Farmers walked away with a $65.6 billion funding boost to agriculture programs in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Industry advocates approve of the changes, but caution there are still unanswered policy questions that they want addressed.

Most of the funding boosts are linked to Farm Bill programs.

According to the Farm Bureau, $59 billion of the increase comes from funding formula updates to commodity programs and crop insurance. These support farmers who operate on tight margins. Long growing or breeding seasons don’t match well with volatile supply and demand trends in the marketplace.

Most national policy surrounding the agriculture industry gets updated and tweaked in a Farm Bill every five years. The last Farm Bill the U.S. Congress passed was in 2018, and those policies have been continually extended; until now.

“We got some Farm Bill provisions, there’s still some to go still,” said Bailey Fisher, federal affairs specialist for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau. "But we at least addressed some of them. And they will allow for farmers to put their head above water for a little while."

Updates to the Dairy Margin Cover formula are especially welcome in Pennsylvania, who is a major dairy producer. Fisher says that multiple tax cuts will also specifically help agriculture businesses.

“There's a lot of a lot of good things in it. A part of our challenge has been the way that they fund it,” said Russell Redding, secretary for Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture. “The way that they support it, just by way of reducing the SNAP benefits.”

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has been run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for years, and has been included in Farm Bill negotiations for decades. Disagreements on SNAP policy is one reason Congress has stalled on passing a new Farm Bill.

There are smaller Farm Bill programs and policies that were not addressed in the One Big Beautiful Bill. These are set to expire on September 30th. The chairs of the agriculture committees in the House and Senate say a Farm Bill 2.0 is needed. Fisher says any further extensions are unwise. 

“Next year, we're looking at mid-terms, and elections are never good for a Farm Bill,” Fisher said.

Unrelated to the farm bill but still of federal concern—Pennsylvania farms are watching for how immigration enforcement could impact operations.

“We're really concerned about what's happening on immigration side, particularly just on the farm worker and production plants,” Redding said.

Tariffs are also impacting agriculture industries—as farmers send food to other countries, and bring supplies in. One Pennsylvania dairy farmer bought a $850,000 piece of equipment from the Netherlands. The farmer ordered the product last summer, but it only arrived this month, and got slapped with a $100,000 tariff.

“To put that amount of cost unexpectedly on a farmer right now, is really troublesome,” Fisher said.