For the better part of three years, conservation groups across America have been watching the Farm Bill situation with the kind of grinding anxiety usually reserved for a long drought season. The landmark legislation that governs nearly every dimension of American agriculture — from crop insurance to wildlife habitat to rural water quality — expired in October 2023, and Congress has been kicking the can down the road ever since. But something has shifted in 2026. After a string of short-term extensions and a seismic reconciliation package that rearranged the funding landscape, there is cautious, hard-earned optimism in the conservation community. The Senate has a fresh draft proposal on the table. The House has already passed its version. And organizations that have spent years fighting for pheasant habitat, clean streams, and healthy topsoil are daring to believe that this might finally be the year Congress gets it done.
Three Years in Limbo: How We Got Here
The Farm Bill is arguably the most consequential piece of legislation most Americans never think about. Its programs range from crop insurance and agricultural research to nutrition assistance and conservation, and each year this legislation provides roughly $6 billion for conservation work alone — making it the federal government's largest investment in the conservation, restoration, and management of private working lands. Those lands — farms, ranches, and forests — cover over half the total land area in the United States. When the law lapses, the consequences ripple quietly but widely across the American landscape.
The last time Congress passed a comprehensive and bipartisan Farm Bill was in 2018, and it expired in 2023. What followed was not the swift reauthorization that farm groups and conservationists had hoped for, but rather a prolonged series of stopgap measures. In the three years since the last Farm Bill expired, Congress has been able to authorize and fund most — but not all — of its key components through short-term extensions. Congress passed a third one-year extension in November 2025, continuing a cycle of uncertainty that makes it harder for producers to maintain their livelihoods and care for their land.
The political terrain has been treacherous. On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the reconciliation bill — the "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act — into law, throwing the decades-old bipartisan Farm Bill coalition into disarray. Republicans' leveraging of the bill to pursue longtime policy priorities, including increasing commodity subsidies and cutting SNAP, was seen by Democrats as undermining what had historically been bipartisan Farm Bill negotiations. The farm policy world, once held together by an unlikely alliance of rural conservatives and urban Democrats united by agriculture and nutrition programs, suddenly found itself on much shakier ground.
The Senate Steps Up: Farm Bill 2.0
That shakiness makes the most recent Senate development all the more striking. Members of Congress took another solid step toward passing an updated Farm Bill this week, and conservation groups are hoping they can keep the momentum going. Senator John Boozman (R-Arkansas), chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, released a draft proposal for what he's calling Farm Bill 2.0.
The terminology itself is telling. Such potential legislation has been informally referred to as a "skinny farm bill" or a "farm bill 2.0," given that some parts of a typical farm bill were already enacted through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation package. The idea is that the hard budget-moving work — commodity programs, major conservation funding — was handled by reconciliation. Now a standalone Farm Bill can address the policy architecture, program reauthorizations, and technical improvements that reconciliation's strict rules wouldn't allow.
The new Farm, Food, and National Security Act is designed to complete full reauthorization across conservation, rural development, research, trade, forestry, energy, and specialty crop programs that have not yet been fully reauthorized. The proposal makes targeted "implementation" upgrades, not just funding changes, aimed at improving program access and delivery — emphasizing flexibility, streamlined delivery, and expanded technical support, including precision agriculture eligibility and higher cost-share options, third-party technical assistance, and updated broadband and water tools.
What Conservation Groups Are Actually Celebrating
The CRP Crisis — and a Path Forward
No conservation program has suffered more visibly from the legislative limbo than the Conservation Reserve Program. "The most prominent and possibly the most concerning program in this kind of limbo state of annual extensions is the Conservation Reserve Program, the CRP, which has been the backbone of conservation since 1985," said Jonathan Coppess, associate professor of agricultural policy at the University of Illinois.
CRP is, at its core, a straightforward but powerful idea: the government pays farmers to take vulnerable or environmentally sensitive acreage out of row crop production. The program provides annual rental fees to farmers who take vulnerable land out of row crop production to reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and provide wildlife habitat — for some, this looks like a meadow of native grasses and wildflowers or a riparian buffer along a stream. Contracts typically last 10 to 15 years, providing stable funding for farmers during fluctuating crop prices and trade wars. "CRP is a backbone program because of how it fits within not just conservation, but also agriculture production and economic issues," Coppess added.
