Senator John Boozman of Arkansas, the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, is warning that Congress risks failing to pass a new farm bill as the 2024 election year tightens the legislative calendar.

"We're in danger of losing the farm bill," Boozman said in remarks reported by 101.5 WKKG, framing the stalled reauthorization as a direct threat to the safety net farmers rely on for commodity programs, crop insurance and nutrition funding.

The warning lands at a moment when growers face squeezed margins. Commodity prices have retreated from recent highs while input costs for seed, fertilizer, fuel and machinery remain elevated, leaving the farm-level economics that farm bill programs back with less cushion than when lawmakers last wrote a full five-year bill.

For producers, the stakes are concrete. The farm bill sets the reference prices and loan rates that trigger Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage payments, funds the federal crop insurance program that underwrites more than 100 crop types, and authorizes the conservation programs through which USDA contracts with farmers for practices on working lands. Every one of those authorities depends on periodic reauthorization.

The current authority is running on borrowed time. Congress allowed the 2018 farm bill to lapse at the end of September 2023 and has since extended it, first through the stopgap spending measures of late 2023 and again in the early months of 2024, pushing the new expiration into the current period. Each extension leaves programs operating on the old law's parameters — parameters written for a price environment that predates both the input-cost spike that followed the 2022 fertilizer run-up and the sharper marketing conditions growers now face.

Boozman's assessment reflects the arithmetic of an election year. A five-year farm bill has historically required months of committee work, floor time in both chambers and a House-Senate conference. With 2024 dominated by presidential and congressional campaigns, the window for that sequence narrows with each recess and each must-pass appropriations fight. Lawmakers who have shepherded previous bills through Congress have repeatedly cautioned that a farm bill that does not move by early in an election year tends not to move at all.

The consequence Boozman flags is a repeat of 2023 in worse conditions: another expiration, another extension, and another cycle in which farmers plan planting, financing and risk management without knowing the program rules that will govern their revenue. Lenders watch the same calendar, and uncertainty over payment programs and insurance subsidies can complicate operating credit discussions for the coming crop year.

The Senate Agriculture Committee, where Boozman serves as ranking member alongside Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, and its House counterpart under Chairman Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania and ranking member David Scott of Georgia, have each released policy frameworks and titles, but neither chamber has cleared a full bill to the floor. Differences over nutrition title funding, commodity program payment levels and conservation dollars remain the reported sticking points between the chambers and the parties.

For the agribusiness sector, the delay carries secondary costs. Input manufacturers, crop insurance agents, lenders and cooperatives all price and plan against the farm bill's program architecture. An extended freeze on that architecture leaves basis, financing terms and risk-management decisions resting on law written for a different cost structure.

Boozman's message to farm country is that the deadline pressure is real, not rhetorical. Whether committee leaders can convert frameworks into floor action before campaign season forecloses the calendar will determine if growers enter the next crop year under a new law — or under another extension with 2018-era program parameters.