Congress on Verge of Striking Out
Published: Friday, November 28, 2025
While Congress spent most of the fall perfecting the useless art of finger pointing, the ag economists, farm finance experts and ag policy wonks at farmdocDAILY kept grinding through the season's farm news and numbers to understand what it all might mean for farmers and ranchers in 2026.
Their well-researched opinion? While farm equity slipped this year, it remains relatively stable due to large "contemporary," or same-year, federal payments. Overall, however, farmers remain under threat in 2026.
Moreover, the emergency spending bill approved by Congress to end the historically long, 43-day shutdown holds no new solution for farmers to get off today's higher-costs/lower-prices treadmill.
The key to most of the brewing trouble lies in what has become Congress' go-to way to handle today's farm and ranch problems: toss a few more federal billions on the table and extend the tired, outdated 2018 Farm Bill for yet another fiscal year.
The problem with that approach is that it fails to recognize that it just might be the tired, outdated 2018 Farm Bill—additional billions notwithstanding—that's made most of the mess we're now in.
Here's how two farmdocDAILY experts, Jonathan Coppess of the University of Illinois and Otto Doering of Purdue University, both long-time farm bill players and observers, wrote about those added billions and the 2018 law on Sept. 25:
"If payments were the answer, then the problems should be solved by now. At the end of last year, Congress authorized over $30 billion in ad hoc/emergency supplemental payments, including $10 billion for economic assistance ..."
In fact, continue Coppess and Doering, "Since 2018," when the current farm bill was passed, "USDA and/or Congress have paid nearly $176 billion (real 2025) in inflation-adjusted economic assistance to farmers." These payments, on average, equal about "$6.5 billion per year from commodities subsidy programs and an astounding $15.5 billion per year in ad hoc or supplemental assistance."
But, they surmise, "Ultimately, federal taxpayer-funded payments are no match for the tough reality of lost demand or damaged markets."
Coppess anticipated this reality in a multi-part farmdocDAILY series earlier this summer that identifies and explains the top five "most problematic changes to farm policy in the Reconciliation Farm Bill," or what Congress calls the One Big Beautiful Bill.
His list reads more like a legal indictment for farm bill malpractice than a to-do list for Congress. Three of the five "problems" center on the growing costs of crop insurance's growing failures. The other two highlight Big Ag's big wins and how they will cost taxpayers, SNAP beneficiaries, and beginning farmers' funds, food and futures.
Not even making Coppess's foul five was the law's "provisions ... adding 30 million base acres to the farm payment programs." This enormous change will add billions more in farm program costs and millions more bushels to our grain stockpiles.
Which is a huge problem "if our latest round of trade and tariff conflicts have substantially damaged export markets for the foreseeable future," write Coppess and Doering. If so, however, "then farmers are going to need adjustments more than payments."
That means Congress should prepare to act boldly because "Allowing farm price and income declines to force adjustments, which often involve many farm foreclosures and bankruptcies as in the mid-1980s, is not politically palatable."
But, "Policy responses, like payments, that keep costs high while prices and incomes drop are paying farmers to drive combines over the proverbial cliff and into crisis. Can we do better this time around?"
This Congress has taken two swings—July's reconciliation bill and November's government-reopening—and whiffed both times. One more miss and countless farmers and ranchers may be out of the game for good.
Return to Top of Page