1. COVID, Ukraine, and warming expose fragility in food security---only the Farm Bill solves.

For better or worse, Americans are not just what we eat, we are the laws that govern what we eat. As agriculture leaders in Congress deliberate over the 2023 Farm Bill, they must confront the need for historic shifts in our food-policy diet — a momentous legislative cleanse, if you will.

Every five years, Congress revises this behemoth 1,000-page bill, reauthorizing some $800 billion in food and agriculture programs that oversee everything from farm subsidies and crop insurance to food-relief programs and organic standards. In the past half-century — since President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told farmers to “Get big or get out!” — those allocations have overwhelmingly benefitted the largest producers of meat, grains and fresh fruits and vegetables in the industry.

But if there’s anything we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that bigger is not better in an era of growing environmental and geopolitical disruption. Now the 2023 Farm Bill must shift America’s food producers away from the anachronistic consolidation trend and toward climate resilience. When producers and processors in one region are hit by a wildfire or superstorm, a dynamic, distributed network of other producers must be ready to continue generating our food supply.

There have been major benefits to the longstanding trend toward bigger, more consolidated industrial agriculture, which has produced an extraordinary abundance of low-cost food. My own household budget, along with hundreds of millions of others, has benefited. The last Farm Bill of 2018 went to great lengths to prop up big producers and support that abundance.

But then Covid-19 happened, exposing the shocking fragility of our consolidated production and supply chains; and a costly series of climate disasters happened — from the punishing drought in the West to the hurricanes in the Southeast to the windstorms of the Midwest. And the invasion of Ukraine happened, revealing still more vulnerability in the supply and transport of global commodity crops. These successive crises showed that our food systems have not been designed to be resilient in the face of disruption.

Now Congress has the chance to usher in a suite of agricultural reforms that can help small and middle-size farmers and ranchers become more productive and sustainable while encouraging Big Ag to get more nimble. My colleague Adam Minter recently argued that the 2023 Farm Bill should be, fundamentally, a climate bill, and he’s right. There’s no question that the single biggest threat to agricultural production going forward is climate change.

Virtually every one of the 12 categories, or “titles,” in the bill can and should include ambitious climate measures, starting with the Conservation Title, which oversees the environmental stewardship of farmlands. Past Farm Bills have had loose standards for defining and rewarding sustainable, climate-smart practices. These standards must become more specific and ambitious in 2023, emphasizing the most beneficial practices such as crop rotation and no-till.