Welcome to the Cato podcast.

I'm Ryan Bourne Cato's R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2006,

commonly known as the Farm Bill by and National Security Act of 2026,

commonly known as the Farm Bill by 224 votes to 200.

The Senate has promised its own version very soon.

Now, this year's Farm Bill is a bit of an oddity.

A lot of the big money decisions have already been made.

Last year's one big beautiful bill changed commodity programs,

crop insurance, conservation funding, and the SNAP program known as food stamps, leaving the current debates over a lot of regulatory issues.

So this bill is not the usual whole farm policy fight.

It's more like the latest instalment in a much larger story.

Congress keeps finding new ways to shield agriculture from market discipline.

Now, farmers are business people, of course, yet Washington subsidises their insurance, loans, marketing,

research, exports, land improvements, and often compensates them when other policies like tariffs

make their lives harder. Do we really need all this federal support for agriculture?

Who actually benefits from it? And how much of the industry's distress is policy-induced to begin

with? To help unpack all that, I'm joined today by Chris Edwards, Cato's Kiltz family chair in

fiscal studies. Thanks, Ryan. And Clark Packard, a research fellow in Cato's Herbert

A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. Thanks for having me. Now, Chris, let's start with you

for a normal listener who hears the term farm bill. They probably think this just means support to

farmers. But what is this overarching legislation actually about?

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