It won’t pass for another year and a half – past negotiations prove

Congress is taking so long to start writing a new farm bill that the legislation won't be enacted until well into 2024, or even later, if the timelines for the four most recent farm bills are any guide.  If President Joe Biden were to sign a farm bill by the end of this September — when authorization for many of the programs in the 2018 farm bill is set to expire — Congress would have achieved in less than 80 days what has previously taken an average of about 18 months. How Congress ultimately approaches the reauthorization of the 2018 farm bill is yet to be determined, but it's certainly not going to happen in 2023, based on how long the process has taken in the past.  “I don't know if I can compare [the current process] to anything else because I can't remember any of the farm bills that I've been involved with that we haven't done a markup in full committee — in either committee — before Labor Day,” Randy Russell, who has worked on farm bills as a congressional staffer, USDA official, and lobbyist over his four-decade-long tenure in farm policy, told Agri-Pulse. The last time a farm bill was enacted into law in an odd-numbered year — the first year of a new Congress — was 1985. The last time the farm bill passed without an extension — or following the expiration of many of its authorized programs, as was the case with the 2018 law — was in 2002. The reauthorization process for the last four farm bills has averaged just over 550 days from start to finish; the shortest of those timelines was the 252-day process for the 2018 bill.