House Farm Bill Slashes Conservation, Abandons Small Farmers

The House Voted. Farmers Pushed Back.

The House passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 on a 224–200 vote, sending a five-year farm bill to the Senate that the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition says falls short on nearly every front that matters to small, diversified, and beginning farmers.

NSAC surveyed member organizations immediately after the vote. The responses, published June 18, paint a consistent picture: the programs that make sustainable farming financially viable are being cut or eliminated, and the programs designed to replace them either don’t exist yet or remain inaccessible due to a USDA workforce that has been gutted over the past year.

The Senate now has the chance — and, in the view of farmers and advocates across the country, the obligation — to write a better bill.

What the House Bill Does to Conservation

The centerpiece complaint is conservation funding. The House bill cuts up to $600 million from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and reduces funding for the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), the two largest working-lands conservation programs in federal agriculture.

Patrick Brown, a farmer in North Carolina, put it plainly: the proposed $100 million annual carve-out from CSP to fund state-level soil health programs sounds like a targeted benefit, but in practice it means “making the pot of money that you compete for in the program smaller.”

That matters because EQIP and CSP are not niche programs. They fund cover cropping, nutrient management, rotational grazing, and the kind of on-farm infrastructure that holds topsoil and keeps water out of waterways. For farmers already operating on thin margins, those cost-share dollars are often the difference between adopting a new practice and not. The cuts land hardest on the diversified, mid-size, and beginning operations that cannot absorb the costs alone — the same farms the bill’s title implies it wants to protect.

Local Food Programs, Terminated Early

The House bill also ends the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program two years before its scheduled expiration — with no replacement.

Michelle Ajamian, a farmer in Ohio, described what that program actually does in practice: it “purchased over a half million pounds of black beans from our region’s organic farmers.” That is not an abstraction. It is a direct procurement pipeline connecting small producers to institutional buyers — schools, hospitals, food banks — that most family farms cannot access on their own.

LFPA was one of the clearest success stories in recent farm policy: it moved federal food dollars toward local and regional supply chains while improving food access for communities that needed it. The House bill cuts it without debate. There is no funding in the bill to authorize a successor program.

SNAP and SNAP-Ed — programs that support low-income food access and nutrition education — also face cuts in the House version, further weakening the connection between farm production and food security that regional food systems depend on.

The Staffing Crisis the Bill Ignores

The sharpest frustration from surveyed farmers was not just what the bill cuts, but what it fails to address: the collapse of USDA field capacity.

In 2025, roughly 20% of USDA staff departed — through layoffs, buyouts, and attrition driven by federal workforce reductions. The result: 141 counties now have zero USDA staff, and 1,197 counties — 53% of all U.S. counties — experienced net staff losses. In rural areas where the county Farm Service Agency office was already the only federal agricultural touchpoint, farmers are now operating without anyone to help them navigate conservation sign-ups, disaster programs, or beginning-farmer loans.

Federal programs are only useful if someone is there to administer them. Farmers told NSAC that programs they are technically eligible for have become functionally inaccessible because there is no staff to process applications. The House bill, according to NSAC’s assessment, does “next to nothing” to address the staffing shortfall.

This crisis compounds everything else. Beginning farmers — who already face steep barriers to land access and capital — are navigating a federal system with fewer people to help them at the exact moment they need the most support. The consolidation pressure that drives Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings is intensifying precisely because the safety net has holes and no one is available to help farmers find the patches.

The Safety Net Still Doesn’t Fit

The underlying safety-net architecture of the House bill is built around commodity price and revenue support programs designed for large-scale corn, soy, wheat, and cotton operations. Diversified farmers, organic producers, and direct-market growers do not fit those templates cleanly.

NSAC members described safety-net programs that do not reflect how their farms actually generate income, risk management tools that don’t apply to their crop mixes, and a system that structurally advantages large commodity operations at every decision point. Farmers flagged the risk of recreating the conditions that produced the 1980s farm crisis: a safety net that looks robust on paper but fails the farms that most need it when commodity prices fall or credit tightens.

That pressure is already building. Extreme weather events are driving emergency borrowing and thinning margins across the Midwest and Plains, and the farmland consolidation that follows financial distress is accelerating — with Wall Street and private equity positioned to absorb the losses of whoever goes under next.

What Farmers Want the Senate to Do

The ask is specific. NSAC-member farmers laid out four priorities for the Senate’s version of the farm bill:

• Restore and expand conservation funding — particularly for working-lands programs like EQIP and CSP, and resist attempts to siphon those dollars into narrower carve-outs.
• Reinstate and fund local food programs — LFPA and its successors, plus robust SNAP funding that connects producers with consumers in underserved markets.
• Build a safety net that fits small and beginning farmers — risk management tools calibrated to diversified and direct-market operations, not just commodity monocultures.
• Address USDA staffing — without field staff, federal programs are authorization without implementation. The Senate bill needs to reverse the hollowing-out of county-level USDA presence.

The vote breakdown in the House — 224–200 — suggests the bill passed with no margin to spare. The Senate has genuine room to move the legislation, and farmers across the country are watching to see whether it will.

---

Farmer survey data and program details are from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s June 18, 2026 analysis. USDA staffing figures are drawn from NSAC’s reporting on federal workforce reductions.