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The Path to a New Farm Bill (Regularly Updated)
It’s GO time! Our federal policy team has been busy at work keeping up to date with the farm bill action in Congress. In this blog, you’ll find all relevant updates, with the oldest news at the bottom and the most recent updates at the top. Stay tuned for more as things are moving.
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Farm Action Agriculture Consolidation Data Hub
Guest post featuring Angela Huffman of Farm Action. Originally published in the Winter 2025 OEFFA Newsletter.
A key priority for the OEFFA Policy team is addressing consolidation in food systems and advocating for policies that support small and mid-sized farming operations. We are digging into a new report and data hub published by the advocacy group Farm Action, which reveals that just three dozen corporations now control almost every industry involved in growing, processing, and distributing food in America.
We discussed the findings with Farm Action president Angela Huffman, who is a long-time OEFFA member and a graduate of OSU’s College of Public Affairs. Huffman also raises registered Katahdin sheep on her family’s 200-year-old farm in northwest Ohio.
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What is Going On with Organic Cost Share?
We reported in our most recent farm bill update that “orphan programs” of the farm bill did not receive additional funding with the most recent farm bill extension (ending September 30, 2025). Orphan programs are those that do not have “baseline,” or permanent, funding in a farm bill. So, their funding does not automatically renew when a farm bill is extended unless they have additional funding written into the extension. One of those programs without permanent funding is very important to our community, organic cost share.
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OEFFA Policy Fellowship Opportunity
Our team has an upcoming opportunity for OEFFA members to get more involved in our policy work.
We hope this will be an experience to broaden your food and farm education and see how it is affected by policy. This fellowship will give you firsthand experience in the food and farm policy world and help illustrate how policy issues influence you and your communities.
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Call for a Resilient, Equitable, and Sustainable 2024 Farm Bill!
On September 11, our partners at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) delivered a letter to Congressional leaders with support from 1,096 groups across the country—including 43 sign-ons from Ohio alone!
The purpose of this letter was to affirm the need for a farm bill to be passed in 2024, without it coming at the expense of policies that address hunger, public health, farmers, workers, and the environment.
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The Overturning of Chevron: What it Means for Our Work
When the Supreme Court overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), it did away with the precedent that regulatory agencies have deference regarding statutory interpretation. In other words, Chevron held that courts should defer to federal agencies’ expertise in interpreting ambiguous statues. Not only does this spare the courts from devoting time to ruling on ambiguities, but it also gives the responsibility of interpretation to federal agencies that are much better suited to the task.
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Celebrating Earth Day with Representative Max Miller
Written in collaboration with the Organic Farmers Association.
There are few more impactful ways to celebrate Earth Day than by inviting a Congressperson to see some of Ohio’s organic farms! It was an honor learning from farmers at Woodlyn Acres Farm in Dalton, Ohio, and County Line Family Farm in Wadsworth, Ohio with Representative Max Miller (OH-7).
The Organic Farm Day was planned in partnership with the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA) and the Organic Farmers Association (OFA).
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Conservation, not Consolidation (Take Action!)
Over the last few weeks, we have been posting an educational ‘Farm Safety Net Fridays’ series on our Instagram page. This has all been leading up to a week of action titled: Conservation, not Consolidation. You may have seen a blog post from us a few weeks back about the farm safety net. In it, we outlined how some folks on Capitol Hill want to use climate-smart agriculture funding to prop up commodity programs.
Some lawmakers in Congress are being pressured to raise commodity program subsidies by $20 to $50 billion. These include the Price Loss Coverage (PLC) program, which makes payments to commodity farms relative to a price floor, or a “reference price,” fixed in legislation. Just 0.3 percent of farms are projected to benefit most from an increase in PLC reference prices.
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NSAC 2024 Winter Meeting Recap
Our federal policy team is feeling extremely motivated and connected after joining fellow NSAC members in DC at the end of January. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) puts on a summer and winter meeting each year where its members join to strategize, build relationships, and learn about agriculture policy. This winter meeting was the largest to date!
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New Year, New Organic Rules
Welcome to 2024! To help us ring in the new year, we wanted to highlight some recent changes to the USDA organic standards and share what’s on the horizon. There have been some notable updates to the standards, some of which will go into effect in 2024. While we still have significant room for improvement, these updates help to strengthen the USDA organic label and foster more consumer trust.
FARM POLICY MATTERS