Statement on the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026

President Chad Franke on the recently released Farm Bill:

“Decades of failed food and farm policy are crushing our family farms. Doubling down on the same approach won’t change anything.

In 2025 alone, 15,000 farms ceased operation, harming rural communities across the country, as well as the US consumers who depend on them. High input costs in the form of land, fertilizer, seed, and equipment prices, paired with volatile commodity prices often hovering below the cost of production make the current situation unconscionably unsustainable for our nation’s farmers and ranchers.

This is a crisis generations in the making.

Policies implemented through previous farm bills and regulations have led to a lack of diversification of farm income, reliance on unreliable export markets due to overproduction of core commodities, loss of domestic processing capacity, consolidation of input, equipment, and sales channels, and reliance on ad hoc emergency payments for survival.

Farmers deserve better.

For family agriculture and rural communities to thrive, we must reverse this trend. Food and farm policy requires a major overhaul, not the minor tweaks and unrelated changes proposed in this Farm Bill. Congress must commit to building food and farm policy that restores fair markets, strengthens rural economies, and ensures a resilient domestic food system that works for producers and consumers for generations to come.”