Reforms fail – too much pushback.

THE USUAL BUDDY COMEDY that is the farm bill unites liberals and conservatives to protect the basic framework of the program. This year, however, the script may be flipping.

The defining odd couple is shaping up to be Cory Booker, the cheery New Jersey senator prone to impassioned, long-winded speeches about hope and the power of love, and Republican Chuck Grassley, the octogenarian curmudgeon of the Senate better known for his so-bad-they’re-good tweets than his long-held enmity against the meatpackers. Despite their ideological differences, they are working in concert with a chorus of anti-monopoly and conservation advocates in trying to subvert the usual dynamic and redirect the course of U.S. agriculture policy to suit the needs of independent farmers rather than Big Ag.

Though Grassley is a mostly down-the-line conservative from Iowa corn country—a major driver of farm bill subsidies—he has been an outspoken adversary to ag consolidation for decades, often diverging from Republican leadership. During his six terms, he consistently championed legislation that would curb the meatpackers’ power to throttle independent cattle ranchers.

This year, he’s pushing for changes alongside Sen. Booker, who is just as quixotically determined to curb concentration in agriculture. Despite being nicknamed the Garden State, New Jersey does not carry a particularly large agricultural economy, representing only 1.3 percent of state GDP. But Booker, as the Senate’s resident vegan, has the perfect credentials to wage a personal crusade against animal cruelty at factory farms.

Dating back to his time as mayor of Newark, Booker has also fought against food deserts, a scourge afflicting urban areas across the country without access to grocery stores carrying fresh foods like fruits and vegetables.

It wasn’t until a meeting Booker took in 2018 with the former Democratic lieutenant governor of Missouri, Joe Maxwell, that he made the connection between limited inner-city access to grocery stores and the monopoly crisis that farmers face in the heartland.

“He had a strong foundation of knowledge about concentrated power in retail, so I just had to add some limbs on the tree and get the wind going in another direction to show him that the same power is impacting family farmers too,” said Maxwell, a soft-spoken fourth-generation hog farmer who speaks more with a preacher’s charm than a politician’s salesmanship.

In addition to competition policy, there’s a major push this year to make the farm bill resemble something more like a climate bill.

After their meeting, Maxwell invited Booker to visit his home state on a kind of disaster tourism trip through rural America. The two traveled together from the Bootheel and up along the Mississippi River through Southern Illinois. Along the route, they spoke with a broad cross section of independent farmers, from cattle ranchers to medium-sized corn and soybean growers, who bear the scars of decades of failed farm bill policies that greased the skids for corporate concentration.

The trip made a lasting impression on Booker, who returned to Washington and began evangelizing for breaking up Big Ag and other market reforms. Though some suspected that Booker staked out the issue as a 2020 presidential play for the Iowa caucuses, he has continued to champion the cause even after his campaign ended. Many of the competition policy initiatives both Booker and Grassley are aiming to include in this year’s farm bill tie back one way or another to the New Jersey senator’s caravan through Missouri with Maxwell.

Reflecting back on the trip today, Maxwell noted that to any outside observer, it would be a strange sight to behold: a Democratic senator who grew up just outside Newark sitting on hay bales across from farmers who mostly vote Republican, despite feeling that the party’s leadership class sold them out to industry.

At a farm bill conference earlier this year, hosted by Maxwell’s organization Farm Action, Sen. Booker delivered the keynote address, detailing his takeaway from the trip: “I heard wrenching stories from farmers who had deeds on their walls from the Homestead Act but now after generations have to sell the farms … because our food system is broken.”

THIS YEAR, INDUSTRY GROUPS are strong-arming legislators to revert back to the direct emergency payment structure phased out in the 2014 farm bill. This would supplement the existing commodity-favored crop insurance model that the government has in place. In addition to crop insurance, commodity farmers also get subsidized coverage, known as Price Loss Coverage, that pays back for lost revenues in the case of market slumps, which happens frequently. With the help of Republicans, interest groups representing mega-farms are working to get a higher reference point for insurance coverage in order to guarantee larger payouts to farmers.

In addition, the Republican majority in the House will surely push for more strenuous work requirements on the SNAP program, which could leave over 700,000 current recipients ineligible, according to the Food Research and Action Center. The House GOP already included SNAP work requirements in their wish-list bill to extend the debt limit in April.

The cross-partisan pressures that make up the farm bill leave little room for the Grassley-Booker coalition to gain a foothold. For years, the graveyard for amendments has always been the conference committee, after the House and Senate pass their versions and the logrolling takes place behind closed doors to decide what will be included in the final bill. Legislation to curb Big Ag concentration or cap subsidy payments historically gets left on the cutting-room floor.

In 2002, it took near-herculean efforts for Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, one of the last populist Democrats from a rural state at the time, to get a vote on a bill that would have banned meatpackers from owning their own livestock. The bill passed handily on the floor with bipartisan support, but was stripped from the final bill in conference committee.

Another amendment that successfully passed in the 2008 farm bill directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to update the Packers and Stockyards Act, a major piece of antitrust legislation that grants the USDA authority to prohibit unfair and deceptive practices by meatpackers but has gone unenforced for years. Under massive pressure from Big Ag, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack dragged his feet on following Congress’s mandate. Then, Republicans passed riders in subsequent bills that neutered the amendment entirely. Vilsack, now agriculture secretary again under President Biden, is still trying to complete Packers and Stockyards rules.

