During the House Agriculture Committee’s first hearing of the new Congress today, dubbed “Examining the Economic Crisis in Farm Country,” Republican lawmakers mainly focused on asking the witnesses about improving the parts of the farm bill that impact large, commodity growers, like crop insurance and row crop subsidies. Throughout, they blamed Biden-era policies for a recent decline in commodity prices and the inflation that raised costs of inputs like fertilizer.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats focused on how the Trump administration’s actions over the past three weeks have impacted farmers. They called out the potential consequences of tariffs that have been both enacted and proposed, the dismantling of USAID that threatens $2 billion in commodity crop purchases and could cause food intended for hungry people to rot in warehouses, and the freeze on USDA grant payments to farmers that continues to cause distress across the country.
A dozen young, Mid-Atlantic farmers growing vegetables, flowers, and other crops for direct sale in the region also attended the hearing to represent their concerns about that freeze, at the invitation of the Democratic leadership. But after they spoke with the press prior to the start, their small-farm perspective was mostly absent from the conversation, since the witnesses all represented larger, commodity-scale interests. (Still, farms of all sizes and types have been impacted by USDA funding pauses.)
Lawmakers from both parties repeatedly called for a bipartisan farm bill to pass this year and blamed each other for partisanship that has held up the process since 2023. “We cannot let this year be a repeat of the last,” said committee Chair GT Thompson (R-Pennsylvania). (Link to this post.)
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