The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry reported the Agriculture Act of 2026, the unfinished business of the Farm Bill, on September 16, 2026 (Farm Policy News, September 17, 2026; C-SPAN, September 16, 2026). The vote was 12 to 11 to report the legislation, and it was a party-line vote (Republicans in favor, Democrats opposed). The outcome highlights further that the controversies of last year’s Reconciliation Farm Bill continue to complicate this year’s unfinished business, especially the changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps) (Martichoux, July 22, 2026; Malicoate, September 22, 2026). With a recess for the mid-term elections rapidly approaching, there is little time and less expectation for Congress to finish the work on this legislation before an expected lame duck session after the election (Yilek, Watson, and Brown, September 17, 2026; Razor, September 22, 2026). With ample time to consider the future of the Farm Bill, this article reviews two updates to the Policy Design Lab visualization project for crop insurance and a storyboard for soybeans.
Discussion
Launched in 2022, the Policy Design Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a project to advance understanding of policy design. Among other things, the project applies research, data, and computational resources to visualize the impacts of policies. The project involves developing web-based resources in which to explore and analyze existing policies and, eventually, policy alternatives or design innovations. The project works from statutory and legislative text to incorporate and apply research, publicly available data, and computational resources for analysis and visualization efforts, guided by statutory provisions or legislative options to produce comparative analysis. One goal of the project is to advance understanding about existing policies, as well as research-backed analysis of alternative designs or innovative designs (see, https://policydesignlab.ncsa.illinois.edu/; farmdoc daily, December 21, 2023).
(1) Crop Insurance Updates
The updates for crop insurance refine the crop insurance visualizations, allowing users to view data at the county level, by major commodity (corn, cotton, sorghum, peanuts, rice, soybeans, wheat, and a combined all other commodities), and for each year or combination of years from 2014 to 2024. Figure 1 is the landing page for this visualization at the net farmer benefits for 2024, all commodities (https://policydesignlab.ncsa.illinois.edu/cropinsurance?map=net-farmer-benefits&level=county). All data visualized has been downloaded from the USDA, Risk Management Agency website and primarily from the summary of business application (https://public-rma.fpac.usda.gov/apps/SummaryOfBusiness).
Source : illinois.edu