On October 1, 2024, after months of contention and fruitless debate, the 2018 Farm Bill expired in Congress, leaving no clear legislative successor. Having already been extended by one year, as an act of compromise amid attempts to pass a 2023 Farm Bill through Congress, the Bill’s expiration has terminated essential programs in the areas of price support for farmers, land conservation and sustainability, and agricultural development.
If Congress does not act to pass a Farm Bill by the end of the crop year (concurrent with the calendar year), federal policy will revert to statutes laid out in the “permanent law” as provided in the 1938 and 1949 Farm Bills. Barring any supplemental legislation, this reversion will entail yet more sunsetting on crop subsidies, which U.S. farmers and consumers worldwide rely on for affordable food, in addition to cuts to federally funded food relief programs.
What does this all mean for New York, specifically?
For one, consider the gravity of losses to federal funding for relief programs in New York. While funding for certain food relief, such as the Supplemental Nutritional Relief Program (SNAP) is set to be maintained in permanent law, the reversion to previous laws from 1938 and 1949 means the termination of grants to the Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP), which provides senior citizens money to spend locally grown produce, and the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which helps provide state and local food banks with the stock they need to feed their communities.
Current federal support for food relief has been insufficient as it is; losing the programs we do have will be detrimental to the outlook of New York City’s food future. In 2023, 1 in 10 people in the five boroughs self-reported as food insecure, a 10 percent increase from 2022’s figures. The new 2023 Farm Bill’s passage was partially held up in light of the House Agriculture Committee’s proposed $30 billion cut to funding for SNAP. With such major cuts on the table and no clear solutions in place, we can only expect to see more New Yorkers go hungry with the 2018 Farm Bill’s expiration.
New York’s food production system also relies fundamentally on federal programs for commodity support and agricultural development.
Take dairy for example. New York is the fifth largest dairy state in the U.S., with 5,000 farms producing 16.1 billion pounds of milk in 2023. As essential as milk, cheese, and yogurt are to most households, the profit margins on dairy can be thin, and the risk associated with a product subject to spoilage and livestock disease makes the industry volatile at times.
The 2018 Farm Bill’s Dairy Margin Coverage Program (DMC) was designed to relieve the pressures of this at-once essential and challenging industry, providing voluntary financial assistance to dairy farmers who had to sell their product below market rate or who suffered product loss. Such assistance helps keep dairy prices fair and affordable, not only for the farmers selling it, but also for the New Yorkers who rely on a steady supply of dairy.
Should Congress not pass a Farm Bill or any other special legislation around dairy margin coverage by January 1, 2025, consumers can expect to see dairy retail prices soar as federal policy reverts to permanent law, with many dairy farmers losing the support they previously have relied upon.
And this is just one product subject to price fluctuation — corn, soy, wheat, and other essential commodities all rely on federal price protection. The 2018 Bill’s expiration has already seen the end to the federal government’s Specialty Crop Block Grant Program, and reverting to regulations written in the 1930s and ‘40s would upend the market as we’ve come to know it.
Beyond consumer and production concerns, ecological issues abound. Funding authorization for the Organic Certification Cost Share Program, which helps cushion the cost of USDA Organic certification for smaller farms; the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to leave ecologically important lands wild; and the Watershed Rehabilitation Program, which helps maintain dams and waterways essential to agriculture — among numerous others — expired as of October 1, alongside the 2018 Farm Bill.
With NYC Climate Week not long behind us, it is essential to recognize the intersections and inter-reliances of our food systems and our ecology. Losing the programs that maintain this delicate balance comes at a sensitive time, with climate-related flooding and wildfires becoming all-too-normal in our corner of the country.
This is, of course, only a brief survey of the loss and potential for further loss potentiated by the Farm Bill’s expiration. New York is but one city, in one state, in an increasingly global food network. With the stakes ever-high, Congress has its work set out for it to pass a Farm Bill before the end of the year.