On May 1, 2024, Rep. G.T. Thompson, Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, released summaries of their respective farm bill proposals (see here and here).
On May 17, 2024, Chairman Thompson released text of his bill. Very early this morning, the House Committee on Agriculture finished marking up its version of the 2024 Farm Bill – the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2024 – and passed it out of Committee on a bipartisan vote of 33 to 21.
While there will be a lot of chatter about the path forward in the full House, attention is now turning to the Senate. To help set the stage, we have compiled a side-by-side comparison of the major farm safety net features of the House Ag Committee-passed bill and the Senate majority proposal – the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act of 2024. Importantly, no bill text has been released for the Senate proposal, so the comparison is compiled from the summary materials linked above. Further, while Table 1 compares the proposals currently on the table, we leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions about which approach they prefer. It is also important to note that Sen. John Boozman (R-AR), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, announced earlier this morning that he will weigh in with his own framework “in the coming weeks” but highlighted that the House Ag Committee-passed bill “mirrors much of what Senate Republicans are seeking to accomplish with our framework.” [READ MORE]