The lack of a new farm bill has been a source of ire for members across party lines. But there finally may be hope that Congress will pass something — at the very least on regulating foreign ownership of American farmland.
After years of stalemate, Republicans included controversial changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in their sweeping budget law. With that done, Republicans say they’re pursuing a narrower farm bill that doesn’t delve into partisan priorities.
House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson, who has taken to calling the agriculture policy portion of President Donald Trump’s budget law “Farm Bill 1.0,” told NOTUS last week he was optimistic about the prospect of a skinny “Farm Bill 2.0” this fall.
There’s “no basis for partisanship with what we’re going to have” in the fall after including tens of billions of dollars in farm bill priorities in Trump’s domestic policy law, Thompson said.
Democrats aren’t necessarily convinced: House Agriculture Committee ranking member Rep. Angie Craig warned throughout the budget law negotiations that the food aid cuts could wreck the bipartisan coalition that usually passes a farm bill.
But Republican lawmakers are betting that Democrats will “offer some support, though, for a less-controversial farm bill that simply extends some programs and boosts funding for bipartisan priorities,” per Politico. Among those bipartisan priorities that have been stymied by no new farm bill is a restriction on foreign farmland ownership, especially from China, which both Democrats and Republicans have been wanting to regulate for years.
“It’s been a long time coming. I’m excited,” Sen. Roger Marshall told NOTUS about efforts on foreign land ownership. Marshall has introduced a bill to codify the secretary of agriculture on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which he considers “the most important thing” Congress can move to do on the issue right now.
It’s a rare policy area that has support from both parties and the administration. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced USDA’s National Farm Security Action Plan at a press conference on Tuesday, where the first of seven priorities laid out in the document is about farmland owned by foreign nationals.
These concerns around this land ownership have had a steady drumbeat in Congress for the last several legislative sessions. Bill after bill has been introduced, year after year, in large part related to concerns about national security. Some members are focused on Chinese purchases of farmland around military bases, others with the international competition American farmers now have when they want to buy agricultural land, and others about how the U.S. might be handing over too much of its food supply chain to other nations.
After getting a Farmland Securities Act passed in 2022 as part of the funding omnibus, Sen. Tammy Baldwin told NOTUS last year that she wanted to see her and Sen. Chuck Grassley’s 2023 updated to include mandating the USDA to increase filing requirements for foreign investors and establish penalties for those who didn’t comply.
Baldwin re-introduced the legislation earlier this year. While she hadn’t seen Rollins’ conference, she is still passionate about the issue.
“I would love to build upon the progress that we’ve made in the past, and especially modernize the records that USDA has so that they are searchable and up to date,” Baldwin told NOTUS this week.
For these bipartisan agriculture bills, the farm bill is a necessity. If not there, many members see another dead end on foreign land ownership. Sen. Tim Sheehy, for instance, suggested legislation on this could perhaps move standalone. But asked if there would be an appetite for that or time in the schedule, Sheehy said “not anytime soon.”
It’s pressing to many members, particularly those with agriculture interests.
“We’ve got way too many foreign countries buying our farmland,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville told NOTUS. A member of the Senate’s agriculture committee, he said to get the legislative work done, he wants “a farm bill. We gotta get a farm bill.”
But, as has been asked over and over for a number of years now, will we get one? “We should,” Tuberville said. “I hope.”
Sen. Josh Hawley has also re-introduced legislation, which would ban Chinese ownership of American farmland and American homes.
“I think it’s really important. I can just tell you, in Missouri, we have so many family farmers and young farmers who want to buy land, and they can’t do it. And one of the reasons that it’s so expensive is you’ve got a lot of foreign corporations, Chinese corporations, coming in, and I just think that’s outrageous,” he told NOTUS.
Hawley sees another option for this kind of legislation with the National Defense Authorization Act, since the issue has substantial overlap with national security. “We’ll find out,” he said, if there’s an appetite to include it there.
Though in 2023, the Senate passed the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security Act, a bipartisan amendment to the NDAA to limit investments in American agriculture from China, North Korea, Russia and Iran, and also add agriculture as an industry CFIUS would have to consider when deciding whether a transaction presents a threat to U.S. national security.
Those proposals didn’t make it into the final NDAA.
Appetite to get this policy passed, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that lawmakers can avoid partisan fighting. Craig reiterated her warnings about the potentially impending difficulties in passing the farm bill this year – and beyond that.
“If Republicans decimate SNAP, a farm bill program, the coalition that has been essential to the successful passage of bipartisan farm bills will be forever undermined, making it tougher to pass not just a full farm bill this year but all future farm bills,” Craig wrote in a statement after the legislation cleared the House last week.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis called Chinese ownership of farmland “concerning” and said she wants to see some legislative progress on the issue. She saw the inclusion of SNAP in the domestic policy bill as a warning sign of a new legislative normal if a farm bill doesn’t pass again.
“We saw some SNAP amendments on the ‘great big, beautiful bill.’ And it probably was part of the ‘great big bill’ because it had not been addressed in the farm bill,” she told NOTUS. “So now, [if we’re] going into year three without a farm bill, we’re going to start seeing different legislative vehicles used to get portions of the farm bill passed.”