Farm Bill: A Short History and Summary

The Agriculture Committees are among the oldest in Congress, established in 1820 in the House of Representatives and in 1825 in the U.S. Senate. The Department of Agriculture was established by Congress in 1862.

Today, the marquee legislative responsibility of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees is the development and passage of a comprehensive package of commodity, conservation, trade, nutrition, credit, rural development, research, forestry, energy, horticulture, crop insurance, and miscellaneous provisions, commonly known as the Farm Bill.

As the next Farm Bill is negotiated, provided below is a relatively brief title-by-title history and guide to this policy, which affects every single American and those in need from around the world in the most fundamental of ways.

Americans enjoy the safest, most abundant, most affordable food supply in the world. In fact, we in the U.S. pay less of our disposable income on food than anyone else in the world. The U.S. also has among the lowest tariff levels and support for farmers in the world. In short, U.S. farm and ranch families feed, clothe, and fuel the nation in a manner that is unrivaled in history. As a recent example of their success, it is because of these hard-working farm and ranch families that the U.S. was able to avoid a major disruption in the food supply during the pandemic.

“Innovations in farm organization, business arrangements, and production practices have allowed farmers to produce more with less… Likely aided by the increased use of risk management tools such as contracts and crop insurance, U.S. agricultural productivity has increased by nearly 50 percent since 1982. Future innovations will be necessary to maintain, or boost, current productivity gains in order to meet the growing global demands that will be placed upon U.S. agriculture.” – USDA Economic Research Service

As Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack once stated in remarks before Congress:

“Every one of us that is not a farmer is not a farmer because we have farmers. We delegate the responsibility of feeding our families to a relatively small percentage of this country. If you look at 85 percent of what is grown in this country, it is raised by 200,000 to 300,000 people. That is less than one-tenth of 1 percent of America.

“But the other 99 percent of us can be lawyers and doctors and Peace Corps volunteers and economists and people that work for government and all of the other occupations because we never think about, well, gee, do I have to actually grow the food for my family? No. I go to the grocery store and get it.

“So, I am free to do whatever I want to do with my life. That is an incredible freedom that we take for granted in this country. It is not true in most of the countries in this world. And then when we go to the grocery store, we walk out of it with more money in our pocket as a percentage of our paychecks than anybody else in the world.”

Former Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue added another dimension to the importance of what U.S. agriculture achieves when he remarked, “Food security is a key component of national security, because hunger and peace do not long coexist.”

Click on each of the Titles of the Farm Bill below to learn more about how that specific title helps support American agriculture and national food security.