Extension, USDA Funding Bill Underwhelm appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

The transition from one fiscal year to the next is not something that typically dominates headlines. In fact, as the calendar turns from September 30 to October 1 – when the federal government begins a new fiscal year – the less attention the better. Yet when Congress and the President are unable to reach an agreement on government funding, the start of a new fiscal year can bring with it tremendous impacts.

During a government shutdown some federal services will remain in operation, while others may go dark, and the longer the shutdown lasts, the more severe the disruptions become. This year, Congress and President Trump failed to reach an agreement to fund the government beyond September 30, 2025 – and as a result the government has largely closed. The President and Congressional Republicans have proposed to fund the government beyond September 30 with what’s known as a “clean” continuing resolution (CR) – simply put, to continue funding the government at the same level (H.R.5371). Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have called for a CR that funds the government and extends Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to prevent healthcare costs from skyrocketing for millions of Americans later this year (S.2882).

Access to critical services – such as reliable internet – can be challenging or even nonexistent in many parts of rural America. Unfortunately, this also extends to access to reliable and affordable health care. On average, individuals – including farmers – living in rural households are more likely to be uninsured. Yet the rate of uninsured adults under 65 in rural areas has dropped by nearly half since 2010, when the ACA was passed, and there’s reason to believe uninsured rates may have fallen even more steeply for farmers since the ACA’s enactment. Healthy, thriving farmers, families, and rural communities are a foundational component of a sustainable, just food and farm system – and ensuring that all Americans can access quality, affordable healthcare is a critical part of reaching that goal.

In addition to the government shutdown, the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 – otherwise known as the 2018 Farm Bill – expired with the new fiscal year, bringing with it an additional set of uncertainties. The rest of this blog post explores the impacts of the government shutdown and the expiration of the 2018 Farm Bill on farmers and food system stakeholders nationwide.

Government Shutdown

Whether you realize it or not, federal programs and services are a part of many peoples’ daily lives. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), with employees around the country currently totaling around 80,000, offers hundreds of programs in communities nationwide that support farmers and ranchers, rural businesses, and other food system stakeholders. With roughly half of USDA’s staff furloughed as a result of the shutdown, the impacts are sure to be felt widely.  However, these shutdown impacts cannot be viewed in isolation. In fact, for the nine months prior to the government shutdown, many of the programs and services that USDA offers have been under threat as funding has been frozen and abruptly – actions resulting in devastating consequences for farmers and rural communities. As with anything, context is important.

USDA has dramatically reduced its staff in recent months. Since January 2025, the Department has already lost at least 18,000 employees. More than 15,000 USDA employees left the department through the “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)”’s so-called Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). The DRP offered federal employees fully paid administrative leave through September 2025 if employees voluntarily resigned from their positions. Approximately 3,876 USDA employees accepted DOGE’s first round DRP offer, and an additional 11,298 USDA employees resigned in the second round of DRP. Many of these employees have years of experience and irreplaceable expertise. The staff losses are impacting research, conservation, the farm safety net, and more.  

Beyond staff losses, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced this summer a proposed USDA reorganization. This proposed reorganization was drafted without any consultation with farmers or other stakeholders. While the reorganization plan does not directly include planned layoffs or reductions in force (RIF), it would in all likelihood result in the loss of thousands more staff if office relocations and consolidations are carried out. Recent history shows that staffing losses directly reduce and delay USDA’s services to stakeholders. As of posting, the reorganization remains a proposal that has yet to be finalized or implemented. But if it is implemented as proposed, the impacts are likely to be severe, lasting long after the shutdown ceases. Find NSAC’s in depth comment on the reorganization here.

Finally, just prior to the start of the current government shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) distributed a memo to federal agencies encouraging them to consider firing employees during the government shutdown by specifically targeting staff who work on programs that were out of alignment with the President’s priorities. The memo was swiftly met with multiple legal challenges and as of posting, no RIFs have taken place during the current government shutdown. 

So, against the backdrop of broken funding agreements, staff firings, a reorganization proposal, and the spectre of more firings – all of which have either reduced USDA’s capacity to serve its stakeholders or threatened to do so – the federal government has shut down. This post looks at what that means for agricultural conservation, the farm safety net, nutrition, research, local and regional food systems, and food safety.

Broadly speaking, federal staff are only allowed to continue working during a shutdown if they are “excepted” – either they are somehow essential to the operations and mission of the agency, or their job is funded through a non-lapsed funding source. On September 30, 2025, USDA published its Lapse of Funding Plan, which details agency-by-agency shutdown plans, from furloughed staff to services that will lapse – and is the basis for our analysis below. 

Conservation

Roughly 99% of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) staff is located outside the National Capitol Region (NCR), which means they are overwhelmingly state-based to provide technical assistance directly to producers. Further, a significant portion – roughly a third – of the NRCS budget for that technical assistance comes from mandatory funding for conservation programs. In theory, this means producers should still have some limited access to NRCS staff and the financial assistance provided by conservation programs at this time. However, shutdown plans provided by the agency, and early reports from our members in the field, indicate the reality is far less clear. According to NRCS’ shutdown plan:

• 95.799% of the remaining 9,237 employees are furloughed. It’s worth noting that, prior to the shutdown, nearly 1 in 4 NRCS employees left the agency this year.
• Services continuing during a shutdown:
  • NRCS will continue agency operations using available funding, including fiscal year (FY) 2026 mandatory farm bill programs funds, as well as prior year carryover discretionary and mandatory funding, to implement NRCS services and programs at USDA service centers and offices.
• Services stopping during a shutdown:
  • Key operational activities such as processing of contract payments to farmers and ranchers, conservation planning activities, ongoing collaborative projects with key soil and conservation partners, and processing of payments for outstanding contracts and agreements 
  • Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) amendments in process of being signed are now further delayed.

The shutdown plan presents an inherent contradiction. It correctly claims NRCS has the needed mandatory resources to continue providing some level of service to producers, but furloughs nearly every single employee, making it impossible to do so. As a result, farmers will likely (or may have already) go without a planned annual payment, a reimbursement for work already completed, or certainty from NRCS on how to complete fall field work to remain in compliance with existing contracts. This approach is needlessly disruptive and burdensome for farmers who are facing the same dismal economy as their neighbors, but have elected to do the hard work of improving conservation efforts within their operation anyway.

Farm Safety Net

The Farm Service Agency (FSA) – the primary agency responsible for administering farm safety net programs – is broadly impacted by the shutdown with a majority of its staff furloughed. Staff in county offices around the country will be largely unavailable for farmers seeking to access loans, commodity and other program payments, and disaster assistance. At a moment when producers across the country are facing significant financial challenges, many programs designed to provide such economic relief will be inaccessible due to the shutdown. 

• 67% of FSA staff are furloughed
• Services Continuing During a Shutdown:
  • After 10 days of a shutdown, each county office will have one loan employee and one farm program employee on call to complete certain loan processing items: continuing liens, protective advances, and bankruptcy notification responses. 
• Services Lapsing During a Shutdown:
  • All disaster assistance payments, including remaining Supplemental Disaster Assistance programs
  • Processing annual CRP payments
  • Processing annual ARC/PLC payments 
  • Accepting and processing of new loans
  • Other credit or loan activities, including providing advance funds, obligating or closing direct loans previously approved, processing or approving debt settlement applications, processing guaranteed loss claims, and loan restructuring. 

Nutrition 

More than 40 million people and 29 million students rely on USDA nutrition programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), and child nutrition programs. These essential nutrition resources will remain available during a shutdown, subject to the availability of funding. In this case, families will still have access to their SNAP benefits and schools will have access to foods through entitlement offerings; however, funding for WIC benefits is expected to run out very soon, impacting roughly 6 million pregnant people and parents with young children. 

• 91.7% of USDA’s Food and Nutrition (FNS) staff have been furloughed. 
• Services continuing during a shutdown:
  • FNS will designate staff to manage program administration of SNAP benefits between state agencies, but the number of staff available is unclear. 
  • School menus and purchases are largely planned before the school year begins. Schools should continue to have access to USDA foods and meal reimbursements since these funds are made available through a transfer of funds from Section 32, which can be drawn at any time. 
  • While it is reassuring that the majority of nutrition benefits will continue to be available for families and children, the extent to which these programs will run smoothly with so many staff furloughed is still unknown.
• Services lapsing during a shutdown:
  • While existing authorized vendors will be able to accept and benefit from SNAP benefits, USDA will not process any new applications for vendors seeking to accept SNAP or WIC applications. 
  • Additional technical assistance or support services, such as offering webinars, will not continue during a shutdown. This is particularly relevant for current Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant applications that are due in early December. 

Research 

The shutdown not only impacts the work USDA does that directly serves producers, but also the research that underpins every aspect of farm viability and success. USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics mission area – which houses the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Economic Research Service (ERS), National Agricultural Statistics Survey (NASS), and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) – is tasked with providing reliable scientific research, data, and analysis for America’s farmers, ranchers, rural communities, and other stakeholders. These research staff and sites provide the human capital and infrastructure for agricultural research, as well as data collection and analysis for commodities and rural communities. 

