Updated Farm Bill Math Confirms Challenging Farm Economy

Feb 04, 2026

By John Newton

Key Takeaways

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) made significant modifications to USDA mandatory farm programs and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Following these changes, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now projects 10-year spending for farm and nutrition programs at $1.4 trillion.
Despite persistent low crop prices, high input costs and tight margins, current farm bill safety net programs delivered only about $2 billion for the 2024 crop year, according to CBO. With support from the OBBBA-enhanced programs not arriving until fiscal year 2027, many farms continue to face financial strain — making additional bridge assistance critical for weathering the upcoming growing season.
While OBBBA made a historic investment in farm bill risk management tools, several farm bill programs were left out, and Congress must still pass a bipartisan farm bill reauthorization to address those remaining gaps.

Following several years of high input costs, declining crop prices and stagnant congressional investments in critical farm programs including risk management tools, trade promotion programs, marketing assistance loans and disaster programs, Congress advanced a historic investment in farm bill programs as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).

However, not every program in the farm bill was addressed in the OBBBA, e.g., the Conservation Reserve Program, and efforts continue to pass a bipartisan farm bill reauthorization for those programs. To facilitate this effort, CBO recently provided an early release of their baseline projections for USDA's mandatory farm programs and the SNAP. CBO’s full 2026 budget and economic outlook is expected to be released in early February.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids