The third part consists of nutrition programs (food stamps). Specifically, the SNAP program is paid for through the farm bill. This is the largest piece of the farm bill. About 60 to 70% of the cost of the farm bill is assigned to the nutrition programs. Many of you may recall when you were younger that there were extensive conversations about welfare. We were talking about food stamps and there was also something called commodities. People could go to the social services office and pick up their commodities or commodes as we called them. The commodities were typically things that were covered in the purchasing from the government. I can remember working at the school kitchen and during a summer at a non-profit camp that got commodities. We got number 10 cans of peanuts. We got number 10 cans of pork. We got 10 pound blocks of cheese.

Those are the three major components. The first farm bill was passed in 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. It was in the midst of the depression and the dust bowl. This bill contained almost all three of these components. Not the crop insurance as much, but it was really to take land out of production—as a way to quiet the dust bowl. The bill was intended to pay farmers for not producing so that prices would stay high. This was a provision in the farm bill for a further decrease in production so prices would increase. The farm bill also had some nutrition programs in it as well as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The farm bill has been around for 90 years, It is rarely contested very strongly in Congress—though you may have heard of little bits and pieces of the farm bill being nitpicked. The last farm bill was authorized in 2018. They go five years–so it ended in 2023. The farm bill was part of the December 2024 continuing resolution. It is covered until March 2025 at the current funding level. However, I think we are in for some interesting times related to the farm bill. I am anxious to see what comes of it.

There are two components of the Farm Bill that I want to focus on to kick off our conversation. There’s the taxpayer-funded farmer crop insurance, and the subsidies that pay farmers a price for their product (the government essentially is buying products from farmers at a profitable margin). I look forward to hearing your thoughts about how the farm bill might be conceived of as a health bill rather than an agricultural bill.

Bill G

The farm bill has actually been in the news several times recently, including an interesting editorial in the New York Times about subsidizing farmers to produce products that go into highly processed foods and into ethanol from corn in particular–which many people have pointed out isn’t a very cost-effective way to make ethanol. Both of those subsidies have major impact on both the environment and health.