The problem is that CRP has been caught in a particularly nasty administrative purgatory. The one exception to otherwise sustained conservation programs has been CRP, which pays farmers to keep some of their acreage out of production in order to maintain quality habitat for upland birds and other wildlife. "Each year, the CRP has lapsed in authorization at the end of the fiscal year, and it's required an extension to get back up and running," explains Andrew Schmidt, director of governmental affairs for Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever. The result: enrollment delays, administrative confusion, and acres of potential habitat left in limbo while bureaucratic clocks reset.
The new legislation directly confronts this. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act did not reauthorize the broader conservation title and notably left out the Conservation Reserve Program. The new Farm, Food, and National Security Act language fills that gap, reauthorizing CRP through 2031 and restoring continuity for producers considering multiyear land retirement decisions. It also modifies county acreage limitations by combining certain CRP and wetland caps into a single limit, giving USDA greater flexibility to allocate acres within counties and reducing technical enrollment constraints that previously limited participation.
Groups Like Pheasants Forever See Real Momentum
Groups like Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever welcomed the Senate news, as they've spent years pushing Congress to pass a new Farm Bill — one that better aligns with the needs of modern-day farmers and builds on crucial programs benefitting wildlife conservation. These are not Washington lobby shops full of lawyers and consultants. They are membership organizations built around hunters, outdoorsmen, and rural landowners who understand that wild pheasant populations, quail coveys, and the fields that sustain them don't exist without structured conservation policy. When CRP ground disappears, the birds disappear with it.
Schmidt puts it plainly: "A lot has changed in the world of agriculture and conservation since 2018. There are now different needs and different tools that we can use to help with that. So it has long since been time to pass a new Farm Bill. And we're excited that now, with the House having passed their bill, we're seeing some movement in the Senate."
New Programs, New Tools
Beyond rescuing CRP from its annual reauthorization crisis, the draft legislation introduces structural innovations that reflect how agriculture and technology have evolved since 2018. It would also create two brand-new programs: a forest conservation easement program, and a state conservation assistance program — the latter meant to facilitate more collaboration between state agencies and landowners to help implement more tools and programs benefiting wildlife, soil health, and water quality.
One specific example illustrates how the policy is trying to catch up to on-the-ground reality. Schmidt points to virtual fencing — a technology using GPS-linked collars and digital perimeters that allows ranchers to manage grazing patterns without physical fence infrastructure. "One example is virtual fencing. It might have been around in 2018, but it was more cost prohibitive, it wasn't widely available, and it certainly was not something anyone was thinking about putting in Farm Bill statute," Schmidt says. "But here we are in 2026, and there is a real need to update rules and definitions to make sure that producers can access cost-share for virtual fencing if that's something they want to use."
That kind of on-the-ground practicality — updating statutory language to match what farmers are actually using — is precisely what gets lost in a policy frozen in 2018 amber. Working lands programs are strengthened beyond simple reauthorization. EQIP and CSP now explicitly incorporate precision agriculture practices and technology adoption, with cost-share rates of up to 90% for precision implementation. For a cattle rancher in the Flint Hills or a row crop farmer in the Mississippi Delta, that kind of cost-share access to modern tools can mean the difference between adoption and abandonment.
The IRA Money: A High-Stakes Shuffle
Perhaps the most complex and consequential chapter in the recent Farm Bill story is what happened to the Inflation Reduction Act conservation funding. When Congress passed the IRA in 2022, it directed an additional $17 billion toward farm bill conservation programs — specifically EQIP, CSP, ACEP, and RCPP — with requirements that the money go toward climate-smart agricultural practices. The catch was that the funding was temporary and subject to a hard stop date, creating what policy experts began calling a "conservation cliff."
According to the Congressional Budget Office, IRA climate and agriculture-related spending on greenhouse gas-mitigating or carbon-sequestering activities was projected at $16.7 billion from fiscal years 2023 to 2031. Because the IRA prevents USDA from entering into any agreement that extends or disburses any funds after September 30, 2031, there was a looming conservation cliff for all IRA-related conservation activities.
The Trump administration's executive orders added another layer of uncertainty. Much of the IRA conservation funding was placed on hold in early 2024 by executive orders prohibiting spending focused on climate change. Although the IRA was investing in many popular bread-and-butter conservation practices — such as cover crops and no-till — the climate focus of the funding in the law made it vulnerable to further funding freezes and potential rescission by Congress.
Conservation organizations fought hard to prevent those dollars from simply evaporating. As a result of the successful advocacy of many conservation organizations, the Republican reconciliation package — signed into law in July 2025 — transferred all unspent IRA conservation funding, roughly $14 billion, into the Farm Bill Conservation Title. This was a strategically important victory: by moving those dollars out of the IRA framework and into the Farm Bill's permanent baseline, advocates transformed what had been a temporary, politically vulnerable infusion into a more durable funding structure.
The long-run math is compelling. In short, the increased but temporary funding available from the IRA was traded for permanent increases in budget authority that will spend more money over the longer term, though less in the near term. Through FY2034, CBO projects a net decrease in outlays of $1.8 billion but an increase in budget authority of $3.3 billion. Zoom out further, and the case becomes even stronger: over 20 fiscal years, the budget authority for these conservation programs increases by $38.8 billion — from $75.5 billion to $114.3 billion.
The 2025 budget reconciliation bill, signed into law in July 2025, included $2 billion a year in additional mandatory funding for five popular Farm Bill conservation programs. Defending Farm Bill conservation funding was a top priority for The Nature Conservancy during the reconciliation process, and this additional funding represents a significant win for farmers, conservation, and nature.
Working Lands Programs: Beyond Conservation, Into Production
One of the more underappreciated features of the Farm Bill's conservation architecture is that it doesn't pit farming against conservation — it integrates them. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program pay working farmers to adopt practices that improve their land's productivity while simultaneously reducing erosion, improving water quality, and creating habitat. These programs are not about taking land out of production; they're about making active agricultural land work better for both the farmer and the surrounding ecosystem.
Farm Bill conservation programs are voluntary and incentive-based, and they benefit agricultural operations of every type and size — from ranchers and farmers managing thousands of acres down to local community gardens. The voluntary nature of these programs is critical to their political durability. They don't mandate behavior; they incentivize it. Farmers who adopt cover crops, install grassed waterways, or implement rotational grazing get compensated for the conservation benefits they provide.
These conservation programs are extremely popular with farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural producers. Applications to these programs already far exceed available funds. That backlog is not a sign of program failure — it's a sign of pent-up demand from landowners who want to participate but simply can't get in. Every year the Farm Bill remains in extension status, that backlog grows, and conservation investments that could be happening on private lands are deferred.
The EQIP situation under the new legislation is particularly notable. Even after the reallocation of a small percentage of EQIP funds to cover new program costs, the program still received the highest increase in funding of any conservation program when compared with the 2018 Farm Bill — with its baseline increased by over $1.2 billion per year for all future farm bills. EQIP payment limits increase for fiscal years 2025–2031, CSP minimum payments rise to $4,000, and new five-year accrual periods reset participation limits.
What Gets Left Out — and Why It Matters
The optimism in the conservation community is real, but it isn't uniform. Critics point out that the Farm Bill 2.0 process was shaped by reconciliation rules that forced tradeoffs — and some of those tradeoffs have not sat well with advocates for smaller-scale agriculture.
Rather than increasing access to credit and crop insurance for small-scale operations and farmers working in diverse systems, the bill doubles down on support for large-scale, industrial commodity operations — a group that already disproportionately benefits from agricultural subsidies. Additionally, the bill chooses to focus on funding precision agriculture technology over proven, farmer-led conservation practices.
Farm Aid and similar organizations have raised pointed concerns about how conservation funding changes interact with program size limits. There is concern that the Farm Bill extension makes some changes to conservation programs that allow very large agricultural operations to utilize a disproportionately large amount of conservation funding through the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. The implication is that the conservation title, even with more total dollars, may deliver fewer benefits to the small and mid-sized operations that conservationists traditionally view as the most land-stewardship-minded farmers.
The political challenge of getting a full Farm Bill across the finish line also remains very real. Unlike the reconciliation process, a new farm bill will require 60 votes to pass in the Senate, meaning that in this closely divided Congress, Republicans will have to win over some Democrats. How they will do that — and what appetite Democrats have for helping them after the nutrition title has been gutted — remains to be seen.
