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On Friday, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee released their first draft of a 2026 Farm Bill, the “Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026,” amid increasing frustration from U.S. farmers around high input prices and challenging market conditions.

The 2018 Farm Bill expired in 2023, and Congress has since been unable to pass the omnibus legislation, which serves to both support U.S. farming and provide a safety net for the food insecure. Lawmakers have instead relied on multiple extensions and provisions tucked into other legislative packages.

The draft includes a wide range of provisions impacting agricultural trade, farmer access to credit, research, forestry, rural development.

The new bill makes fewer changes to the farm bill’s largest sections, called titles, because many of those changes and extensions were made using other pieces of legislation last year. However, the 802-page draft includes a wide range of provisions impacting agricultural trade, farmer access to credit, research, forestry, rural development, and more.

A path forward for this new bill remains elusive, since Democrats have said they won’t vote for it if Republicans don’t agree to roll back the SNAP cuts they made last year. Nevertheless, the Agriculture Committee, led by Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania), has planned a markup—where components of the bill will be debated and edited—for Feb. 23. As the negotiations ramp up, there are several policy changes in the legislation that will draw attention, debate, and pushback.

The Big Titles

Republicans have already made major changes to SNAP and boosted commodity payments in the One Big Beautiful Bill. They also extended conservation programs in the bill that ended the government shutdown. So changes to the four biggest titles of the bill—Nutrition, Crop Insurance, Commodities, and Conservation—are minimal.

For example, the Environmental Quality Incentives and Conservation Stewardship programs were reauthorized last year, so the new bill doesn’t need to fund them again. Instead, it makes small changes to which practices farmers can adopt in conservation programs, especially around precision agriculture.

The latest farm bill proposal does reauthorize the Conservation Reserve Program, which was not included in other funding packages last year. It maintains a cap of 27 million acres for the program over the next five years.

The Most Controversial Provisions

The draft bill includes text from the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, a provision that would make it harder for individuals to sue pesticide companies based on claims that their products cause cancer and other illnesses. Health advocates had expected this, because Thompson had clearly indicated his support for the measure. Bayer, which has been battling thousands of lawsuits over its flagship weedkiller Roundup causing non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, has led lobbying efforts on the provision.

Lawmakers attempted to get a similar provision included in an EPA funding bill last month, but Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) led a fight to remove it. Supporters of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda also pushed Republicans to oppose it. The provision will likely be debated during markup, and the group MAHA Action already launched a campaign urging lawmakers to remove it.

“House Republicans can’t credibly claim to back an agenda that supports public health or protects kids while advancing a bill that weakens protections from pesticides and hands more power and profits to foreign pesticide manufacturers,” Geoff Horsfield, legislative director at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), said in a statement. EWG’s statement also pointed to other provisions in the bill that could overturn state and local laws restricting the use of pesticides in public places like parks and areas near schools.

The bill also includes a section that would overturn state laws that have rankled industry, including California’s Proposition 12, which bars the sale in California of pork from hogs raised in gestation crates anywhere. Democrats have largely opposed these efforts. But in September, a handful of Republicans also expressed opposition to overturning such laws, which, they argue, would violate state rights and open the door for other countries to expand their market in the United States.

The National Pork Producers Association, however, has pushed hard for the legislation. Other groups of farmers support keeping laws like Proposition 12, which they argue create opportunities for smaller farms by building established markets for higher-value meat.

“Farmers have already made financial investments in more humane pork, and this Farm Bill would devastate many farmers,” Pennsylvania hog farmer Brent Hershey said in a statement released by the American Meat Producers Association.

Nutrition

The bill does not include any big changes to the administration of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, but it does mandate that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) make permanent a pilot program that allowed shoppers to use their benefits for online shopping. Hunger groups have long pushed for this, because it can increase food access.

The draft bill also directs the USDA to move forward with helping states transition to chip-enabled benefit cards, to better ensure that benefits are used by those individuals who are entitled to them. This would cut down on skimming, where individuals steal benefits from those who need them by copying user data collected by payment terminals and then using the funds. The farm bill proposal would set a six-month deadline for the USDA to propose a rule that increases EBT card security.

Closely following the January release of the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the bill also includes a proposal to reform the guideline process, by expanding the timeline of each iteration, installing a separate panel to select the questions the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) compiles research on, and upping transparency reporting requirements.

Some of these changes have nutrition experts worried, though, given the criticism of the administration’s handling of the recent guidelines. The latest guidelines largely discarded the findings of the DGAC, which typically operates under a transparent process with several opportunities for public comment. Instead, these guidelines were published with a separate scientific report that was not subject to the same public scrutiny before the release.

Local Food

Lastly, the provisions of the bill with the most bipartisan support are likely to be local food programs, many of which overlap with nutrition and health initiatives. However, advocates say the bill falls short of guaranteeing funding for most of those programs.

The bill maintains funding for the popular Local Agriculture Market Program, which includes grants that help farmers turn their crops into higher-value food products and supports farmers market initiatives. It makes changes to the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) to allow SNAP users to buy additional types of fruits and vegetables, such as frozen and canned, but does not increase funding for the popular bipartisan program, which groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest pointed to as a significant failure in the draft farm bill.

Most significantly, lawmakers included most of a bill introduced by Representatives Rob Bresnahan (R-Pennsylvania), David Valadao (R-California), and Pingree, which had strong bipartisan support. Their marker bill, called Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act, would create a permanent program modeled after the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchasing Assistance (LFPA) programs.

Under the draft farm bill, the new program would be eligible for up to $200 million in annual funding and be run by state, local, or tribal governments.

Both programs were created by the Biden administration during the pandemic to help more schools and food banks buy fresh food directly from small and mid-size farms in their region. Those programs were set to end by 2026, but Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins cancelled them early, eliminating more than $1 billion that farms had expected to receive.

Under the draft farm bill, the new program would be eligible for up to $200 million in annual funding and be run by state, local, or tribal governments.

The problem, said Mike Lavender, the policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), is that unlike the original marker bill, which proposed $200 million in appropriations on top of $200 million in mandatory funding, it does not offer any mandatory funding, and ensuring money gets appropriated every year is increasingly difficult. “An authorization of appropriations is essentially an empty promise,” Lavender told Civil Eats. (Another program included in the bill that would fund local meat processing also lacks mandatory funding.)

During NSAC’s annual gathering in D.C. for meetings with members of Congress and federal agencies, multiple farmers said that the Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act was a top legislative priority. Ed Dubrick, an independent Illinois farmer who raises chickens, turkeys, and sheep and sold to his local food bank through LFPA, told Civil Eats that it felt like one of the first USDA programs that really worked for small farms.

“It was absolutely tremendous for us,” he said. “By having that consistent market for our product, it allowed us to invest in infrastructure, capacity, production, transport, storage, all those things.”

Regardless of whether the local food program makes it through the markup, the entire farm bill draft will face political challenges. Democrats have already said they won’t back it without a reversal of SNAP cuts, and the Senate has yet to put forward its own proposal.

And with midterm elections in November, razor-thin margins in the House of Representatives, and other legislative priorities this year, it is not clear whether House leadership would bring the proposal to the floor for a vote.

The post Here’s What’s in House Republicans’ ‘Skinny’ Farm Bill appeared first on Civil Eats.

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