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KEY POINTS:
More than two years after its expiration, the Farm Bill remains stalled.
Cuts and cancellations to federal conservation programs have disrupted funding for projects aimed at improving rural water quality and soil health.
Farmers across the region say the loss of support is forcing them to absorb significant financial losses and scale back conservation efforts.
More than two years have passed since the Agriculture Improvement Act — better known as the Farm Bill — expired, leaving the nation’s primary agricultural policy framework in a state of prolonged uncertainty.
The bill, which steers the economics, logistics, and environmental priorities of America’s food production and land and water use, is one of the largest pieces of legislation authored by Congress. The 2018 package, which lapsed in 2023, is more than 500 pages long.
Two full legislative sessions have come and gone without the approval of a new five-year Farm Bill, and this year is unlikely to yield more productive results. The U.S. House Agriculture Committee passed a new version of the bill out of committee earlier this month, but its chances of gaining Senate approval, policy experts tell Circle of Blue, are slim.
The absence of a new Farm Bill has been temporarily stop-gapped with consecutive one-year extensions of the 2018 bill, in 2024 and 2025. But these interim fixes have been vulnerable to cuts, with environmental protections and funding taking acute hits.
Last year, hundreds of Farm Bill-supported conservation programs and grants administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) were paused or cancelled by the Trump administration. Many were stalled or eliminated on grounds of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Some of these grants include those administered by Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), a USDA effort that subsidizes farmers who address “natural resource challenges” on their lands, including water pollution, invasive species, and flooding.
Responding to a September FOIA request from Circle of Blue, the agency in February declined to release records identifying specific projects affected by cancellations, but acknowledged that at least 69 RCPP projects tied to those decisions are under legal review.
Each passing year without a new bill, environmental advocates say, is a missed opportunity to enshrine reliable funding for programs, including the RCPP, that prioritize healthy watersheds.
Conservation-Minded Farmers Absorb Losses
Many farmers around the Great Lakes, still reeling from the financial impact of last year’s sudden changes, have testified to their positive impact on local watersheds.
Ross Bishop, a farmer in the town of Jackson, Wisconsin, has used no-till practices for nearly 30 years on his 700-acre plot to manage flooding, drought, and water contamination. This proved especially effective in August, when more than nine inches of rain fell on his property in the span of 24 hours. The sheets of water that ran through his land and cover crops carried no sediment, according to the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District — a far cry from the two millimeters of soil that erode off the average midwestern field every year, often carrying fertilizers that pollute water sources.
Frozen USDA grant programs that support Bishop’s no-till work cost him $44,000 last growing season, he estimates.
“The healthy farming practices that we do here are definitely keeping soil in the field,” Bishop told Circle of Blue. “If it erodes, you’re losing organic matter, so there’s a lot of value in these practices, and you need to show you’re making money by doing it. We’re all in trouble right now with economics.”
In northwest Indiana, Tom Eich has slowly been expanding his farming acreage since he began running Kankakee Valley Homestead in 2017. His vegetable plots grew from a quarter-acre to three acres, then 45 acres in 2024. Before last growing season, supported by two USDA-funded programs — Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools — he made the decision to expand his farm to 150 acres for 2025.
The ink wasn’t even dry on the lease for these new plots when Eich received word that those grants had been canceled. Of the roughly 100 extra acres he acquired, he could only afford to grow vegetables on roughly one-fifth of this land.
“The beginning of the year left us with debt that we’re still kind of finishing paying up and unfortunately, that minimal cash flow throughout the year had ripple effects,” Eich said. “I wasn’t able to afford the normal help that we had on the farm. I wasn’t able to grow as much this year. Then we weren’t able to bring as much to the market.”
The Kankakee River, which is one of the most-polluted rivers in Indiana, runs through Eich’s farm. He says he’s the only one of his neighbors who doesn’t plant his crops right up to its banks, and instead has a line of trees and native plants that help combat flooding and preserve water quality. It’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make even without reimbursement from the USDA, but it’s not a luxury every farmer can afford.
“Instead of putting into the program, they could potentially make more money farming it. So they still do that,” Eich says. “For the most part, a lot of the people that were doing it were doing it out of a mind of conservation, rather than necessarily the payback. But there are people for whom [grants] did make a real difference, and they are going to have to adapt.”
Further south, near Culver, Indiana, the impact and timing of grant cancellations added up quickly. A USDA cost-sharing cover crop research grant that was cancelled last February put Chad Gard, a farmer at Hole in the Wood Farms, in an $8,000 hole to start the spring. That snowballed, Gard said, into about $160,000 worth of losses over the year. Roughly 80 percent of his farm “went to weeds” instead of crops.
This meant that Gard wasn’t able to focus as closely on efforts to improve watershed quality and biodiversity.
“We work really hard to make sure that we’ve got buffer areas so we don’t have runoff from our fields,” Gard said. “We don’t use any synthetic chemicals at all, we’re careful not to use excess compost or leave our manure, you know, where it would run into the waterways, because that’s all ending up in the groundwater and in the river.”
Since he started implementing these practices several years ago, Gard said he has noticed the waters in the wetland woods adjacent to his land containing fewer algae, a sign of decreased nitrogen. The population of singing frogs has increased. Clearing invasive species like honeysuckle and silver maple from the outskirts of his land has brought birds back to the landscape.
“The environment has been responding,” he said. “But if I spend 100 hours clearing out honeysuckle, I’m not spending that producing lettuce that I could sell and make income from. With a grant paying a portion of it, it’s a little easier to justify the expense.”
Even programs whose grants have remained untouched are dealing with the ramifications of defunded farmer outreach and education programs. Many of these rural efforts rely on word-of-mouth communication and trust. A year of instability has ruptured this grassroots momentum.
In 2023, Ducks Unlimited was awarded $8.8 million through the USDA’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program to “restore and protect 800 acres of wetlands and associated upland areas” in priority watershed areas in Wisconsin.
But getting this program off the ground, even years later, has been difficult. “Finding agronomists to deliver these programs can be challenging,” Joe Genzel, the organization’s regional communications coordinator, told Circle of Blue in September. “It’s a very specialized position. Finding a biologist who can talk the talk to farmers is extremely niche.”