All Chickens Come Home to Roost
Published: Friday, March 13, 2026
If you grew up on a farm, you know that milk cows show up to be milked, horses return to the barn to be fed and, like clockwork, chickens return to roost every night.
In fact, chickens are so certain to return each evening that we've recast this commendable habit into a common admonition: "The chickens are coming home to roost," we say when the consequences of a past mistake show up.
Well, here come the chickens as Republicans on the House Ag Committee push their subsidy-heavy, SNAP-lite farm bill through Congress. Combined with other costly changes they added to last July's budget bill, the "2.0" bill now holds more chickens than your average KFC freezer.
But don't be fooled by any talk of cost savings or budget cutting. Despite huge cuts to food assistance, nothing in the bill will save money if the ag economy stays in the freezer.
The reason, as noted here last November, isn't spending; it's policy.
"If payments were the answer," as I then quoted ag policy experts Jonathan Coppess of the University of Illinois and Otto Doering of Purdue University, "then the problems should be solved by now."
But the problems have only ballooned—as have federal payments.
"Since 2018," when the current farm bill was enacted (again quoting the pair), "USDA and/or Congress have paid nearly $176 billion (real 2025) in inflation-adjusted economic assistance to farmers."
These payments, on average, consisted of about "$6.5 billion per year from commodities subsidy programs and an astounding $15.5 billion per year in ad hoc payments."
And there's talk of even more payments this spring.
Now stir in an unpredictable, still-widening Middle East war. Its only certainty is that the cost of the mundane to the sacred—from the price of fertilizer and fuel to that of futures and lives—will climb.
Now throw in today's destabilized ag export markets, more White House tariffs, a Department of Agriculture whose data integrity is being questioned, and the certain impact of more climate change.
That's a lot of chickens coming home to roost in 2026.
Or, as our two ag policy experts noted last year, "Ultimately, federal taxpayer-funded payments are not a match for the tough reality of lost demand or damaged markets."
Those are two elements no one saw coming when GOP farm bill writers in 1995—like today—sought to finish a law that would become known as Freedom to Farm, or F2F. Its key tenet, that farm program payments would be keyed to land, or "base" acres, not crops, redirected farm policy from "supply management" to "market oriented."
It quickly became a financial flop, however. What was designed to be a seven-year, $47 billion farm program ended up costing more than $100 billion in just six years.
It was predicted by me and others. In the Sept. 10, 1995 column, I wrote that the proposed changes would prove very costly to taxpayers and even more so to farmers.
I came to that conclusion through simple math: I totaled the federal farm program payments key crops like wheat, corn and cotton had received under the previous five-year farm bill. The sums were eye watering.
For example, from 1991 through 1995, wheat farmers received, on average, 26% of the annual wheat income through federal payments. For corn, the average was 18% and cotton, 16%.
Can these farmers, I asked, give up these annual "crop receipts and survive?"
"Some can, but many cannot," I noted and—no surprise—some did but many did not. The reason, however, wasn't government spending; it was government policy.
And that chicken is headed for the roost, too.
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