Many competitive grant programs within NIFA, like the Organic Research and Extension Initiative, Food Safety Outreach Program, and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, are already running nearly a full year behind their normal grant cycle even prior to the shutdown. The shutdown will further delay the agencies in opening up funding opportunities for these programs, exacerbating uncertainty for farmers and researchers who are already reeling from frozen and terminated funding agreements since the start of this Administration.

• 69% of ARS Staff Furloughed
  • Services continuing during a shutdown:
    • Protection of human and animal life as well as research property and data where significant damage could result
    • Research on Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, New World Screwworm, and other vital research needs that are essential to protecting public health and safety
  • Services stopping during a shutdown:
    • Citrus Greening
    • Animal/crop production and protection projects and food safety research 

• 94% ERS Staff Furloughed
  • No public facing work at ERS will continue during shutdown
  • ERS will suspend almost all program activities. ERS publications, website updates, and data products, will be suspended during a lapse in appropriations

• 95.6% NIFA Staff Furloughed
  • Continuing: financial and grants management support as needed
  • All program activity will cease

In addition, 91% of NASS employees and the entire Office of the Chief Scientist, except for the Chief Scientist themselves, are furloughed, along with a suspension of all NASS data releases. 

Local and Regional Food Systems 

Unlike other agencies within USDA, staff and operations at the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) – one of the primary agencies that supports local food system efforts – are largely funded by associated program fees and mandatory farm bill funding. As a result, many AMS programs and functions can continue during a shutdown. The status of other programs utilizing funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) remain unclear. 

However, this is not the case for Rural Development (RD). While the RD budget is small in comparison to AMS, it runs a number of impactful business development programs with staff located in every state. This includes the Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Plant grant Program and the Value-Added Producer Grant program, among others. 

• 8.72% of AMS staff are furloughed.  
• Services continuing during a shutdown:
  • A number of activities that allow for products to reach markets, such as food product grading and specialty crop inspections, will continue uninterrupted. 
  • Commodity and food purchases, directed by FNS and other agencies, will continue. 
  • There are a number of Farm Bill programs that have mandatory funding, such as the Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Programs, that should be unaffected.
• Services lapsing during a shutdown include:
  • Grant programs funded by annual appropriation
  • National Organic Program; Country of Origin Labeling; Packers and Stockyards Program; Pesticide Data Program; National Bioengineered Food Disclosure  
  • Other programs not funded by mandatory funds may also halt such as the Meat and Poultry Processing Technical Assistance program or the Local Meat Capacity grant program 
• 83% of Rural Development (RD) staff have been furloughed. 
• Services continuing during a shutdown:
  • The extent of activities that will continue will be those focused on protecting government assets or property. In this case, that includes home and farm loan programs, in which the government has a vested interest in collecting payments from borrowers. 
• Services lapsing during a shutdown:
  • Although RD programs are authorized by the farm bill, the majority of business development RD activities are funded through annual appropriations and as a result will stop during a shutdown. These include programs such as the Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program, Rural Business Development Grants, and Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA). 
  • Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program (MPPEP) grants that have not been fully paid out are likely paused.

Food Safety

A large portion of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s staff, with their core missions of food safety, are exempted or excepted from the shutdown. However, even within this core mission, many of their services are reduced, defaulting to a more reactive position. Across both agencies, non-mandatory policy initiatives – such as those that provide extra guidance to small farms or small processors – will be paused. While these activities are not mandatory, they are of critical importance to those small businesses that rely on them. 

Across both agencies, state cost-share funding will follow the model of federal activities and  narrow in on key inspection activities as well. It is unclear from the contingency plans of both FDA’s Human Foods Program and FSIS whether the overall payment of these state cost shares will cease, though the FSIS contingency plan does mention the potential for this to happen whereas the FDA does not. 

The lapse in support for services and programs that benefit small farmers and processors means that parts of the industry often most in need of tailored support may feel the impacts of the shutdown disproportionately, further delaying needed progress in food safety improvements. 

• 7% of FSIS staff are furloughed.
• Services continuing during shutdown:
  • FSIS will continue to perform mission-essential food safety operations required to protect life and property, including statutorily required inspection of meat, poultry, and egg products, investigations necessary to protect public health (outbreaks, recalls, etc.), laboratory work essential to identifying public health concerns and threats, emergency preparedness, and minimum levels of other support functions necessary to maintain these activities. Additionally, mandatory administrative work related to the shutdown will also continue. 
• Services stopping during the shutdown: All functions not required to directly or indirectly support the protection of life and property will cease. This includes non-essential administrative tasks, training other than mandatory training for frontline inspectors, and other support activities.
  • Cooperative Agreements for Inspection Services: States may run out of funds to perform key inspection services. A total of 29 states run Meat and Poultry Inspection (MPI) programs. 
  • Policy initiatives, including those that impact small and very small plants, are stalled.

According to FDA’s lapse plan, 13,872 (86%) of FDA staff will be retained, including 10,740 (66%) who are exempt from furlough because their activities or position are already funded or otherwise exempted and 3,132 (19%) who are excepted because their activities are deemed necessary by implication or for the safety of human life or protection of property).

• Services continuing during shutdown:
  • All FDA activities related to imminent threats to the safety of human life or protection of property would continue. This includes detecting and responding to public health emergencies and continuing to address existing critical public health challenges by managing recalls, mitigating drug shortages, and responding to outbreaks related to foodborne illness and infectious diseases. It also includes surveillance of adverse event reports for issues that could cause human harm, the review of import entries to determine potential risks to human health, conducting for cause and certain surveillance inspections of regulated facilities, and related regulatory testing activities, and criminal enforcement work and certain civil investigations.
• Services stopping during shutdown:
  • Food safety efforts within FDA’s Human Foods Program (HFP) are reduced to safety surveillance and emergency responses. Longer-term food safety initiatives, including policy work to help prevent foodborne illnesses and diet-related diseases, would be halted, jeopardizing public health.
  • FDA will be limited in the number and type of inspections to be conducted, unless the inspections are for cause or otherwise necessary to detect and address imminent threats to the safety of human life, or can be conducted with carryover user fee funding.

Office of Hearing and Appeals – National Appeals Division

USDA’s National Appeals Division (NAD) is an independent office that presides over appeals of adverse decisions stemming from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Farm Service Agency, the Risk Management Agency, and Rural Development. When a farmer or other stakeholder disputes a decision made by one of those agencies, they generally may appeal the decision to NAD for review and potential reversal. 

During the shutdown, 100% of Office of Hearing and Appeals (OHA) staff are furloughed and all NAD proceedings are postponed. Given first the funding freeze and then the unprecedented and abrupt cancellation of countless agreements between the USDA and farmer-serving organizations under this Administration, the shutdown will further delay farmers and other stakeholders from obtaining the relief they seek. When the government reopens, there will likely be additional delay resuming postponed proceedings given how many appeals have been filed under the Administration challenging the lawfulness of recent decisions, on top of NAD’s regular docket.

Farm Bill Expiration

Amidst all of the uncertainty outlined above, it would be understandable if you lost track of the farm bill’s status. While the 2025 budget reconciliation bill (OBBB, P.L. 119-21) reauthorized some programs from the traditional farm bill, it excluded the vast majority of farm bill programs, leaving them to an uncertain future. Consequently, on October 1, 2025, the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 – more commonly known as the 2018 Farm Bill – expired.

Close observers of federal food and agriculture policy will be familiar with the oft-repeated albeit misleading message that the impacts of an expired farm bill don’t really kick in until January 2026, with the start of the new crop year. While it is true that there are new and significant impacts beginning in the new year, the consequences of allowing the 2018 Farm Bill to expire without a replacement begin immediately.

Note: the farm bill expiration impacts discussed below are anticipated impacts when the government is funded and open. During a government shutdown, the impacts in this section are superseded by and in addition to the impacts of a government shutdown.

Conservation

With one major exception, key USDA conservation programs – Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Agriculture Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), and the Regional Conservation Program (RCPP) – should remain largely unaffected by the expiration of the farm bill. This is a direct result of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which invested in and reauthorized these programs through 2031. However, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is not so lucky. 

Administered by the Farm Service Agency (FSA), CRP conserves and improves soil, protects water quality, and provides wildlife habitat by establishing long-term cover on highly erodible land or land in need of conservation buffers that has previously been in row crop production. In exchange for cost-share and rental payments, farmers remove environmentally sensitive land from production and plant resource-conserving land cover to protect soil, water, and wildlife habitat.

CRP’s statutory authorization lapsed along with the rest of the farm bill on September 30, and therefore no new work can occur within that program without action from Congress to extend the prior or reauthorize a new farm bill. Effective as of October 1, 2025: 

• FSA will not approve new CRP contracts for any signup types
• FSA will not process offers for enrollment in CRP for all signup types
• FSA will not authorize any CRP contract revisions or corrections
• Contracts that were approved on or before September 30 will receive annual rental and cost-share payments, and signing incentive and practice incentive payments, as applicable.

