NFFC was quoted by the New York Times in an article about the budget reconciliation bill, aka the ‘One Big Beautiful Budget Act’ that was recently passed by Congress.
In the article titled “Trump’s Tax Bill Expands Farm Subsidies. Not All Farmers Will Benefit.”, Times reporter Linda Qiu explores the “stark disparity” among the farms that will likely benefit financially from the sweeping tax law, and those that likely won’t.
The difference comes down to what the farms grow, and illustrates the stark disparity in who stands to benefit from the president’s sweeping tax and domestic policy bill. Under the new law, more than $60 billion in additional funding will be funneled toward agricultural subsidy programs, with large farms, particularly those in the South, poised to reap the most benefits. But owners of smaller farms and independent producers who grow fresh fruits and vegetables or raise livestock have expressed concern that the distribution of funding will only deepen the consolidation of an industry that has lost over 300,000 farms in the past two decades.
The article goes on to quote NFFC among other advocacy groups.
Even as farm and commodity groups applauded the law’s increased funding for subsidy programs, a number of critics agreed with Mr. Loewen’s assessment.
The influential Farm Bureau called the agricultural provisions “desperately needed.”
But the National Family Farm Coalition, which supports smaller farms, warned that the law was short sighted, unnecessarily favoring large corporations. The law “perpetuates a decades-long decline of forward-thinking food and farm policy that has undermined independent agricultural producers to benefit corporate agribusinesses,” the group said in a statement. About a quarter of the 880 million acres of farmland in the United States is enrolled in the two price-support programs. But because payments are made per acre and thus scale up with production, the programs disproportionately benefit the wealthiest.
Though large family farms — those making $1 million or more annually — and corporate farms amounted to less than 8 percent of all farms in the United States, they received about 47 percent of subsidy payments and 67 percent of crop insurance payments in 2024, according to the Agriculture Department. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy group, estimates that the top 20 percent of farm subsidy recipients in 2024 received 80 percent of payments.