Expand SNAP or hike crop prices? Congress is locked in a farm bill fight.

Congress could promise farmers new guaranteed minimum prices for their crops, as it considers sweeping new agriculture legislation. Or lawmakers could provide more generous aid to help needy families afford to buy food.

But they don’t seem to be able to agree on doing both.

In the latest draft of a $1.5 trillion measure known as the farm bill, Republicans in Congress have plans to spend $50 billion over the next decade to raise price floors for major agricultural products such as corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and peanuts. But to pay for those new prices, the House version of the bill would scrap a 2018 change in the law that allowed presidents to increase benefits in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, which subsidizes groceries for nearly 42 million Americans each month. President Biden used that authority in 2021 to boost funding by the largest amount in the program’s history.

Now Congress is locked in negotiations over whether to send money to food producers or food consumers, as the current farm bill is set to expire Sept 30.

Farm lobbyists say the farm bill already dedicates much funding to nutrition programs and farmers are struggling.

“It’s really that farm safety net that’s been left behind,” said Joe Gilson, director of governmental affairs for the American Farm Bureau Federation. “Farmers are just asking for an increase for the reference price, a modest increase, that can address some of the concerns that they’ve seen in their production over the past five or six years.”

The bill by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., would raise price guarantees for 14 commodity crops. The proposal raises “reference prices,” the federally guaranteed minimum price, for those products by up to 20 percent. It also includes a 15 percent crop insurance subsidy for new farmers, up from the current 10 percent; those policies can protect specialty crops and livestock that lack commodity price protections.

“It’s risk management. It protects against market volatility. Crop insurance protects against weather,” Thompson said. “What we put together is really what the American farmer is asking for.”

To balance that spending, Republican proposals would prevent the White House from flexing power to increase future food assistance. Lawmakers also plan to cut funds the Agriculture Department has traditionally used to help small farmers survive market shocks. The GOP proposals, advanced by Thompson and Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, would not cut SNAP benefits, which would continue to receive annual automatic cost-of-living adjustments to keep up with inflation. But the bill would prevent the president from recalculating benefits outside of budgetary limits.

That would prevent $30 billion in future food assistance expansions, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a red line in negotiations for Democrats and anti-poverty groups.

“The farm bill has a great responsibility to the health and viability of our agricultural economy and also authorizes the nation’s foremost and effective anti-hunger programs. It shouldn’t be a choice between those two,” said Vince Hall, chief government relations officer for Feeding America, a leading anti-hunger advocacy group. “We have a responsibility to do both as a country.”

Republicans have countered that without these changes, a future GOP president could use the same authority Biden leveraged to boost SNAP benefits to unilaterally cut them.

“They could abuse it significantly,” Thompson said.

Now, the farm bill’s future is in jeopardy. Previous farm bills have passed with bipartisan support from nutrition-conscious urban Democrats and farm-focused rural Republicans with a tacit agreement: Money shifted from one side’s priority won’t be used to fund a priority for the other. But the spending dispute over food assistance and commodity prices threatens to fray that alliance.

Using SNAP funds to pay for higher price floors is “a trade-off that none of us Democrats are willing to make,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told the Post. Booker said Congress should address SNAP and reference prices as independent issues.

The standoff could force lawmakers to extend the current farm bill again, either to consider legislation after November’s elections or after a new Congress takes office in January. Without a farm bill, U.S. commodity and dairy markets could face massive upheaval.

Reference prices are the main method policymakers use to keep agricultural commodity prices stable and help withstand global shocks. U.S. growers compete with international producers in an industry that experiences more price fluctuation than many other goods-producing industries, economists say. Favorable soybean growing conditions in Brazil, for example, could tank the price U.S. growers can demand for their product. But by the same token, a drought in India could boost American rice export prices.

If the market price falls below the reference, taxpayer dollars pay agricultural producers a subsidy to make up the difference. That smooths over some of the price volatility, agro-economists say, and can help keep farmers afloat after a rough growing season.

Those floors have not increased since 2014, and inflation has increased dramatically since then, essentially leaving producers with a lower price guarantee.

But price guarantees only kick in for a subset of commodity farmers. Producers are eligible for the guarantees if they farm on “base acres,” land set aside in 1985 for crop-specific farming. Congress has gradually added acres to the allotment, but the designation only covered 244 million acres of the United States’ 879 million acres of farmland in 2023. So reference prices tend to mainly help larger industrial farm operations, which over time have consolidated ownership of much of those acres.

“It’s a lot of money going to a very small number of farmers, representing a very small number of counties in the U.S., who already are receiving significant payments anyway from this program,” said Joelle Johnson, deputy director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

The advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, for instance, found in 2021 that the largest 10% of farms received 81% of reference price payouts. The largest 20% received 91% of the subsidies.

Congress has also relaxed rules about which crops farmers must grow to claim subsidies. Legislation in 1996 divorced crop requirements from price support, encouraging growers to “farm the market” instead of “farming the reference price.” Producers no longer have to match the crop they grow on a base acre to the subsidy they receive.

For example, a farm can grow more price-stable soybeans on land set aside for long-grain rice, which regularly receives government support. That farm would get subsidies based on the rice market, even though it’s growing soy.

A Senate companion bill has yet to be released.

To nutrition advocates, a new investment in commodity producers feels like it comes at the expense of families in financial straits, said Johnson from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Biden’s SNAP benefit boost wasn’t an overzealous expansion, said Hall of Feeding America; the move just helped food assistance keep pace with the cost of a healthy diet.

“We all accept that SNAP benefits should be adjusted for inflation,” he said. “And we have to be equally accepting of the fact that nutritional guidance, societal norms around food, the availability of food products, the way in which we prepare food are also things which should be accounted for to ensure that SNAP recipients are not losing ground.”