Local and Regional Food Systems

Due to NSAC member advocacy during the 2018 Farm Bill, many local and regional food system programs now have permanent mandatory baseline funding and therefore should not see a significant interruption following the expiration of the 2018 Farm Bill on October 1, 2025. However, for programs such as the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), that have not yet awarded FY2025 Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Program and Regional Food System Partnership Grants, it’s possible that grant cycles could be interrupted during the lapse in authorization. For the Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP), while states should be able to finish programming without interruptions for the remainder of the 2025 season, the programs’ operations could be impacted in calendar year 2026 if there is a significant delay in a farm bill reauthorization or extension.

Organics and Research 

A handful of critical farm bill programs are funded without mandatory “permanent” baseline funding, meaning that without a provision that specifically offers continued funding, funding for the programs would expire when the farm bill expires. Despite its faults, OBBB provided additional funding for several of these formerly “stranded” programs, meaning they will remain funded during a short term lapse in farm bill authority.

One such program is the National Organic Certification Cost Share Program (OCCSP), which supports farmers with their annual certification costs. The Organic Production and Market Data Initiatives (ODI) and Scholarships for 1890s Institutions also both received additional funding through OBBB and should not be impacted by the lapse in authorization. 

Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach

The Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach (FOTO) program, which is a combination of the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development program (BFRDP) and the Outreach and Assistance to Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Program (2501), was created in the 2018 Farm Bill in part to secure mandatory baseline funding for both 2501 and BFRDP. Many competitive grant programs within NIFA, like FOTO, are already running nearly a full year behind their normal grant cycle and saw no RFA for the FY25 grant cycle. Despite mandatory funding for the program continuing, the statutory authority for the grant program lapsed on October 1, 2025. Therefore, like LAMP discussed above, absent an extension or reauthorization, the next grant cycle may be interrupted.

Farm Safety Net

By and large, the farm safety net – ranging from credit to crop insurance and commodity programs – should continue to operate with little interruption through the end of 2025. 

The Federal Crop Insurance Program – which is permanently authorized and funded at such sums as necessary in perpetuity by Congress – will continue to function without interruption in the absence of a farm bill reauthorization or extension. Permanent disaster programs, including the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program and programs to support livestock and fruit tree producers, are also authorized to continue. 

The farm bill also permanently authorizes USDA to make and guarantee loans, for which money is allocated by Congress in the annual appropriations process. Failure to reauthorize or extend the farm bill is not likely to impact the availability or servicing of farm loans. 

Several commodity programs – including Price Loss Coverage (PLC), Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC), Dairy Margin Coverage (DMC), and marketing assistance loans – were amended and extended through 2031 in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill. Changes to reference prices in ARC/PLC will be implemented for the 2025 crop year, with payments calculated on these new reference prices set to be administered in Fall 2026. 

However, if the farm bill is not reauthorized or extended by January 1, 2026, these commodity programs will begin to be replaced with “permanent law,” or non-expiring provisions established in the 1938 and 1949 Farm Bills. The first commodity to be impacted is dairy. While the reconciliation bill amended these commodity programs, a suspension of permanent law was not included in the final legislation. Therefore, a reauthorization or extension of the farm bill prior to January 1, 2026, is necessary to prevent these programs from reverting to permanent law.

What’s Next

This year has presented farmers with an unprecedented set of obstacles to navigate. While there is a long way to go, the final months of 2025 nonetheless offer an opportunity to bring much needed stability after months of chaos – by ending the government shutdown, enacting FY2026 agriculture appropriations, and passing a farm bill extension if a strong and fair farm bill cannot be achieved this year.

The post How the Government Shutdown is Impacting Farmers appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

“In a challenging moment for farmers and the farm economy, the government shutdown will further destabilize – and in some cases stop – federal services that offer critical loans, disaster assistance, conservation funding, and more. The shutdown also threatens food safety, leaving states on the hook to fund food safety inspections once their cooperative agreements expire. With nearly half of all US Department of Agriculture (USDA) staff furloughed, farmers can expect limited services and delayed payments. These disruptions will worsen with time and be exacerbated if the Administration implements a ‘reduction-in-force’ plan to fire more USDA employees. NSAC encourages Congress and the President to set-aside finger pointing and work toward an agreement that brings stability to farmers and the communities they call home.”

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About the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC):

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is a grassroots alliance that advocates for federal policy reform supporting the long-term social, economic, and environmental sustainability of agriculture, natural resources, and rural communities. Learn more: https://sustainableagriculture.net/

The post Comment: NSAC Laments Government Shutdown as It Harms Farmers, Halts Progress appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

When Congress returned from its August recess, it faced a long to-do list and little time to act.

On the September list is to fund the government by September 30, when current funding expires for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and across the federal government. A failure to fund the government by September 30 would result in a government shutdown, significantly impacting USDA’s ability to serve farmers, ranchers, and stakeholders nationwide.

Meanwhile, Congress is now nearly 7 years removed from passing a full farm bill. Earlier this year, President Trump signed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB, P.L. 119-21) into law, which slashed SNAP benefits by nearly $186 billion and directly reinvested more than $50 billion of that to further increase farm subsidies to the largest, wealthiest farmers, while programs that support the vast majority of farmers and rural communities were excluded from the bill entirely. The inclusion of a handful of traditional farm bill programs in budget reconciliation has severely diminished the likelihood that Congress will pass a comprehensive and fair farm bill this year, or at all this Congress.

With all this in mind, this blog post analyzes fiscal year (FY) 2026 agriculture appropriations proposals in both the House and Senate, the prospects of a government shutdown at the end of September, and whether a farm bill may move later this year.

FY2026 Agriculture Appropriations

On June 23, 2025, the House Appropriations Committee approved – in a 35-27 party-line vote – its fiscal year (FY) 2026 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. Meanwhile, on August 1, 2025 the full Senate passed its version of the FY2026 Agriculture Appropriations bill with strong bipartisan support, 87-9.

At a high level, the Senate bill sets FY26 Agriculture spending at just over $27 billion and maintains level funding for numerous NSAC priorities. Meanwhile, the House bill sets FY26 Agriculture spending at $25.5 billion, reducing funding for critical programs that serve farmers and their communities. The House bill also includes harmful policy riders that would prevent implementation of three rules designed to promote fair competition for livestock farmers under the Packers and Stockyards Act, as well as any similar rulemaking effort (Section 729), and prevents any funding for efforts related to Executive Order 13985, which seeks to advance racial equity and support for underserved communities through the USDA (Sec. 755). 

Both the Senate and House bills include language relevant to the proposed USDA reorganization. In Sec. 746 of the House bill and Sec. 750 of the Senate bill, the following language appears:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds available to the Department of Agriculture may be used to move any staff office or any agency from the mission area in which it was located on August 1, 2018, to any other mission area or office within the Department in the absence of the enactment of specific legislation affirming such move.

Separately, during the full Senate’s consideration of its bill, Senators voted on an amendment led by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that would have prevented the reorganization until USDA had: collected public input from stakeholders on the reorganization; conducted and made public a benefit-cost analysis; and required a report on how USDA would maintain staff expertise throughout the reorganization. While many members of Congress have spoken out with concerns about the USDA reorganization, the amendment ultimately failed 42-53 along party lines, with the exception of two Senators from Colorado joining all Republicans in opposing the amendment.

Conservation, Energy and Environment

One of the most notable areas where the House and Senate FY26 appropriations bills diverge in funding is for Conservation Technical Assistance. In the Senate, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Conservation Operations account – 85% of which funds NRCS staff capacity and partnerships with third party conservation organizations through the Conservation Technical Assistance (CTA) program – comes in at $895.75 million. The bill reserves $775.495 million of the Conservation Operations funding for CTA. Conservation Operations saw a $26 million cut in overall funding from FY23 to FY24, and the proposed FY25 Senate funding level would bring Conservation Operations funding well above its FY23 levels, but still well below the $1.2 billion that NSAC and dozens of other conservation organizations requested. 

The Senate bill reserves $10 million from the CTA funding pool for the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative (GLCI), maintaining its current funding level. GLCI – which promotes high quality livestock grazing techniques – was funded at $10 million in FY2024 and FY2025. The Senate’s number of $10 million is an important counter to the House proposal, which has zeroed-out funding for GLCI the past several fiscal years, and NSAC is thrilled to see support for such a valuable program. We hope that continued leadership in the Senate can lead to a restoration of GLCI funding in future years to its historic levels of nearly $30 million.