The Historical Stakes: 1985 and the Conservation Mandate
To understand why conservation advocates care so deeply about this particular piece of legislation, it helps to go back to 1985. That year's Farm Bill marked a watershed moment in federal agricultural policy, when Congress first tied farm program benefits to basic conservation requirements and created CRP as a land retirement tool. Starting in 1985, farm bills broadened the conservation agenda to include addressing multiple natural resource concerns. Although the number of conservation programs has increased and techniques to address resource problems continue to emerge, the basic approach has remained unchanged: provide financial and technical assistance to implement conservation systems supported by education and research programs.
Four decades later, that foundational commitment has produced measurable results. Through this legislation, farmers and ranchers have voluntarily enrolled 140 million acres in conservation programs. That is a land area larger than California and Nevada combined — working farms and ranches where soil health, water quality, and wildlife habitat have been deliberately managed as part of the American agricultural system.
The conservation title's growth in funding over that same period reflects both its political durability and its expanding scope. The conservation title is one of the larger non-nutrition titles of the farm bill, accounting for $58 billion in projected 10-year mandatory funding. Spending for agricultural conservation programs has generally increased from $2.3 billion in FY2002 to an estimated $5.3 billion in recent years — a more than doubling in real terms that reflects bipartisan recognition that conservation on private lands is cost-effective public policy.
Looking Ahead: What Passage Would Actually Mean
If the Senate can build on Boozman's draft and negotiate a final bill with the House, the practical effects on the ground would be substantial and immediate. CRP enrollment would stabilize, allowing farmers to commit to multiyear contracts without fear of another bureaucratic interruption. Working lands programs would expand access to modern tools. State wildlife agencies would gain new partners in a federal assistance program explicitly designed to bridge the gap between federal conservation programs and local land management realities.
For hunters and outdoorsmen, the stakes are visceral. CRP ground is quail and pheasant habitat. Riparian buffers are trout streams. Grassed waterways are the difference between a working farm and an eroded gully that chokes downstream fisheries. The Farm Bill's conservation programs are not abstract environmental policy — they are the mechanical infrastructure of the landscapes that millions of American men use for hunting, fishing, and recreation every year.
The legislation also reforms program delivery by expanding the use of third-party technical service providers, establishing clearer certification timelines and requiring periodic review of conservation practice standards — a set of procedural improvements that sounds dry on paper but represents a genuine effort to reduce the bureaucratic friction that causes eligible farmers to give up on the enrollment process before they even get started.
The feral hog provision is worth noting as well, particularly for landowners in the South and Midwest. The bill converts the Feral Swine Eradication and Control Pilot Program into a permanent program and authorizes $150 million for fiscal years 2025–2031. With feral hog damage to U.S. agriculture estimated at more than $1.6 billion annually, shifting from pilot status to long-term authority provides greater certainty, sustained funding, and improved coordination for producers in heavily impacted states.
The Bottom Line
The Farm Bill has always been one of Washington's more unglamorous but genuinely consequential legislative exercises — a sprawling, multi-title, multi-stakeholder negotiation that rarely makes front pages but shapes the physical character of the American landscape more than almost any other federal action. After three years of extensions, a seismic reconciliation bill, and a reshuffled political coalition, the conservation community has found reasons to be genuinely, if cautiously, hopeful.
After three years of short-term extensions, conservation groups hope this can be the year that Congress finally passes an updated Farm Bill. The Senate's willingness to move a draft is an encouraging sign, but the path ahead still requires bipartisan negotiation in a deeply divided chamber. The difference this time — and why the optimism feels more grounded than in previous cycles — is that the major funding battles have already been fought and largely won through reconciliation. What remains is the policy work: reauthorizing programs, updating definitions, building new tools, and restoring the long-term planning horizon that farmers and wildlife managers need to make decisions that play out over years and decades.
For the rancher deciding whether to idle some creek-bottom acres under a CRP contract, for the pheasant hunter watching grassland habitat shrink across the Great Plains, and for the state wildlife biologist trying to leverage federal partnerships to reach more landowners, the stakes of this legislative moment are anything but abstract. Getting the Farm Bill done — a real, comprehensive, five-year Farm Bill — would mean that some of the most consequential conservation infrastructure in American history gets the stability it needs to keep doing its job.
