Tag: food

Next Steps for the 2026 Farm Bill

The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (H.R. 7567)—which would reauthorize agriculture and nutrition programs through 2031—was passed by the House Agriculture Committee on March 4, 2026. Leadership aims to bring it to a full House vote before Easter (April 5).

If the bill passes the House, it will move to the Senate. The Senate may take it up as written or develop its own version. Either way, both chambers must ultimately agree on a single bill before it can be sent to the President.

What’s in it for urban agriculture

Some key provisions are included:

  • Reauthorization of the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP)
  • Reauthorization of the Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production Advisory Committee
  • Permanent authorization of urban county committees, which have until now operated as pilots

These are small but important steps toward stabilizing urban agriculture’s place in the US Department of Agriculture.

The bill also incorporates the Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act, which would revive and extend two popular pandemic-era programs that were recently ended. These programs direct federal funding to states and tribes to purchase locally produced food for distribution to people facing food insecurity.

While not strictly an urban agriculture program, this approach matters. It begins to shift procurement away from highly centralized, industrial supply chains and toward more regional and local systems—the kind of infrastructure urban agriculture would need to operate at meaningful scale.

What happens next

Passing a farm bill is rarely straightforward, and this year is no exception:

  • Major disagreements—for example, around SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program/aka Food Stamps)—remain unresolved
  • Midterm elections are approaching, which will increasingly pull lawmakers’ attention toward campaigning

Because of this, Congress could end up passing yet another extension of the 2018 Farm Bill and revisiting the issue next year with a new Congress.

There is also a broader question emerging: whether the kind of omnibus farm bill that has held together the food-and-farm coalition since 1973 is still viable at all.

More information

House Agriculture Committee Info straight from the House’s mouth.

Committee markup summary In case you read the original draft, here’s what changed

Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act More detail from the bill’s sponsor

The omnibus farm bill’s future Does it have one?

Countdown to Destruction

This is the first of three videos in a series by Greenpeace called Countdown to Destruction. This episode, Do You Know Where Your Food Comes From?, is about the environmental danger posed by commodity agriculture. Below the video are links to the remaining two episodes.

Episode 2: Can we fix our broken food system?

Episode 3: Food for people, not for profits

I appreciate that they’ve defined the topic as commodity agriculture rather than meat. That means they include the industrial production of soy right up there with industrial production of meat, leaving room for the truth that both soy and cows, raised properly, can be beneficial to the environment.