The U.S. House Agriculture Committee is gearing up to discuss a new Farm Bill. Many of our highest priorities in the Farm Bill — priorities you have helped fight for — that support small, beginning, and diversified farms, are underfunded, have flat funding, and/or lack funding guarantees for the duration of this Farm Bill.  

Your Representative serves on the House Committee on Agriculture and has an important say in what is included in the final Farm Bill. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to contact your Representative and tell them that this draft version falls short and to VOTE NO on this bill.

This Farm Bill fails to fully address the challenges small, beginning, and diversified farmers in Illinois face. We need meaningful access to the farm safety net, real investments in local food supply chains, and access to proven, popular conservation programs. Specifically it: 

• Siphons $100 million away from the Conservation Stewardship Program to fund a state and tribal soil health program. While ISA supports the soil health program concept, we do not want to see CSP funding even further limited for Illinois farmers, as these funding pools are extremely competitive. Please protect CSP’s full budget and authorize the soil health program within RCPP instead.
• Fails to provide real funding for local food resiliency programs. The bipartisan Local Farmers Feeding our Communities Act – which establishes an LFPA-like program – is included in this draft – a positive! However, there’s no mandatory funding attached to the program, so there’s no guarantee it will ever be implemented. Same with the meat processing grants modeled off of the bipartisan Strengthening Local Processing Act – the funding authorization is too low to meet the need.
• The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) would lose $1.055 billion from the first five years of this Farm Bill. EQIP funds are already extremely competitive, and NRCS’s new Regenerative Pilot Program is funded through CSP and EQIP.
• Fails to make the kinds of improvements small, beginning, and diversified farmers need to access the safety net. There are a few tweaks to improve credit access for beginning farmers, but legislative proposals to improve the Whole Farm Revenue Protection (WFRP) Program and the Noninsured Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) are entirely absent from the bill.

👇 Take action today and tell your member of Congress to support the Farm Bill programs that level the playing field, support local and regional food, conserve our land, and, most importantly, help farmers thrive. 👇