After USDA's Local Food Cuts, Congress Pushes Back

On June 18, Civil Eats reported that Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) led a bipartisan group of colleagues in introducing the American Food Supply Chain Resiliency Act — legislation aimed at rebuilding the regional food infrastructure the USDA dismantled over the past year and a half.

That word “rebuilding” is doing a lot of work. Here’s what was torn down, and why it matters to small farms.

What USDA Cut

Regional food infrastructure wasn’t a fringe program. It was the operational layer that helped small and midsize farms plug into supply chains that don’t require 10,000-acre scale.

USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service administered several programs in this space. The Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP) funded food hub development, farmers market infrastructure, and regional supply chain projects. The Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Program (FMLFPP) invested in market venues that give producers direct consumer access. The Regional Food Business Center program helped small and midsize producers build the business and logistics capacity to supply institutional buyers — schools, hospitals, universities — at meaningful scale.

These weren’t charity. They were connective tissue. The commodity market system is designed around volume and standardization — it rewards scale above nearly everything else. A 200-acre diversified vegetable operation, a small pasture-raised livestock farm, a specialty grain grower — none of these fit the commodity pipeline. To sell their product, they need alternative channels: food hubs, regional distributors, direct retail, institutional procurement relationships. The USDA programs helped build and sustain those channels.

When USDA cut or curtailed these programs in 2024 and 2025, as part of broader federal spending reductions, the damage landed unevenly. Large commodity operations — already integrated into established supply chains, already capturing the bulk of federal commodity support through the ARC and PLC price-protection programs — barely noticed. The operations that felt it were small and midsize diversified farms already running thin margins in a mounting debt environment while facing new competition from energy and tech developers bidding for their land.

What the Bill Does

The American Food Supply Chain Resiliency Act would restore investment in the regional food infrastructure that makes the local food economy functional. According to Civil Eats’s June 18 reporting, the bill explicitly targets the damage done to regional food business centers and local food programs — rebuilding what was stripped rather than attempting a redesign from scratch.

The bipartisan dimension is worth noting. Farm country support for local food infrastructure cuts across partisan lines in ways that Washington’s political culture doesn’t always reflect. Rural Republican districts have farmers markets, food hubs, and small diversified producers alongside their commodity operations. Farmers who can’t scale to commodity size — which is most farms by count, even as commodity operations dominate by acreage and output — need regional market access regardless of party registration.

When a bill on small farm issues draws Republican co-sponsors in the current political environment, it signals that constituent pressure is landing somewhere real.

The Wider Squeeze

This bill didn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s a response to a food system that has been systematically consolidated in ways that leave small farms with shrinking options.

Private equity has been rolling up farmland on short capital horizons, extracting lease income while farming families absorb volatility. The concentration of farmland ownership means more operations are tenants paying rent to absentee investors. Meatpackers, seed companies, and equipment manufacturers have consolidated so thoroughly that farmers in many sectors face a narrow band of buyers for their product and a narrow band of suppliers for their inputs.

Regional food infrastructure — food hubs, farmers markets, regional supply chains, institutional local purchasing programs — distributes some of that concentrated control. It creates market access for operations that don’t fit the industrial mold. It makes small-scale farming economically viable in ways that commodity prices alone never will.

The National Farmers Union, one of the primary advocacy organizations representing family farm interests in Washington, has long pushed for exactly this kind of infrastructure investment as a counter to consolidation. The premise is practical: you can’t reform a consolidated market from the inside; you build a viable alternative alongside it and let farmers choose.

What to Watch

The bill was introduced June 18, but the real test is the Farm Bill. The Senate Agriculture Committee is working on its version of the new farm bill — which sets funding levels for exactly these programs for the next five years. The introduction of bipartisan legislation signals that enough political capital exists to push these priorities into the farm bill markup. Whether it survives the negotiation is a different question.

What’s unusual about this moment is that pressure is arriving from both directions: farm organizations pushing for restored funding from below, and legislators feeling constituent heat from above. That combination doesn’t guarantee passage, but it changes the stakes of the debate. For small farms that have watched federal support tilt overwhelmingly toward scale, the American Food Supply Chain Resiliency Act is at minimum a signal that the political cost of those cuts is large enough to generate a response.