Punxsutawney Phil, the shadow-obsessed groundhog, and Glenn “GT” Thompson, the chairman of the House Ag Committee, have something in common: both reside in Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional district.
And, yes, that makes the roly-poly rodent a constituent of Thompson, a ruby-red Republican House member since 2008.
The pair have another similarity. Like Phil’s weather prediction every February, Thompson just made his annual announcement that he’s ready to “debate a new Farm Bill” this month.
Annual because farmers and ranchers have been promised a “new” Farm Bill every year since before the “old” law expired Sept. 30, 2023. In fact, promising a new farm law every spring has become a Groundhog Day experience: Promise, do nothing, repeat.
The outcome has become so predictable that the better bet is the groundhog; his forecast is right about 40% of the time and, well, he’s a large rodent known in some parts as a whistlepig.
Given that legislative failure, the odds are miles-long that a barely-GOP House will get a bill done before this year’s rising election fever burns through most of its time, interest and money. That’s hurdle number one.
Second, Republicans tackling a Farm Bill this year will first have to explain — and more importantly defend — the changes they made to ag spending in last year’s so-called big beautiful bill. One change, cutting $186 billion from domestic food assistance programs while increasing farm program spending by nearly $65 billion, is particularly odious.
Thompson knows this. In his “get ready for Farm Bill 2.0” announcement Feb. 6 he deftly “framed the effort as both a continuation of that work and a reset,” one press account explained, “aimed at modernizing farm policy for today’s production and economic realities.”
Not really. Today’s House Republicans and Democrats can’t agree if the sun rises in the east, let alone join hands on the massive task of “modernizing farm policy.”
In fact, it’s a fair assumption that few in Congress would even know where to start to fix an increasingly dysfunctional crop safety net that, according to our good friends at farmdocDAILY, now helps finance the dysfunction rather than fix it.
Recently, three ag econ experts came to that conclusion after reviewing “market returns” since 1975 for “program crops” (mostly barley, corn, cotton, peanuts, oats, rice, sorghum, soybeans and wheat) that fall into a Farm Bill’s “safety net.”
What they found was that farm programs prior to 2014 worked pretty well. “The crop safety net offset most market losses [in program crops] in 1981-2006. Total return averaged negative 1.7%/year.”
In short, the “farm program” covered all but 1.7% of all market losses for 25 years.
But, “Since 2000, annual… safety net payments averaged 12.7% /year of costs, more than triple the level needed to cover losses.” That means that “So far, in the 21st century, the US crop safety net policy has more than eliminated crop sector loss.”
This is a critical failure because “losses are important to incentivize efficiency in a market economy at the individual level and at the collective sector level.”
Which is exactly what the GOP-led Congress did not do last July when it fattened today’s poorly-working farm programs, then tossed another $11 billion of “bridge” money to bail out “program” farmers in late 2025, and have teed up $15 billion more for 2026.
After all that spending, say the farmdocDAILY trio, “Debate is badly needed on when and how to curtail, even eliminate, crop safety net payment when market return is positive. This includes crop insurance subsidies.”
Again, I’d bet on the whistlepig to follow that wise, long-overdue advice well before our scared-of-its-shadow Congress.
(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Contact information is posted at farmandfoodfile.com. © 2026 ag comm)
