Usually there is a farm bill every 5 years, but none was passed in the 2023-2024 session. Once Trump came in, he broke up the farm bill and put a lot of what is usually included in the farm bill into the One Big Beautiful Bill. Cuts to SNAP (food stamps), to local food for schools and food banks, and other cuts were rushed through and infuriated the Democrats. Rightly so, since the farm bill is usually determined through a more bipartisan process.

Then, when what was left of the farm bill came up in the House, the Republicans pushed through what they wanted with a simple majority, stiffed the Democrats, and got something passed that was, again, very unpopular.

I don’t know why the Republicans did that, because they knew they needed 60 votes in the Senate to get the bill passed, and they didn’t have that. Nonetheless, they managed to finally get their Senate Ag committee markup passed by a hair (in its second attempt in the Senate Ag committee) by wheeling in a zombie Mitch McConnell for the 12:11 vote in September.

But they still needed 60 votes in the full Senate. The existing bill could never get the 60 votes. Maybe their plan was to blame the Democrats for holding things up? What would they trade away? No one knew.

But now the Democrats have trumped all of those calculations and hold all the cards. They don’t have to pass anything they don’t like. Sen. Klobuchar, the current Ag Cttee ranking Senator, will soon be the Ag committee chair, and she is talking about getting a bill through now in the lame duck session, along with current chair Boozman. And so there will be the potential for plenty of horse trading. What do you or I want to see in these trades?

Those of you who follow me very carefully may recall that there were additional bad sections of the farm bill that dealt with pesticides, that remained in the House version, though the worst sections got pulled out in an amendment by Anna Paulina Luna, in a striking 2:1 vote. The fact that 2/3 of the House voted to strip out the pesticide liability provision tells you that the members knew how unpopular giving away a liability shield was to their constituents.

Here is a summary of the remaining bad pesticide provisions, which CHD and other groups have shared. They were passed by the House and are included in the Senate version, which has not yet passed. Will they be in the final compromise bill? This is where constituents come in.

Congress is negotiating the final Farm Bill. It is critical that we stop the provisions that weaken pesticide oversight and cut conservation funding.

The House passed its Farm Bill, H.R. 7567, on April 30 by a vote of 224–200. That vote included a big win: lawmakers stripped out liability protections for pesticide manufacturers, with the Luna amendment passing 280–142. But the fight isn’t over as other harmful pesticide provisions remain in the House-passed bill.

In the Senate, the Agriculture Committee passed Senator Boozman’s version along party lines, 12–11. It was reported to the Senate on September 24 and placed on the calendar as S. 5526.

The troubling provisions in the bill that must be removed are:

• House 10201/Senate 10201 
  Synthetic Look-Alike Pesticides Skip Safety Review/GE Plant Exemptions 
  Certain plant biostimulants would be excluded from federal pesticide law and expand exemptions for pesticidal substances produced in plants. That could open the door to exempting synthetic chemicals in toxic families like pyrethroids and neonicotinoids, which are linked to cancer, neurological harm, and bee declines. [Exempting them from regulation means anything goes for a variety of pesticides, especially neonicotinoids used to coat seeds—Nass]

• House 7308 & 10202/Senate 10208 & 10209 
  Expanded USDA Role in EPA Pesticide Decisions 
  USDA would gain new influence over the EPA’s pesticide decisions through required “coordination.” EPA would be required to conduct and publish an economic analysis of the costs of implementing pesticide safety measures, putting new significance on industry costs in decisions that should only center on health impacts. The bill also increases funding for USDA’s pesticide office. [This is unusual. The section requires that the EPA administrator coordinate with the USDA Secretary, and with the Secretaries of Commerce and Interior on certain decisions, almost as though the pesticide industry feels if it cannot control the EPA, maybe it can control regulation through its influence on one of these other agencies—Nass]

  

• House 10203/Senate 10203 
  USDA and Industry Gain Increased Influence 
  Requires that the USDA’s pesticide office have a seat at every meeting of a new interagency working group, shaping how the EPA protects endangered species from pesticides. The working group would also have to consult with industry stakeholders in decisions about pesticide registrations that are potentially harmful to the environment and drinking water. [This seems to be similar to the last section—bringing in another agency just in case EPA fails to do industry’s bidding—Nass]

• House 10204/Senate 10207 
  Pesticide Review Deadline Extended to 2031 
  The legislation would delay deadlines for completion of hundreds of overdue pesticide safety reviews for 5 more years. Congress should not give the EPA additional years to complete overdue reviews. [The review of glyphosate is essentially 18 years overdue; a review was supposed to be completed this year; and this provision would give EPA 5 more years to update its glyphosate review from the 1990s, and delay other pesticide reviews for 5 more long years—preventing the label from identifying the risks discovered since the prior review for another 5 years—Nass]

• House 2501(a)(2)/Senate 2401 
  Cuts to EQIP Conservation Funding for Farmers 
  Both Bills reduce funding available through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which supports on-farm conservation.

Senator Boozman has said Senators and House members will informally conference to work out differences between the two versions, and advocates report that closed-door negotiations among Agriculture Committee leaders are underway. That’s where bad provisions can get slipped back in, so take action now by contacting your Senators and your Congressional representative and urging them to vote the bill down if it still contains these harmful provisions.

Email Your Federal Legislators Now

Please consider taking an additional step by calling Senator John Boozman, Senate Agriculture Committee Chair, at (202) 224-4843 and urging him to remove the Farm Bill provisions that weaken pesticide oversight and cut conservation funding.

In solidarity,

The Children’s Health Defense Team

But I have two more very important items that you should consider mentioning in a call to your legislators. BTW, all these issues are bipartisan.

The first is Thomas Massie’s Prime Act, Section 12114 (page 900) of the Senate Farm Bill. It was passed in the House version, but we expected it to be pulled out of the Senate bill. Maybe now it won’t be removed, especially if there is enough constituent interest.

The PRIME Act creates a pilot program that would allow a small number of local “custom” butchers to slaughter and process meat without going through USDA inspection, and sell directly to customers within the state. This is very similar to the on-farm slaughter bill I’ve promoted in NH. It would provide competition to the large meatpackers, enable traceability, and probably make buying high quality meat easier and cheaper.

The second item is the “Save Our Bacon” Act, also called the EATS Act, and is often called by me and others the Save China’s Bacon Act, since China owns the largest pork processor in the US: Smithfield. If it becomes part of the compromise Farm Bill that gets passed (and it passed in the House version of the bill), it would supercede (preempt) 1,000 existing state laws on animal welfare. It would cement the CAFO as the way pigs are raised nearly everywhere in the US—because CAFOs, confining pigs in small crates for nearly their entire lives, can grow pork at less cost than giving the animals room to move around.

So it should not be included in the Farm Bill.

Thanks for reading and helping.

 

IPAK-EDU is grateful to Meryl’s CHAOS letter (Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS) as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More