50-Year-Old Rural-Urban Coalition for Farm Bill No Longer Exists
Published: Friday, June 13, 2025
The following is from Alan Guebert, a freelance agricultural journalist from Illinois.
Despite all his accolades and achievements, Dwight D. Eisenhower remained modest and plainspoken. "The proudest thing I can claim," he noted after his triumphant return to the U.S. from World War II, "is that I am from Abilene."
He was clever, too; he made that statement in a speech to the good people of Abilene, Kan.
Farmers and ranchers may recall his famous line about their profession: "You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from a corn field."
The context of the remark, from a speech given at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., on Sept. 25, 1956, had as much to do with Ike's less-than-happy view of the Agricultural Act of 1956 he had signed a few months earlier as his deep belief in farmers.
That law, best known for its land-retiring, surplus-cutting Soil Bank Program that Ike endorsed, also included several programs he openly disdained. Most centered on the South's troublesome two-some: cotton and rice.
"I am hopeful that the Congress will review and repair (these) shortcomings," he noted in formal remarks after signing the law.
And Congress did—sort of. It ditched the Eisenhower-favored, price-supporting Soil Bank Program nine years later in the Food and Agricultural Act of 1965.
Bringing that "banked" land back into production, however, also brought back years of market-flattening overproduction which—after the short, explosive export boom of the late 1970s and the massive ag lending bust in early 1980s—laid the foundation for another "soil bank program," the 1985 Farm Bill's Conservation Reserve Program.
But the 1965 Farm Bill, ag historians explain, also carried a bigger, longer-lasting wallop: It initiated today's vaunted "Farm Bill Coalition," the handshake partnership between urban and rural congressional forces that delivered federal food aid for the metro poor and federal farm programs to rural America.
Here's how analysts at farmdocDAILY explained it in a May 22 post:
"That coalition began in 1964 when a deal in the House of Representatives allowed for enactment of the Food Stamp Act which, in turn, made possible enactment of legislation attempting to fix failed policies for cotton and wheat farmers."
Then, in the 1973 Farm Bill, the "coalition was formalized (through) ... Food Stamps reauthorization in the same legislative vehicle as reauthorization of farm assistance programs."
However, that now-50-year-old coalition—the key to urban support for farm programs across two generations of U.S. farmers and ranchers—was severed by the one-vote victory for the GOP House of Representatives' reconciliation bill May 22. Its $300 billion cuts in food assistance and incongruent increase in farm price supports "violates one of the cardinal rules of farm bill politics," notes farmdocDAILY.
"If it were to become law" through Senate passage, the analysts continue, "reconciliation will have effectively broken the larger farm bill coalition that has made reauthorization possible for over 50 years."
In short, if the Senate ratifies the House reconciliation bill with the steep cuts in food assistance intact and the president signs it, farmers will have sold out their half of the most productive legislative team in the last 50 years for a few more pennies per bushel of crop insurance coverage.
It's an incredibly short-sighted deal that today's farm leaders already may be regretting. Shortly after the House vote, the Trump administration released its 2026 U.S. Department of Agriculture budget plan. It requests "$23 billion for USDA ... a cut of nearly $7 billion from the current year," reported Politico.
The Senate says it will act by July 4, but there will be fireworks long before then.
Return to Top of Page