The House bill, on the other hand, funds Conservation Operations at $850 million, more than $45 million below both current funding levels and the Senate proposal. It also rescinds an additional $50 million of unspent funding allocated in previous fiscal years through a rider (Sec. 765). Funding for CTA in the House bill is $705 million, a nearly $70 million cut from current funding levels, showing that the majority of funding cuts by House appropriators for Conservation Operations are directed at CTA. As noted above, the House continues to attempt to zero out funding for GLCI in FY25, despite the growing popularity of grass-based systems among new farmers and ranchers.

Research and Organics

The House and Senate bills do not differ significantly on sustainable and organic research, though there are noticeable differences in the report language accompanying the bills, including the Senate’s emphasis on the important role sustainable and organic research programs play in building agricultural resilience.   

The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SARE) receives $48 million in funding in the Senate’s proposal, level with FY24’s enacted level but still below SARE’s funding of $50 million in FY23. While NSAC is pleased to see no further funding cuts to SARE in the Senate proposal, we are disappointed that the Senate bill did not restore SARE’s funding to FY23 levels. The failure to restore SARE’s funding has a compounding impact as applicants continue to be turned away from the program for lack of sufficient funding. 

SARE provides farmers and researchers with vital opportunities to better understand agricultural systems and increase profitability.The current demand for sustainable agriculture solutions far outweighs available resources. According to SARE’s most recent 2023-2024 Biennial Report From the Field, less than 40% of Farmer Rancher Grant proposals were able to receive funding between 2022-2023. The Committee also included report language on SARE regarding its important work on soil health:

“The Committee appreciates the work SARE has done to improve soil health through cutting edge research, education, and extension on cover crops, diversified rotations, and managed grazing. The Committee expects the funding provided to be focused on increasing agricultural resilience, including, where appropriate, interdisciplinary systems research and education, farmer and rancher research and demonstration grants, and graduate student research grants.”

Elsewhere within the purview of USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics (REE) Mission Area, a number of priorities important to NSAC members received level funding in the Senate bill. The Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI) did not receive any discretionary funding on top of its mandatory authorization level of $50 million, continuing a trend in recent years. The Organic Transitions Program (ORG) received level funding of $7.5 million. The Committee included report language highlighting the importance of organic research and the need for more organic research across USDA REE. 

“Organic Research.—USDA’s National Organic Standards Board [NOSB] has identified key organic research priorities, many of which would help to address challenges that have limited the growth in organic production in this country. The Committee encourages NIFA to give strong consideration to the NOSB organic research priorities when crafting the fiscal year 2026 Request for Applications for AFRI and the Organic Transition Program. Given the growing demand for organic products, the Committee also encourages USDA to increase the number of organic research projects funded under AFRI and the Specialty Crop Research Initiative.”

The Senate bill does not provide any additional discretionary funding for the Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach Grant Program (FOTO), which includes both the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program and Outreach and Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers (Sec. 2501). While FOTO receives $50 million in mandatory funding that is unaffected by annual appropriations, the program has also received additional discretionary appropriations each year between FY20 – FY23, which NSAC members have strongly supported.

As opposed to the Senate’s approach to mostly level-fund key sustainable and organic research and education programs, NSAC is disappointed to see SARE receive $40 million in funding through the House proposal, an $8 million cut to FY24’s enacted level. Over the past several years the House has continuously worked to cut funding for SARE, despite the program’s wide popularity among farmers and ranchers. In House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Andy Harris’ (R-MD-1) home state of Maryland alone, over 7,000 farmers have participated in SARE since 2020. 

Similar to past years, the House bill attempts to remove funding for USDA’s Climate Hubs. The House bill also treats OREI and ORG the same as the Senate, and includes some report language recognizing the value of organic research:

“Organic Agriculture Research.—The Committee encourages NIFA to consider the USDA National Organic Standards Board organic research priorities when crafting future AFRI Requests for Applications. Given the growing demand for organic products, the Committee also encourages NIFA to continue organic research projects funded under AFRI.

Similar to the Senate, the House bill does not provide any additional funding for FOTO.

Local and Regional Food Systems

The Senate and the House continue to prioritize funding for local and regional food systems at different levels. 

The Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), created in the 2018 Farm Bill, is USDA’s primary funding source for local and regional food system initiatives across the country. LAMP is a combination of the Value-Added Producer Grant Program (VAPG), the Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Program (FMLFPP), and the Regional Food System Partnership Program. Combined, they invest in processing, distribution, and marketing of local foods. 

The Senate and the House have consistently funded FMLFPP; both provide the maximum authorization of $7.4 million to be split between the two programs, which is level funding from FY25. While the Senate maintains strong support for producer grants, authorizing $11.5 million for VAPG, the House proposes a significantly lower level of $5 million. The House’s sizable proposed cut in funding for the program is a new trend; they proposed the same in FY25. A decrease in funding for VAPG would have a greater impact this year compared to previous due to the increase in popularity of the program. Earlier this year, VAPG implemented a new grant application process that seeks to remove barriers for producer applicants. It is demonstrating initial success; Rural Development staff shared that the number of applicants nearly doubled. 

The Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP) is another impactful program addressing community food security through local producer networks in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Since OUAIP received its first appropriation in 2020, it has invested over $85 million in 199 grants and 146 cooperative agreements to increase the capacity of agricultural production and municipal composting initiatives in local communities across 43 states and Puerto Rico. Yet, the office remains unable to meet its full potential due to Congress continuously underfunding it. While authorized at $25 million annually, the Senate includes only $6 million – a decrease from $7M in FY25; and an even greater decrease from $8.5 in FY23. The House includes $4 million, as a result of Congressman Mark Alford (R-MO-4) including an amendment during markup, after initially being completely left out of the bill with zero funding. These levels are simply insufficient to meet program demand. We recommend significant increases to fund more than 14% of projects – the cumulative award average as of last year.

Government Shutdown

Despite a decent amount of progress – albeit behind schedule – on FY2026 agriculture appropriations, there nevertheless remains a significant possibility of a government shutdown beginning October 1, 2025.

Negotiations on government funding beyond September 30 are developing by the minute and as of posting this blog, it appears possible – though not certain – that the federal government will shutdown for an undetermined period of time beginning October 1. So what, exactly, would a government shutdown mean for agriculture?

Each agency and department throughout the federal government, including USDA, is required to develop a government shutdown contingency plan, available here. 

While USDA will need to keep a number of employees working to handle critical functions, non-essential programs will be forced to a halt. In the past, essential activities have included but were not limited to: food safety inspections, wildfire suppression, nutrition assistance programs, and monitoring imports for pests and diseases. The number of employees that will be furloughed will depend on how long the shutdown lasts. 

In particular, we anticipate that a shutdown would adversely impact farmers and ranchers who rely on county-level USDA offices of the Farm Service Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. These local offices – many of which are already strapped due to the ongoing USDA staffing crisis – would close, and while the impact from the closures may not be felt immediately, the longer the shutdown runs, the more acutely farmers and stakeholders will feel the impact.

Farm Bill

As many of our readers will know, Congress has not passed a full farm bill since December 2018. While OBBB – which was signed into law in July 2025 – included some components of a traditional full farm bill, it excluded many programs that support the vast majority of farmers and rural communities. This calculated move effectively ended a decades-long era in which federal farm bills were passed by coupling nutrition assistance and farm programs, raising legitimate questions of how, or even whether, future farm bills might pass Congress.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “G.T.” Thompson (R-PA-15) has indicated that he would like the House to approve a farm bill this fall, yet there is no clear path to accomplish that goal in the House of Representatives let alone Congress as a whole, nor has there been concrete evidence of a timeline or commitment to enacting a bipartisan farm bill anytime soon. On the other side of the US Capitol, there has yet been no indication that the Senate has the capacity or appetite to advance a new farm bill this fall.

Even amidst this uncertainty, some truths remain constant. Congress must pass an extension of the 2018 Farm Bill by September 30, 2025 or December 31, 2025 at the very latest, in order to prevent critical programs’ lapsing authorization. More broadly, for a farm bill to become law this year, it must meet the high bar of a good farm bill. The bill should move our food and farm system forward by meaningfully supporting family farmers and their communities while addressing OBBB’s impact on families and individuals.

The post September in Washington, DC: FY26 Appropriations, Shutdown, and Farm Bill appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

On July 24, 2025, US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released a memo (SM-1078-015) describing the planned reorganization of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) staff. This reorganization plan was drafted without any consultation with farmers or other stakeholders. While the reorganization plan does not directly include planned layoffs or reductions in force (RIF), USDA has already lost at least 18,000 staff since January 2025. If the reorganization moves forward as planned, it will likely result in the loss of thousands more staff. 

After swift bipartisan pushback to the proposed reorganization, USDA opened an impromptu and unofficial public comment opportunity. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) encourages organizations and individuals to submit their comments, questions, and concerns regarding the reorganization to USDA at reorganization@usda.gov by September 30, 2025. NSAC also notes our concern that the opportunity for public comment has not been formally provided through the Federal Register, as is standard practice for proposals of this scope.

