How the Republican-sponsored farm bill could hurt Iowans

Ryan Marquardt, a fifth-generation farmer from Winterset, is worried about the future of farming. 

President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran have left farmers with soaring costs at a time when debt has already been climbing, farm bankruptcies are skyrocketing, and farmers are dying from suicide at more than double the rate of everyone else. 

It’s difficult to run a small or mid-sized farm at a time when corporations are increasingly taking control of the agricultural industry, Marquardt explained. Fewer and fewer people want to enter farming, and, at the age of 45, Marquardt said, he’s often the youngest farmer around. Federal statistics show that the average age of a farmer in the United States is about 58.

Marquardt, who runs two farming operations, works full time in economic development and is the vice president of the Iowa Farmers Union, thinks there’s still an opportunity to turn things around and make the country once again a viable place for small- and mid-sized farms. That, however, is not going to happen any time soon if the newest version of the federal farm bill is signed into law, he said.

“It’s just going to result in the same stuff that we see with farmer suicides, farmer debt crisis, continuing to diminish the margins in farming,” said Marquardt. “It is not a very promising future right now, and this farm bill doesn’t really fix that.” 

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives at the end of April passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, known as the farm bill. The 224 to 200 vote included three Republicans against and 14 Democratic lawmakers in favor of the measure. Now, the legislation is before the Republican-controlled Senate. 

The farm bill is a massive legislative package that governs agricultural and food policies in the country. The nutrition title of the bill, for example, authorizes and funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides financial assistance to help more than 40 million Americans purchase food.

First passed in 1933, the bill had typically been renewed every five years up until 2018, when Congress last passed a farm bill. When the bill was up for renewal in 2023, Democrats and Republicans reached an impasse largely over funding for SNAP and initiatives to combat climate change. Congress has only approved one-year extensions since then as lawmakers continue to clash over federal food assistance and climate change.

“The 2026 Farm Bill is a win for our farmers, ranchers, foresters, rural communities, and all Americans across our country,” Rep. Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, wrote on social media after the House passed the bill on April 30.

Farmers running smaller operations, farmer organizations, anti-hunger advocates, and environmentalists have criticized the House bill for a wide swath of reasons, including that the legislation does not restore a $187 billion cut that congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump made to SNAP in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

Additionally, critics said the House version does not address the Trump administration’s workforce and programming funding cuts to the Department of Agriculture. A network of livestock farmers wrote in an April 26 letter to members of Congress that the farm bill for too long has “prioritized industrial agriculture at the expense of independent farmers and ranchers.”

“To me, it just doesn’t really move the needle in any meaningful way that it needs to for the long term,” Marquardt said. “So it’s very much a representation of status quo continuum. And if you look outside, the status quo, at least in the ag industry, is not a very good one right now, and not a very promising one for the future. And it’s just continuing down the same path with very little deviation.”

Critics say congressional Republicans made the cuts to SNAP and other safety net programs like Medicaid to pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Republican lawmakers have often characterized their support for cutting SNAP as an attempt to curb abuse of the system, though experts report there is little fraud, waste or abuse in the SNAP program.

“It’s a very efficient program,” Julia Wolfson, an associate professor of international health and health policy management at Johns Hopkins University, said in a report from the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “There aren’t a lot of administrative costs, there’s not a lot of waste, fraud, or abuse. The overwhelming majority of the money is actually getting to Americans to buy food.” 

Should this farm bill pass the Senate and be signed into law by Trump, Marquardt said, he expects that small, independent farms will go bankrupt while large corporations continue their takeover of the agriculture industry. In 2025, there were 18 farm bankruptcies in Iowa, a 220% increase over the year before, according to data from the American Farm Bureau Federation. Nationwide, farm bankruptcies increased by 46% during the same time period.

“You have fewer and fewer farm families actually on the landscape — that’s less and less money spent in rural communities for all the basic services that support rural communities, from optometrists to the dentists to the hospitals,” Marquardt said. “I think there is the potential for a revival and a turnaround there, but, again, it’s going to have to take consequential steps to reimagine what American agriculture can and should be on the landscape.”

Clementine Bennet of Des Moines said the fact that the farm bill does not restore any of the cuts to SNAP funding means more people will be forced to center much of their lives on finding food, as Bennet has had to do. Bennet said they would run out of SNAP funds each cycle a week and a half before the next round of benefits became available, and they would scramble to figure out where their next meal was coming from.

“It’s usually the last 10 days or so I’m kind of scrambling,” Bennet said. “I’m either scrambling to make all the calls and appointments to go to the food pantry, or, even before that, even to find a stable or reliable food pantry was really difficult.”

Bennet, who first enrolled in SNAP in 2024, said there were moments when they had run out of SNAP funds and it simply became too exhausting to try to find food.

“It was just like, I’m just going to make do with whatever I can, and if I’m not eating, then I’m not eating,” they said. 

Bennet temporarily let their SNAP benefits lapse recently because they had applied for Social Security Disability Insurance due to their chronic fatigue and chronic pain, but they’re hoping they can reenroll for food assistance as grocery prices rise and they struggle to find food. Now, however, Bennet is worried about what the federal cuts could mean for them and for people throughout the state. 

Already, about 15,000 Iowans have lost their SNAP benefits following the federal cuts, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Iowa Hunger Coalition reported about 23,000 Iowans could see their food assistance benefits reduced or eliminated entirely because of the cuts.

The cuts to SNAP come at a time when the USDA has eliminated programs that benefited small and mid-sized farms, as well as schools and food banks, and increased food security, said Ardyth Gillespie, a resident of Atlantic  who retired as a faculty member at the Community Nutrition Program in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. Gillespie has spent much of her life and career advocating for a country in which all people have access to food. 

Last year, the USDA axed the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement program, which helped schools purchase food from local farms, and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Program, which helped food banks buy food from local farms. The farm bill does not restore those programs, Gillespie noted.

“In my mind, this farm bill moves us in the wrong direction,” Gillespie said. “Instead of making it easier for families to afford food and easier for farmers to keep feeding their communities, it doubles down on cuts to SNAP and other food assistance programs, such as the school lunch.” 

Children who are enrolled in SNAP automatically qualify for free school meals. Cuts to SNAP, however, jeopardize how many children will be enrolled in the program, and hundreds of thousands of children across the country could be affected, according to the Urban Institute.

“These cuts hurt families, but they also hurt farmers and local markets, such as farmers markets and small grocery stores, who have been offering foods for the SNAP program,” Gillespie said.

Should the farm bill be signed into law, Gillespie expects there will be more people struggling to get food and make ends meet: “I see an increase in hunger and food insecurity, increased stress on public and private systems, and although I have faith in our citizens and — well, our communities — I’m not sure how we’re going to pull through this.”