The 2026 Farm Bill (short overview, title-by-title summary and full text) is the deregulation dream of companies like Bayer that peddle pesticides and genetically modified orgnisms (GMOs). It completely guts the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the law that governs how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates pesticides, with sweeping exemptions to FIFRA and huge changes to EPA reviews.
Section 10201 exempts "plant biostimulants," "nutritional chemicals," "vitamin hormone products," and "plant-incorporated protectants" from EPA regulation under FIFRA.
Critics call these so-called "bioinputs" "agribusiness's new toxic trap." Bioinputs are supposed to be derrived from beneficial soil microbes and other "natural" ways to support and protect plant growth, but it's just a new marketing angle for the same old pesticides and GMOs.
BASF managed to get its Poncho/VOTiVO insecticidal seed treatment registered as a "biostimulant" even though it contains a neonicotinoid pesticide that's toxic to pollinators and a dangerous genetically engineered Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) microbe. This Farm Bill section would go even further, completely deregulating these categories of pesticides and GMOs, including the diabolical GMOs where food crops are engineered to produce their own pesticides. That's what's meant by "plant-incorporated protectants." The pesticides aren't on the food, they are the food.
On top of all of that, SEC. 10201 gives the EPA Administrator the power to exempt any pesticide whatsoever from regulation or review!
Sections 10202 and 10203 change the way the EPA reviews pesticides, requiring the EPA and the Department of the Interior to subordinate concerns about human health, endangered species, and the environment to the economic priorities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Department of Commerce, and industry stakeholders.
Section 10204 repeals the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act, a law that been on the books for two decades and, in 2024, was used by the courts to overturn the EPA's approval of three dicamba-based pesticides intended to be used with genetically-engineered dicamba-resistant corn and soy.
The House environment appropriations bill has 72 riders, including one just for Bayer (Monsanto).
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to Pass a Farm Bill--Without the Bayer Protection Act!
Federal farm politics have never been worse.
Earlier this year, Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture stopped payments on more than $20 billion appropriated by Congress for regenerative agriculture and local food purchasing programs.
Instead of a genuine Farm Bill, the Republican-led Congress passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashed hunger program funding to funnel more money to wealthy landowners and polluting factory farms that produce unhealthy junk food ingredients.
Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" would put even more money into the pockets of the richest landowners by:
- eliminating a current provision that restricts people with adjusted gross incomes of $900,000 or more from receiving certain USDA benefits,
- increase annual payment limits from $125,000 to $155,000 per person, another boon for rich "farming" families (they're not the ones doing the actual work), and
- enroll 30 million more acres in annual commodity payment programs for peanuts, cotton and rice, further entrenching this system where Members of Congress give away our tax dollars to their richest constituents in exchange for campaign contributions.
And, that's just counting farm subsidy payments. Another way Members of Congress enrich their landholding donors is through disaster relief. Last year, Congress set aside $30 billion in disaster aid for farmers. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins directed $10 billion of those funds to the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program. Plenty of actual farmers are still suffering from the floods and fires of 2024 and need help, including the small-scale, regenerative, and organic farmers who haven't been getting federal funds, but the rest of the money has yet to be dispersed.
Money for rich landowners is coming from a 30 percent reduction in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps). More than three million people will go without food and many millions more will receive much less help. Over the next 10 years, payments to the richest landowners will increase by $56.4 billion, while hungry people will receive $294.7 billion less.
Do the math and you can see that money robbed from hungry people is paying for more than farm subsidies. The reverse Robinhood is part of a larger heist.
The Big Beautiful Bill would make $1.1 trillion in health cuts, leaving 11.8 million people uninsured, to deliver lowered tax rates to the wealthy and bigger tax deductions to their hedge funds, while expanding military spending by $163 billion.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress To Say No to the “Big Beautiful Bill” and Reauthorize the Farm Bill!