The dedicated USDA staff powers the Department to meet its mission to serve farmers and other stakeholders. Unfortunately, recent history shows that staffing losses directly reduce and delay USDA’s services to stakeholders. When USDA relocated the Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) offices in 2019, the agencies lost more than half of their staff. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), these staff losses cut the number of reports and articles generated by ERS staff in half, led to the loss or delay of several vital industry reports, and led to delays and suspensions of several grant programs and payments. It has taken years for the agencies to rebuild their capacity and attempt to replace the lost institutional knowledge needed to serve American agriculture and stakeholders. USDA must avoid replicating the problems of these previous staffing disruptions and further exacerbating the already ongoing staffing crisis at the agency. 

This is the first blog post in a series discussing the loss of USDA staff since January 2025 and the expected impacts of the proposed USDA reorganization across issue areas. This post sets the stage by examining the overall department staffing losses and the losses experienced by each state.  

USDA Staff Work in Your Communities

In recent years, USDA staffing numbers have hovered around 100,000 employees. In September 2024, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) reported that USDA had 98,473 employees. Across Republican and Democratic administrations, USDA staffing levels have remained fairly consistent – George W. Bush oversaw the department’s largest workforce, while Obama trimmed it back – until the Trump administration broke sharply with precedent by presiding over recent steep cuts. The first Trump administration saw a historical low in USDA-wide staffing in September 2019 following the relocation of both the ERS and NIFA from Washington, DC to Kansas City, MO. While staffing levels recovered slightly during the Biden administration, they remained below typical levels, and the department has had little time to rebuild the lost institutional knowledge and relationships with stakeholders. 

Figure 1: USDA Staffing Levels

• Data from the Office of Personnel Management

USDA staff work in every US state and territory, as shown in Figure 2 below. Only approximately 4.6% of USDA employees are located in the capital region, with the rest of the department staff spread across the country, working closely with farmers, ranchers, and stakeholders. 

While the reorganization memo claims that major disruptions are justified to bring “the USDA closer to its customers,” the reality is that the overwhelming majority of USDA staff are already living and working outside the capital region. 

Figure 2: USDA Staff by State

• An additional 1,063 USDA staff work throughout the US, but their location was suppressed by OPM to protect employee privacy; 794 USDA employees work in US territories, and 336 outside the US. 

USDA Staff Has Already Been Gutted

USDA has already lost at least 18,000 staff since January 2025. More than 15,000 USDA employees left the department through DOGE’s so-called Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). The DRP offered federal employees fully paid administrative leave through September 2025 if employees voluntarily resigned from their positions. Approximately 3,876 USDA employees accepted DOGE’s first round DRP offer, and an additional 11,298 USDA employees resigned in the second round of DRP. Many of these employees have years of experience and irreplaceable expertise. 

In addition to staff who have resigned through DRP, approximately 2,827 USDA staff members separated from the Department between January and March 2025, according to OPM. These separations include employees who quit, experienced a “reduction in force”, retired (early, voluntary, or for disability), were terminated due to an expired appointment or contract, transferred out, or had some other separation from the department. The separated employees have an average length of service of more than 12.4 years, with 38% of separated employees having more than ten years of service. 

The table below shows the number of employees in each USDA agency, the number who accepted the deferred resignation offer, and the number of other separated employees. 

Table 1: USDA Deferred Resignation and Separations by Agency

1. The DRP data differentiates between general FSA employees and FSA county employees; FSA county employees are typically not general service employees.

Every agency at USDA has experienced staff resignations and separations. Some have been hit particularly hard, like the Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement (OPPE), losing 53% of its staff to DRP and separations, Rural Development losing 36% of its staff, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) losing 22% of its staff. Reasons for these disparities are not fully understood. Future posts in this series will explore these agency losses and impacts in greater depth. 

Staff Losses Are In Your Communities

Despite claiming to prioritize serving farmers and to “bring USDA closer to its customers”, 94% of USDA employees who resigned were located outside of Washington, DC. Every state and territory lost USDA staff during DRP, as the map below shows, and every state except three (Hawaii, Oregon, and California) had more than 10% of its USDA staff resign. 

Figure 3: USDA Staff Losses by State

• An additional 73 USDA staff in US territories also accepted the Deferred Resignation Program

Like resignations, 94% of the separations between January and March 2025 were outside of Washington, DC. Every US state and territory had USDA staff separate between January and March 2025, adding to the loss of vital USDA staff. 

Reorganization Will Further Undermine USDA Services

USDA staff are dedicated public servants who support America’s farmers, ranchers, and rural communities. They work in every state and territory and bring their expertise and energy to tackling some of America’s greatest challenges. 

Since January 2025, USDA has already lost at least 18,000 employees. These staff losses mean less capacity to serve farmers and rural communities. The major staff losses experienced during the previous relocation of ERS and NIFA led directly to lost productivity and poor service to stakeholders. Those agencies lost their most experienced staff, and it took years to rebuild their internal capacity. 

The USDA is already experiencing a staffing crisis which means longer wait times for farmers and widespread cutbacks to programs serving American agriculture. The reorganization of USDA will further devastate the department’s workforce and ability to fulfill its mission to serve farmers and rural communities. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has said that she expects between 50-70% of USDA staff to accept the relocation required by reorganization, indicating that thousands of experienced and knowledgeable staff may soon choose to leave the Department, further undermining USDA’s ability to provide vital services to stakeholders.

The post USDA Staffing Crisis: Mass Departures Undermine Local Ag Support appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Nourish Colorado, an NSAC member. This is part three of a five part series. See part one, Budget Reconciliation: An Unwanted Outcome for Coloradans, and part two, Impacts of Budget Reconciliation and Coloradans’ Health.

“Welcome” is an odd word to use to begin this post, given the profoundly and universally negative information we’re here to convey. Thank you for being here with us and reading along! This series elevates the many damaging impacts of the recently passed budget reconciliation bill, referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”. The more we can share accurate information about what is going on, the more effective we will collectively be in changing these policies! Our third blog post in this series focuses on some of the ways this new law hurts farmers and farming communities. (If you haven’t yet, catch up on our first and second posts in the series.)   

At a high-level, this bill: 

• Will increase subsidies for large commodity growers; 
• Includes little to no supports for small, diversified, and local agriculture; 
• Makes drastic cuts to programs like SNAP and SNAP-Ed that connect more households to growers and help keep dollars local; and
• Ultimately delays the passage of a comprehensive, forward-looking, bipartisan farm bill.  

Farm Bill Catch-Up

Budget reconciliation, as a reminder, barely passed out of the Senate and House, with all Democrats in both chambers voting against it. The bill pays for tax breaks and commodity subsidies by cutting SNAP.  In so doing, it has bypassed, perhaps for years, the opportunity for the government to draft a bipartisan farm bill that reflects the many needs of rural and urban communities across the country. For many decades, the “Farm Bill Coalition” of Democrats and Republicans have worked together to draft and adopt a farm bill every five years or so that supports agriculture big and small, conservation, rural issues, and nutrition assistance. The farm bill, like all major legislative policies, requires 60 votes in the Senate to pass, meaning it must be bipartisan in nature. Legislators have long worked together to make sure many priorities are included so that the government can keep on functioning for the American people. In contrast, the budget reconciliation bill needed only 51% to pass, making it highly partisan with the majority party (Republicans) able to push through legislation without needing bipartisan support.

With the inclusion of so many farm bill provisions in budget reconciliation and the complete abandonment of bipartisan policy-making, this process means we may not see a complete, new farm bill until we have a new Congress. The 2018 Farm Bill has already been extended twice. These kinds of delays in changing or improving government programs hurt ALL sizes and shapes of agriculture and clearly will result in increased food insecurity. In the absence of a new farm bill, and to sustain most farm bill programs in any capacity, Congress must now pass an extension (again!) of the current bill before the end of the year.  

How Cutting Nutrition Assistance Hurts Farm Communities

Much has been written about the economic impact of SNAP – every dollar of SNAP generates between $1.50-$1.80 in economic activity.  This is critical – food dollars benefit farmers, and the more food dollars one has, the more benefits farmers reap. The House Agriculture Committee released an analysis of budget reconciliation that summarizes the impacts that cutting SNAP will have on farm country.They point out how 25 cents on every dollar spent on food (whether SNAP or otherwise) goes to a farmer, and for every dollar cut from a person’s SNAP benefits, food purchases will decrease. Cuts have a compounding effect on SNAP food purchases, leading the House Ag Committee to estimate that this new law will eliminate $30 billion in farm revenue due to SNAP cuts alone.  