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BILL CLARK/AP PHOTO

Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have formed an unlikely partnership as they attempt to reform this year’s farm bill.

This year’s coalition of family farm advocates and environmentalists aren’t under any illusions about the challenges ahead. But so far, many of their key proposals are picking up traction with members of both parties, spearheaded by Booker and Grassley.

“Our forces are stronger together when we can get support from across the aisle,” said Adam Zipkin, who serves as counsel to Sen. Booker on food and agriculture policy.

The odd-couple senators are each supporting a collection of complementary competition titles to deconcentrate agriculture and promote an open market for independent farmers to sell into. Both senators are proposing a rule that would force meatpackers to purchase at least 50 percent of their animals in the open spot market instead of through contract, which would give independent ranchers a chance to compete. The measure is also supported by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), a self-described “dirt farmer” and a frequent partner with Booker on the Democratic side. Booker has also called for placing a moratorium on CAFOs.

“We [anti-monopolists] used to be greeted on the Hill like we were wearing tinfoil hats for saying we had a consolidation problem, and now everyone is like ‘of course we do,’” said Lovera, who’s worked on farm bills since the early 2000s.

The USDA’s checkoff program is also in the crosshairs of reformers. The program effectively acts as a government-run slush fund, bankrolled by a tax on all farmers, that agribusiness can tap for both industry marketing and lobbying. In essence, small farmers pay for Big Ag to destroy them. Booker introduced a bill earlier this year that would prohibit checkoff dollars going to any lobbying organization. Another primary concern for the farm bill is to reinstate country-of-origin labels, a long-sought priority for independent farmers to distinguish their goods from large meatpackers’ foreign sourcing of products.

In addition to competition policy, there’s a major push this year to make the farm bill resemble something more like a climate bill, in order to fulfill President Biden and Secretary Vilsack’s pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups and family farm advocates are aligning their priorities to deliver more funding to practices like rotational grazing and crop-covering, rather than using those dollars to retrofit the mega-farms driving the highest emissions.

“In its current form, many conservation programs at the USDA aren’t accessible to small farmers, whose applications get denied at higher rates but could help cover the costs of sustainable farming,” said Antonio Tovar, senior policy associate at the National Family Farm Coalition.

Much of the current funding for climate-related farm bill policies has turned into a money pit for factory farms. A good example of how this works is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), one of the largest USDA conservation funds.

A provision in the 2002 farm bill, written by lobbyists, required that over a third of the EQIP funds used in Iowa go to livestock operations, which are dominated by factory farm CAFOs. As the Environmental Working Group has documented, over a third of EQIP funds, totaling around $62 million, finance animal waste cleanups and containment at corporate farms, like manure lagoons and toxic runoffs. Taxpayer dollars help backstop rather than penalize environmental harms by factory farms, when those funds could instead support family farms using sustainable practices that keep carbon in the soil. Booker and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) plan to fight for an amendment in the farm bill that would amend the livestock requirement and direct funding to small farmers.

The Inflation Reduction Act also included a pot of almost $20 billion for climate-smart agriculture at the USDA. It didn’t include an EQIP livestock requirement, which was seen as a victory for progressive advocates. They are now pushing to protect that IRA funding, which faces opposition from Republican lawmakers, in the farm bill.

Along with distributing access to conservation funding, Maxwell’s group Farm Action is leading the charge to restructure the bill’s prioritization of payments to fencerow commodity crop production, which promotes monoculture. The core subsidy payments exclude specialty crops like fruits and vegetables, and also dissuade diversified crop farming, which is primarily used by small family farms. Diversified farming is shown to be far better for soil health and doesn’t require the same amount of nitrogen fertilizers and other agrochemicals to replenish eroded soil.

Several members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have spoken favorably about incentivizing specialty crop farming, including Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who grew up on a family farm in Iowa.

“The fact that only 4 percent of the subsidies go to fruits and vegetables is not because politicians don’t know that fruits and vegetables are good for you … it’s the corporatization of agriculture,” said Rep. Porter in an interview with the Prospect.

Another conversation among lawmakers on the Hill is to cut down on wasteful farm payments. Mega-farms collect the largest subsidies because of the base acreage model instituted after the WTO agreements. However, merely revoking subsidies across the board would harm medium-sized and small farms, which rely on government payments more than ever because agriculture markets are fundamentally broken. A bipartisan bill introduced by Sen. Grassley would shift to a subsidy model that caps payments for wealthy mega-farms, to ensure the bulk of the program goes to farmers who actually need government assistance.

These reform efforts are ambitious. It will likely take more than one farm bill in order to turn around years of failed policies. Joe Maxwell’s Farm Action has laid out a decade-long strategy to accomplish reform goals. It begins with getting lawmakers to understand what exactly the stakes are in the legislation, how it works, and how to fix it. In other words, it begins with breaking the bargain at the heart of the farm bill, which has led to a corporatized, consolidated agriculture policy.

“It’s not just about one farm bill, our coalition’s goal is to shift the entire conversation in Congress for years to come to make the family farm the center of our government’s policies, not industry,” said Maxwell.