Farm Bill 2.0 Rooted in the Past
Published: Friday, February 27, 2026
House Ag Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson must not be a superstitious man. If he were, he would not have introduced the biggest bill of his congressional career, the "Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026," on Friday, Feb. 13.
But there he was Feb. 13 taking the lid off his "Farm Bill 2.0" for all to see. The bill, he explained, "provides modern policies for modern challenges ..."
Not really. Indeed, little in Thompson's proposed legislation even suggests the current century. Worse, three of "modern" agriculture's biggest problems—ethanol, resource pollution and tariffs—are barely mentioned or left completely unaddressed.
Take tariffs. While never mentioning the word, Thompson suggests a tariff-fueled, 54% drop in recent U.S. soy sales to China can be cured through increased "port capacity" and "new and developing markets."
Clearly, today's biggest trade problem is tariffs. No matter, Thompson budgets $533 million—more than twice today's "trade promotion" spending—to paper over it, not fix it.
It's another sign that the past, according to recent farm bill research, is where much of today's farm bill still gets its inspiration—especially the costliest aspects of it, according to Jonathan Coppess, associate professor and director of the Gardner Agricultural Policy program at the University of Illinois.
In a recent, multi-part series on farm bill basics, Coppess explains the ages-old root of farm program payments, "base acres," and how they continue to drive farm policy.
By definition, base acres are historical; they establish the "what" and "how much" government will subsidize "covered" crops like corn, soybeans, cotton, wheat, rice, barley, oats, sorghum and peanuts under farm bills.
And here historical means old. "The base acre system is rooted in acreage allotments which were part of the parity policy design that developed out of the New Deal farm policies," he explained in his initial paper.
As such, base acres "represent a snapshot in time, but a very different time." In fact, if landowners did not update their base acres when given the chance in either 2002 and 2014, their "base acres would be largely unchanged from the contract acres (laid out in) ... the 1996 Farm Bill."
And millions weren't; a 2005 USDA report shows that "over 60% (163 million) of the base acres ..." were not updated.
Crazy, right? Why not update your base to better reflect current crop mix and, potentially, boost program payments? Coppess has a perfectly good answer but must take a tortured path to get to it.
"The 1996 contract acres were not calculated anew; they were simply the base acres enrolled under the 1990 Farm Bill. Those base acres were established for the 1986 crop year by the 1985 Farm Bill, calculated using the acres (from) 1981-1985."
So, "It is not an exaggeration to note that most of today's base acres represent planting decisions and farming that are decades old—many of which ... were ... made in the first half of the farm economic crisis of the 1980s."
Why?
Because the 1996 law famously "decoupled" base acre payments from what is actually grown on the land. Combined with other "updates" to payment schemes over subsequent years, this "flexible" design "encourages ... a farmer to supplement the income from one crop with the payment of another."
Indeed, this "fundamental flaw becomes most problematic when farmers growing the same crops can earn different incomes based solely on policy and politics."
Neither changes under Thompson's "modern" bill. Policy and politics, after all, will deliver an additional $27 billion in "bridge" and "ad hoc" payments this year. In any other business that would be a sure sign of failure; not in U.S. agriculture, though.
Crazy? Yeah, that's the right answer.
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