To better understand the compounding effects here in Colorado, let’s dive deeper. The loss of food dollars through SNAP alone will decrease farm sales, and in Colorado, SNAP is the foundation of two SNAP incentive programs – Double Up Food Bucks and the USDA pilot program Colorado SNAP Produce Bonus, which has over a 99% redemption rate. Collectively, these produce incentives for SNAP shoppers are available at over 150 locations and over 250 farmers accept payments from one or the other of these incentives. Farmers markets, and retailers that gain critical income from SNAP and SNAP incentives will lose customers from decreases in SNAP participation. Compounding this loss is the elimination of SNAP-Education, which has for over 10 years connected limited-income households with their local food system by supporting programs like Double Up, offering shopping tours at farmers markets, and integrating local and seasonal produce into cooking classes. The farm bill is the only mechanism to not only sustain sufficient SNAP benefits, but also to restore SNAP-Ed and secure the future of high-ROI SNAP incentive programs.  Laurel Smith, owner of Here & Now Farm in Wellington, CO, sums up this damage to farmers such as herself: 

“Like many people, I became a farmer because I wanted to feed people—not just middle- or high-income people, but everyone who wants to eat fresh fruits and vegetables. One way I can make sure this is possible is to accept SNAP payments. And since I run a pilot program called Colorado SNAP Produce Bonus, SNAP shoppers can get up to $60/month in additional produce from my farm for free—a healthy food incentive. But all this is in jeopardy since the passage of the budget reconciliation bill. I am furious that almost 300,000 Coloradans might lose some or all of their SNAP in years ahead. Farmers like me will see that revenue stream shrink and we’ll lose some of our favorite customers. Economists have shown that when someone shops with SNAP, it has a significant impact on our local economies. Why would we take that? These are programs that we dreamed up as a society. We asked our legislators for them, and we designed them into existence. For generations, we made changes to these types of programs through the Farm Bill instead of rushing bad ideas through budget committees. A proper farm bill is where we’ll be able to decide to keep Colorado SNAP Produce Bonus going past 2027. Many farmers I know are unhappy with our representatives who voted this appalling bill through, and we’ll be fighting for ways to rebuild a robust SNAP program for the communities we live in and love.”

A Multitude of Attacks on Farm and Food Systems 

The budget reconciliation bill, referred to by the University of Illinois’ farmdoc policy analysts as the “Reconciliation Farm Bill”, wreaks much more havoc for farmers big and small than simply decreasing revenue through SNAP. Analysts opened farmdoc’s recent blog, The Reconciliation Farm Bill: The Top Five Most Problematic Changes to Farm Policy, thusly: “Were it not for the protective cover of the budget reconciliation process and its fundamental warping of the deliberative process as designed in the Constitution, it is extremely unlikely that these five changes would have become law.”  

In its comprehensive overview of impacts on farms and farm systems, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) calls attention to the significant expansion of farm subsidy programs, all benefiting large commodity growers and corporations, and paid for by cuts to SNAP. NSAC elevates how the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the increases in subsidies through the nation’s largest loss, in addition to risk coverage payout programs for commodity crops (which do not include fruit and vegetable crops), will cost over $54 billion over the next 10 years. Given that only 27% of farm acres are enrolled in these programs and only 31% of farms are even eligible given their base acreage, these massive subsidies will not benefit most of America’s farmers. In moves that seem determined to widen the divide between large, commodity growers and smaller farmers, the bill does not expand access to crop insurance for most small to mid-sized, multi-crop, or direct marketing farms. 

The bill is a confusing mixed bag for on-farm conservation support as well. The major problem is that conservation programs need to be authorized and strengthened through an actual farm bill. Refer back to NSAC’s What’s Really Inside the Final Budget Reconciliation Bill: A Breakdown of Food and Agriculture Provisions for an extensive review of how the bill does not extend the authorization of the $2 billion Conservation Reserve Program (it needs a farm bill!!) but it does rescind unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds that were an unprecedented investment from the Biden Administration, including from the Conservation Stewardship Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, and Regional Conservation Partnership Program.  The bill also does not increase funding for programs such as the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program and the Organic Research and Extension Initiative. These are just a few examples of the types of programs that rely on a bipartisan farm bill for continuity and impact that will not experience support since the budget reconciliation seemingly picked and chose some agricultural provisions to support, and others to ignore.  

Bottom line, this process bypasses the decades-old Farm Bill Coalition and provides few opportunities for local efforts that support regional food systems and connections between nutrition assistance and farming communities.  Stick with us next week to read more about the unfortunate ways that cuts to SNAP hurt not just SNAP recipients, but impact many food assistance programs, leading to concerns for food security.

The post Cross Post: Impacts of Budget Reconciliation and Colorado Farms: Hurt for Farmers and Farm Communities, and the Need for a New Farm Bill appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB, P.L. 119-21) into law. Spanning nearly 900 pages of legislative text, OBBB relies on draconian cuts to the American social safety net – including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – in order to fund an extension of 2017 tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans.

While it is possible to cherry-pick certain provisions of OBBB that seem or may in fact be positive, the bill’s fundamental calculus – that it is ok to spite your neighbor if it puts you ahead – is deeply un-American. This is not who we are, or if it is who we are, it is not who we should be.

OBBB is antithetical to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s (NSAC) vision for a better food and farm system. The food and agriculture provisions of OBBB closely mimic the bill’s larger theme. The bill slashes SNAP benefits by nearly $186 billion – taking food off the plates of hungry children, seniors, and veterans – and directly reinvests more than $50 billion of that to further increase farm subsidies to the largest, wealthiest farmers, while programs that support the vast majority of farmers and rural communities are excluded from the bill entirely.

The remainder of this blog post offers an in-depth analysis of the process and key food and farm components of the final enacted version of OBBB.

Process

The journey toward passage of OBBB began in earnest following the November 2024 federal elections. The election outcome delivered a “trifecta” for the Republican party, giving them majority power in the House of Representatives and Senate, along with the White House. However, the Republican majority totaled only 53 votes in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to pass most legislation. This meant that Republicans would still need Democratic support in the Senate for most legislation, with the one exception being budget reconciliation.

The budget reconciliation process, an optional budget procedure that can alter spending, revenues, and the federal debt limit, was first established in the late 1970s and has been used dozens of times by both political parties since 1980. Reconciliation has primarily been used to cut federal spending, with one notable recent exception being the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Since the establishment of reconciliation, federal programs within the jurisdiction of the Congressional Agriculture Committees have been consistently targeted for cuts – through budget reconciliation, cuts to farm bill programs were made in 1982, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1996, and 2006. The scope of reductions in these past instances pales in comparison to those included in the final-passed OBBB.

In April 2025, the House and Senate adopted dueling budget resolutions, which served to kickstart the budget reconciliation process. The House resolution called for at least $230 billion worth of cuts to programs within the jurisdiction of the House Committee on Agriculture, while the Senate resolution called for at least $1 billion in cuts to programs within the jurisdiction of the Senate Agriculture Committee. In mid-May 2025, the House Committee on Agriculture unveiled and approved its budget reconciliation bill that slashed $294 billion from SNAP. In June 2025, the Senate released its version of the OBBB, cutting billions from SNAP, though not as drastically as the House version. However, the Senate’s bill closely mirrored the House’s approach to farm subsidies.

Following approval by the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, OBBB moved through congressional consideration, where the agriculture provisions originally introduced by those committees remained largely intact. The SNAP provisions in the bill were modified somewhat significantly by the Senate in the 11th hour in order to gain key Republican support, but the scope of cuts was not moderated at all. On July 1, the Senate voted 51-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, to approve an amended OBBB. On July 3, merely forty-eight hours later, the House of Representatives took up the Senate-amended version of OBBB, voting 218-214 to approve the bill and sending it to the President’s desk.

Key Notes

For the closest observers of federal food and agriculture policy, there are two aspects of the bill that NSAC has been closely tracking: a provision known as the “suspension of permanent law” and the resultant budget sequestration required following the enactment of OBBB.  

Sequestration

A sequester is the term used to describe an “automatic cancellation of previously enacted spending,” which makes funding cuts to nonexempt programs, activities, and accounts. Currently, sequestration is enforced through three laws: the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, the Budget Control Act of 2011, and the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 (PAYGO). In particular, PAYGO prevents “new revenue and mandatory spending legislation enacted during a session of Congress from increasing the net deficit”. If legislation is enacted that increases the net deficit, PAYGO “automatically [reduces] spending to achieve the required deficit neutrality”.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – a federal agency that provides Congress with objective, nonpartisan analysis of budgetary and economic issues – the enacted OBBB will increase federal deficits by $3.4 trillion between 2025-2034. By definition, this would trigger PAYGO sequestration in order to maintain deficit neutrality.

In May 2025, as CBO analyzed the House-passed OBBB, it had this to say:

After accounting for the reduction in Medicare spending, the required reduction in spending for other programs would exceed the estimated amount of resources available to those programs in each year over the 2027–2034 period. If [the Office of Management and Budget] sequestered all of the funding for those programs, the total amounts would be less than the reductions required by S-PAYGO.

