I am writing to you as your constituent to express my opposition to the Senate Farm Bill draft, "Farm Bill 2.0," or the Agricultural Act of 2026.

Family-scale farmers have been struggling to make ends meet, and years of high input prices, low farmgate prices, severe weather, USDA staffing cuts, funding cancellations, and market consolidation have made it even harder, all while contributing to high food prices in the grocery aisle. In its current form, this bill does nothing to address these problems, yet family farmers have been championing solutions to them for decades.

Instead, this bill

• makes changes that are too small to genuinely improve the state of agricultural lending at USDA, while failing to reverse cuts to staffing, which would make it harder to implement any new provisions in the bill.
  
  
• does not meaningfully address concentration of farmland or in the livestock sector, either by improving existing competition laws or by offering local solutions. The bill omits any requirements around mandatory country of origin labeling or provisions related to on-farm slaughter, and does not expand oversight of corporate farmland ownership beyond existing foreign farmland ownership statutes.
  
  
• creates some new programs like the Strengthening Local Food Security Program, but does not back them up with new funding, and takes funding away from oversubscribed conservation programs to create new conservation programs, all in the name of budget neutrality.
  
  
• does not reverse the harmful changes made to SNAP in H.R. 1, making it harder to pass a five-year Farm Bill and ensure that the right to food is upheld in the U.S.

Instead, the Senate Agriculture Committee should bring the Farm Bill back to the drawing board to include the policies that small- and mid-scale farmers need to survive and thrive. I urge you to oppose the Senate Farm Bill draft. Thank you for your time.