It's farm bill time
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
Every five years or so, Congress considers and passes a new version of the farm bill. It is a massive law covering not just agriculture, but also food assistance programs. And it comes at a particularly tough time for farmers, who are being pinched by drought, tariffs, and rising fuel and fertilizer costs. Then, what's the UAE's departure from OPEC mean for oil prices? And later, from "Marketplace Tech," we hear how Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act opens the "backdoor" for warrantless searches.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Farm Bill season from Marketplace. I'm Sabrina Bennishoor in New York. Every five years or so, Congress considers and eventually passes, a new version of what's known as the Farm Bill. This is one of those years. It is a massive law covering not just agriculture but also food assistance programs. Marketplaces Carla Javier has more. |
| 0:22.9 | The Farm Bill sets the rules of the road for the food and farm economies, says Michael Hap at the |
| 0:28.3 | Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. It's got 12 sections or titles, things ranging from |
| 0:34.4 | commodities and crop insurance to conservation and nutrition. |
| 0:39.1 | Nutrition programs, he says, help folks pay for food at grocery stores, part of farmers' income. |
| 0:44.5 | And policies in the farm bill set the payments and assistance some farmers receive. |
| 0:49.4 | Scott Myers and his family grow seven crops, including a lot of hay, at woodland acres, an organic farm in Ohio. |
| 0:56.5 | When there was a drought last year, Myers says the farm lost about half of the hay crop, |
| 1:01.3 | but hay insurance, federally subsidized under the farm bill, made a big difference. |
| 1:06.0 | It didn't make us money, but in the end, it did help bring us up to where we at least broke even for the year. |
| 1:12.3 | But not everyone is eligible for that type of support. |
| 1:15.6 | I don't have access to any of that kind of a safety net in the farm bill. |
| 1:19.7 | That's Hannah Bernhardt of Medicine Creek Farm in Minnesota. |
| 1:23.4 | There she raises grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork. |
| 1:26.8 | The only place I can get some help from is through those conservation programs. |
| 1:32.1 | Through one of the programs under the Farm Bill, she agreed to do adaptive rotational grazing. |
| 1:37.2 | Which is really good for soil health. |
| 1:39.7 | They would help me install permanent fences and water lines so that I could raise my livestock here. |
| 1:47.1 | The debate over what should and shouldn't be included in the next farm bill comes at a time that's |
| 1:52.6 | extremely tough for farmers, says Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund. |
| 1:58.1 | We've had to face tariffs, which drove our largest soybean buyer China away, |
| 2:04.0 | depressing our prices. He says these days the numbers just aren't adding up. All of us are facing |
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