In layman’s terms, OBBB increases the federal deficit so significantly that the size of the required sequestration would be larger than the programs subject to sequestration, meaning that unless sequestration is waived altogether, numerous USDA programs subject to sequestration would be completely wiped out for a period of time. USDA programs subject to sequestration span the Department and include, but are not limited to, those in the following agencies:

• Office of the Secretary
• National Institute of Food and Agriculture
• Agricultural Research Service
• Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
• Agricultural Marketing Service
• Risk Management Agency
• Farm Service Agency
• Natural Resources Conservation Service
• Food and Nutrition Service
• And more …

CBO outlines several options to avoid this catastrophe, including subsequent legislation that would offset the deficit increase, waiving the recordation of the bill’s effects on the scorecard, or mitigation or elimination of the statutory requirements. Congress must waive the PAYGO sequestration resulting from the passage of OBBB or risk eliminating funding for dozens of programs crucial to farmers and the communities they call home. 

Suspension of Permanent Law

One provision that was considered for inclusion in OBBB is known as the “suspension of permanent price support authority” or, more simply, the suspension of permanent law. This provision was included in the House-passed version of OBBB as well as the initial Senate-introduced version of OBBB.

What exactly is the suspension of permanent law? Historically, most farm bill programs have the same authorization date, which is another way to say that, with a few exceptions, the farm bill legally allows most programs to operate within the same time window. The expiration of that window is what prompts a new farm bill. 

If the suspension of permanent law provision had been included in the enacted OBBB, it would have effectively created two sets of authorization dates for “farm bill” programs. Some programs would have been authorized through 2031, while the rest of the farm bill programs would have had an authorization that runs through September 30, 2025. This would have left two sets of farm bill programs on different reauthorization timelines, making it more challenging than ever to extend the farm bill. Thankfully, however, this provision was excluded from the enacted version of OBBB after it failed to pass the Senate’s Byrd Rule Test.

There have been many questions about what the exclusion of this provision means for the future of the farm bill. The short answer is that the provisions’ exclusion from OBBB does not meaningfully move the needle toward accomplishing a farm bill anytime soon. Getting a farm bill done is an exceedingly complicated equation that cannot be solved with a single provision. However, it is nonetheless positive that the suspension of permanent law provision was excluded because it more or less keeps commodity programs on the same “reauthorization” timeline as many farm programs across other titles – from rural development, horticulture, and research to miscellaneous and the Conservation Reserve Program. This is important because it will likely make it easier to accomplish a farm bill extension while also going a long way towards ensuring that OBBB is not the farm bill because Congress will now be forced to stave off a reversion to permanent law each year. For the majority of farm bill programs, it is fundamentally important that Congress pass an extension of the 2018 Farm Bill by September 30, 2025 or December 31, 2025 at the very latest, in order to prevent those programs’ lapsing. Stay tuned to NSAC’s blog for more on this soon.

Detailed OBBB Analysis

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

The final law reflects a number of changes to the originally proposed provisions for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, while still maintaining its primary focus on restricting future updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, adjusting participation requirements, and requiring historical and significant cost sharing from states. The implementation timeline of the changes in Subtitle A (Nutrition) varies across provisions and is noted accordingly. 

The final law limits future updates to the Thrifty Food Plan, which is the calculation used to define the value of groceries for SNAP participants. However, no updates are allowed before October 1, 2027, and any future update must remain cost-neutral. Additional flexibilities to adjust the value of benefits based on household size have been defined in statute for the first time (Section 10101). 

The proposed state cost-share requirements created significant controversy within the Senate and were initially challenged by the Parliamentarian. The final law requires states to cover more of the administrative costs of the program, increasing the state’s share from 50% to 75%, taking effect October 1, 2027 (Section 10106). It also establishes a new state match requirement for the cost of the food benefit based on the state’s payment error rate (Section 10105). If states maintain a payment error rate less than 6%, the entirety of the cost of the food benefit is covered by federal funding. According to analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only one state has achieved a payment error rate below 6% since 2003. Therefore, it is expected that almost all states will be faced with new annual costs. As a state’s payment error rate increases, the required state funding contribution increases incrementally. If the error rate is: 

• greater than 6% but less than 8%, the state contributes 5%.
• greater than 8% but less than 10%, the state contributes 10%.
• greater than 10%, the state contributes 15%. 

To put this into perspective, North Carolina had a 10.21% payment error rate in FY2024. This would put them in the highest contribution category, and it is estimated it would cost the state $438 million to continue at the current SNAP benefit levels. 

The new cost share requirements for states go into effect on October 1, 2027; however, they can be further delayed if the state has an exceptionally high payment error rate. To determine the state’s initial cost share, they will choose the payment error rate from either fiscal year (FY) 2025 or FY2026. Beyond FY2028, states will use the payment error rate for the third preceding year; for example, for FY2029, the state’s payment error rate for FY2026 will be used to determine the cost share requirements. 

All states are bracing for the new state cost share requirements. They will inconsistently affect food-insecure families with disproportionate impacts in states with higher levels of poverty, only exacerbating existing inequities. However, the final law includes a number of provisions that will almost immediately restrict access to food benefits and nutrition education. One in particular is the elimination of the National Education and Obesity Prevention Grant program, often referred to as SNAP-Ed. These programs coincide with the provision of SNAP benefits to encourage nutritious food choices. Their implementation can reflect the unique geographic and cultural needs within a state, often equipping families with the knowledge and skills to prepare nutritious and unfamiliar foods, providing nutrition education and how to cook with their health in mind, and encouraging shopping at local farmers markets. Many changes to SNAP have timelines that allow for a transition period; however, this elimination will take effect beginning October 1, 2025 (Section 10107). 

Other changes to SNAP will restrict who can receive benefits and how much they can receive. These include changes to work requirements, how states can be exempted from those requirements, and how household income and expenses are determined, all of which can take effect immediately (Sections 10102, 10103,10104, and 10108). 

Taken altogether, the changes to SNAP will undoubtedly affect millions of individuals nationwide, with rural areas expected to be the most impacted. The full extent of harm is still unknown since cuts to SNAP will be compounded by other cuts to Medicaid. Families will face increased costs across the board, and states will have fewer resources to help. 

Commodity and Crop Insurance

The final law maintains all provisions initially passed by the House of Representatives (with only trivial adjustments) to substantially raise farm subsidies for some farm operations. Direct payments to farmers from the two major commodity programs – Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) – are triggered when commodity market prices fall below statutory “reference prices” under PLC, which are established per eligible crop, or a “benchmark revenue guarantee” under ARC. In short, the law raises those reference prices and the benchmark revenue guarantee. This means that shifting commodity prices will fall below the statutory floor and trigger payments to farmers with greater frequency. 

Specifically, Section 10301 boasts an immediate increase to PLC reference prices for each commodity by 10 to 20%, in addition to an annual 0.5% adjustment beginning in 2031 up to 113% of the updated statutory reference price. Section 10305 boosts ARC revenue guarantees from 86% to 90% of a farmer’s average individual or county revenue, as well as authorizing a higher payment factor. Notably, while eligible farmers choose to enroll in either ARC or PLC (but not both) annually, the Senate included a provision that such producers will automatically receive the higher of ARC or PLC payments for crop year 2025.

The nonpartisan CBO has said that the increase to PLC reference prices alone will cost $50.5 billion and that elevated ARC payments will cost $3.6 billion over 10 years. Despite the enormous price tag – paid for by cuts to SNAP – just 27% of US farm acres are enrolled in ARC and PLC, and only 31% are eligible given their possession of “base acres.” Base acre enrollment was first available for acres planted to covered commodities, which do not include specialty crops, in 1996, with limited voluntary updates since then. This means very few farms will benefit from the bill’s most expensive agriculture provisions. 

Section 10302 of the bill authorizes enrollment of up to 30 million additional base acres nationwide “as soon as [is] practicable.” For reference, this is roughly the number of farmland acres in Iowa. While the manner of implementation will determine this provision’s impact, it is likely that the option to update base will be most accessible to farmers with existing base acres that have acquired new acreage. Farmers growing fruits and vegetables – among them, most small and direct-market farms – are still not eligible for base acres or commodity program enrollment. Even if a small farm that grows an eligible commodity manages to enroll base acres, it would see inconsequential payments from ARC or PLC; the value of these programs is designed to scale with acreage. 

To exacerbate the spectacle of winners and losers, OBBB eviscerates historically bipartisan payment limits and means tests intended to curb waste, fraud, and abuse in farm subsidy programs. Longstanding law placed a $125,000 cap on the amount that a farmer – deemed actively engaged in the labor or management of a farm – may receive annually, or double that amount if married. Loopholes already constrain the effectiveness of the payment limit, including a recent exemption for all family farms from the actively engaged requirement – roughly 97% of farms. This means that nuclear family members, as well as cousins, nieces, and nephews, are automatically considered to be “actively engaged” and thus eligible to receive up to $125,000 irrespective of their actual involvement with the farm. Section 10307 of the Act raises the aforementioned cap to $155,000, while also authorizing annual adjustments for inflation. Perhaps more consequential, the law extends the “actively engaged” exemption to farms organized as S-corporations and limited liability companies (Section 10306). This is posed to expand eligibility for farm payments to board members and absent landowners, regardless of their labor or management contributions, far from the spirit of supporting farmers with dirt under their fingernails. 

