As Congress prepares for a House floor vote on the Farm Bill next week, lawmakers are issuing dire warnings about what might happen to American farmers if an aid package doesn’t pass.
The past year was tough for American farmers, a downturn that the Farm Bureau has called a “generational rather than a temporary slowdown.” Farm bankruptcies increased 46% in 2025 and are at their highest level since 2020, though fewer farms are going bankrupt than in the 2010s.
The combined costs of seed, fertilizer, equipment and other necessary materials have been rising steadily since 2021; retaliatory tariffs from China hurt American farmers’ business last year; and the cost of gas and fertilizer is soaring as a consequence of the U.S. war with Iran.
The Trump administration announced $12 billion in one-time aid to farmers in December. But many in Congress say farmers need more help and are pushing for a farm aid package giving American farmers billions in immediate assistance — though major details, like how much aid the package would provide and how it would be passed, are still unresolved.
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House Agriculture Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson has called for $20 billion in farm assistance. Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman has said he would support a farm aid measure, and House Agriculture Democrats introduced a $17 billion aid package at the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile, the Farm Bill is making its way through Congress. Lawmakers last renewed the measure, the cornerstone of federal agricultural and nutrition funding, in 2018. A one-year extension of the bill is set to expire in September. The House is expected to vote on its version of the bill next week.
Some lawmakers are warning that the delays are costly for American farmers and need to be resolved.
“There are so many moving parts that it’s almost like we on the Hill who don’t understand anything about agriculture have just opted to just think, ‘Well, that’s going to be okay,’ but it’s not, it’s not going to be okay,” Sen. Jim Justice told NOTUS.
Sen. John Hoeven said he would like to see the aid as a part of a larger supplemental package and said he believed a package that includes farm assistance, natural disaster relief and funding for the Department of Defense could receive broad bipartisan support.
“I think the sooner the better,” Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, told NOTUS. “I think you got a combination there that I believe we should be able to move on a bipartisan release.”
Justice concurred that lawmakers need to move fast: “It needs to be an immediate infusion today,” Justice said. “The very moment that we have a meltdown with our family farm in this country, we won’t care about anything else here.”
Sen. Raphael Warnock said he had not reviewed the specifics of Thompson’s request but agreed that action was needed beyond the farm bill.
“I can tell you that farmers are suffering in Georgia, by the natural disasters — Hurricane Helene, these tariffs on top of it,” Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, told NOTUS. “So we need farm relief, and we need a Farm Bill.”
In the Southeast, severe drought and active wildfires are adding to farmers’ difficulties.
“I think there’s a reasonable path. Unfortunately, the closer you get to an election, my experience has been the harder it gets to do reasonable things,” Warnock said. “If we center the people rather than the politicians, we can get a farm bill done.”
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