Further, under longstanding law, farm operations with an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) above $900,000 are not eligible for most subsidies. Historically, this “means test” stems from a bipartisan consensus that any farm business with a robust profit margin – almost $1 million – does not need to be bailed out by the American taxpayer. Although loopholes exist, such as dividing a large farm into multiple entities on paper (“paper farms”), OBBB takes it further.  It completely exempts farmers who earn 75% or more of their income from farming from the means test with respect to payments from disaster and conservation programs (Section 10308). Incomplete public data makes it impossible to know how many farms this impacts, but 77% of farm household income is derived from off-farm income, and even large commercial farms (with a Gross Farm Income beyond $350,000) receive on average 74% of their income from off-farm sources. Further, USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) has published aggregate data suggesting only large-scale farms, with total incomes well above the US median income, will benefit from this waiver.

While Congress has routinely made this exemption when authorizing supplemental disaster relief, its permanence will perpetuate the disproportionate distribution of taxpayer-funded payments to farms in states with the most acres planted to commodities. 

The application of this AGI waiver to conservation programs is particularly troubling. Coupled with large program budget increases (discussed below) and recent aggressive reductions in total staff capacity at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), this waiver offers a sinister release valve for field staff facing mounting pressure to spend down their state’s annual program budgets. With more dollars and fewer hands on deck at NRCS to address the long line of farms trying to access funds, many states may opt to prioritize working with larger farms in hopes of writing larger contracts, thereby getting more money out the door, faster. Many NSAC members report anecdotally that this philosophy is often present at NRCS state offices, even in times of higher staff capacity. Passing this waiver into law now would allow more of the largest farms in each state to access conservation programs for the first time, increasing the risk that new investments in each program will flow to a small number of the largest, most well-resourced producers, rather than to the current backlog of producers that have been waiting to enroll.

Finally, OBBB includes no meaningful provisions to expand access to crop insurance for a majority of small to mid-sized, multi-crop, or direct marketing farms. While it does authorize an expanded premium discount for beginning farmers (Section 10501), that provision alone fails to remove any of the most persistent administrative barriers to enrollment across crop insurance programs, including paperwork and compensation metrics that disincentivize crop insurance agents to write policies for small farms. To similar ends, Sections 10504 and 10502 marginally expand coverage levels for catastrophic policies and authorize expanded premium discounts for the Supplemental Coverage Option, but these changes will not reach the 73.5% of farms with cropland that are not enrolled in the Federal Crop Insurance Program. 

Private insurance companies stand to benefit most from the limited crop insurance provisions in the bill. While the Government Accountability Office has found on several occasions that federal payments to Approved Insurance Providers (AIPs) contribute to spending waste or exceed what may be considered a reasonable amount based on market necessities, the law authorizes a range of new subsidies for AIPs. For example, Section 10503 authorizes an additional subsidy equal to 6% of companies’ net book premiums as well as annual inflation adjustments to all contracts covering commodities that were subject to an increase between 2011-2015 – a highly specific provision may exclude Whole-Farm Revenue Protection from the bonus, which only began as a pilot in 2015. Under current law, subsidies for administrative and operative expenses to AIPs already amount to almost $4 billion annually – and sometimes surpass annual payments to farmers.

Conservation 

In Section 10601, OBBB rescinds unobligated Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funds within the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), and Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP). The bill increases permanent baseline funding for these same conservation programs. Over the 10-year budget window used to score the bill, each program’s budget authority will be:

• CSP – $13.6 billion, a 36% increase 
• EQIP – $31.55 billion, a 55% increase
• ACEP – $6.85 billion, a 26% increase
• RCPP – $4.475 billion, a 49% increase

Since this package increases permanent baseline authority for these conservation programs, it creates a long-term investment in each program that will last long beyond the 10-year budget window of this reconciliation package. This will ensure tens of billions of extra dollars in conservation funding in the coming decades and any future farm bill, a long overdue investment NSAC has advocated for. It is worth noting that this investment could have been accomplished during recent government funding negotiations or in a fully reauthorized farm bill; reconciliation was not the only path to achieving this investment.

Notably, these totals and percentages mark a reprioritization of available funding across these four programs. Previously, the IRA had overinvested in RCPP, creating $2.4 billion in additional budget authority in FY26 alone, a roughly eight-fold increase over RCPP’s farm bill budget of $300 million for that same year. The redistribution of funds codified in the bill corrects this, shifting a greater portion of funding into CSP and EQIP, programs that contract directly with farmers and have seen similarly high oversubscription rates in recent years, even with additional IRA funds available. This redistribution is generally positive, though with similarly high oversubscription in both CSP and EQIP, NSAC maintains that a more balanced distribution of funding between CSP and EQIP would better serve producers, particularly the most innovative conservation farmers who have led the way for our nation in building systems of stewardship on their operations.

Despite these positive investments in conservation, OBBB abandons targeted support for practices that help farmers deal with the impacts of climate change and increasingly severe weather that were a component of the original Inflation Reduction Act investments. All Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry (CSAF) practices are popular, classic conservation practices – such as cover crops, rotational grazing, and reduced tillage – that first and foremost address non-climate resource concerns on farms, such as water quality, erosion, soil health, and wildlife habitat. However, CSAF practices also have the added benefit of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or sequestering carbon and building agricultural resilience to the impacts of severe weather – something that is not true of all conservation practices that NRCS supports. Making climate targeting a permanent part of conservation programs would have ensured that the most popular practices that address multiple resource concerns, including climate change, had dedicated funding. 

Finally, it’s worth noting one significant thing this bill did not do – extend the authorization for the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). One of the largest conservation programs in the country, authorized by Congress to restore wildlife habitat on 27 million acres of land at a time, CRP’s statutory authority is set to expire at the end of September when this fiscal year concludes. What that means is the Farm Service Agency (FSA) will lose the ability to enroll new acres of any kind in the program. Acres are typically enrolled for 10-15 years at a time, so without further action from Congress, expiring contracts will begin to shrink the footprint of the program across the country. Allowing CRP’s authorization to expire will deny farmers a key conservation tool for rebuilding soil health on their operations, take away an option for solidifying cash flow on marginal acres, and gradually shrink wildlife habitat acreage across the landscape. CRP is not the only farm bill program in this position, though with an annual budget of almost $2 billion, it may be the largest program poised to experience this disruption.

Research

OBBB will increase mandatory funding for Scholarships for Students at 1890 Institutions (1890 Scholarships) from $40,000,000 to $60,000,000 to remain available until expended. Of note, this program is considered a “stranded” program in the farm bill and has not been issued any new funding since September 2024. In addition, this bill significantly increases mandatory funding for the Specialty Crops Research Initiative (SCRI), scaling up funding from $80,000,000 in FY25 to $175,000,000 in FY26. This increase in funding for SCRI is only for FY26, and would revert to $80,000,000 in FY27 without a commensurate change in a new farm bill or a second reconciliation package.

Unfortunately, however, OBBB does not increase funding for a variety of critical programs, like the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SARE) and the Organic Research and Extension Initiative (OREI), that provide more direct funding for organic and sustainable agriculture research. Nor does the bill address the many education and training programs – like the Food Safety Outreach Program or the Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach program – which provide critical education and technical assistance for small and mid-sized farms navigating new markets and regulatory requirements. The current demand for sustainable agriculture solutions far outweighs available resources. Increased funding for these programs in a full, bipartisan farm bill would play a critical role in helping farmer-driven research keep pace with the growing challenges related to the state of the rural economy, soil health, and competitiveness of American producers, and helping smaller-scale and next-generation farmers access new markets.

Stranded Programs

Funding for programs without farm bill baseline (the so-called “orphan” or “stranded” programs) was left out of the American Relief Act, passed in December 2024. These stranded programs have been unable to issue new funding since the farm bill expired at the end of September 2024. However, OBBB provides funding for most of the stranded programs, including:

• $8,000,000 each fiscal year for the National Organic Certification Cost-share Program through 2031. 
• $10,000,000 for the Organic Production and Market Data Initiative for fiscal years 2026 through 2031.

What’s Next

The policy changes included in OBBB are some of the most significant in modern history because of what’s included and what’s left out. For the American food and farm system, the bill resorts to cannibalization – cutting nutrition assistance in order to increase subsidies for some farm programs. This calculated move effectively ends a decades-long era in which federal farm bills were passed by coupling nutrition assistance and farm programs, raising legitimate questions of how, or even whether, future farm bills might pass Congress. Whatever the future holds for federal food and farm policy, it’s not hyperbole to say that the passage of OBBB can be seen as a watershed transition to an uncertain future. 

The post What’s Really Inside the Final Budget Reconciliation Bill: A Breakdown of Food and Agriculture Provisions appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.