Companies like Bayer that peddle pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) would get two big gifts if the 2026 House Farm Bill passes:
1. A free pass to poison us with impunity. The bill guts the Environmental Protection Agency's authority over pesticides (including GMO crops engineered to produce their own insecticides), while stripping the states and the courts of their powers to protect us.
2. Money for industrial agriculture stolen from regenerative programs. Environmental quality and conservation programs would be earmarked for "precision agriculture," the same old trifecta of GMOs, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers, only with big tech's artificial intelligence making the decisions instead of farmers.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to Scrap the 2026 House Farm Bill!
Pesticide Companies Would Get a Free Pass to Poison Us
The 2026 House Farm Bill takes away most of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s powers to review and regulate pesticides (including GMOs crops engineered to produce their own pesticides). Then, it gives the hamstrung EPA exclusive authority over pesticides, robbing the states and the courts of their ability to protect us in the absence of EPA regulation.
The 2026 House Farm Bill completely guts the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), with sweeping exemptions and huge changes. At the same time that it makes EPA’s pesticide authority weak to non-existent, it concentrates power within the agency, forbidding the states from doing anything, including blocking state courts from hearing cases brought on behalf of people who have been killed, injured, or sickened by pesticides.
Click here for a section-by-section analysis of the pesticide deregulation subtitle in the House Farm Bill.
Money Would Be Robbed from Regenerative for Industrial Agriculture
The 2026 House Farm Bill lets Bayer and its business partners break into programs intended to promote regenerative agriculture. The word "regenerative" doesn't appear in this Farm Bill even once, while the catch phrase Bayer came up with for its business model, "precision agriculture" is in the bill dozens of times. Just like "precision fermentation" is genetically modified microbes spitting out GMO proteins, "precision agriculture" means the same old GMOs, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers, only with big tech's artificial intelligence making the decisions instead of farmers.
Under the guise of "precision agriculture," the 2026 House Farm Bill lets the largest most industrialized farms get payments from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program. The bill also directs research funding to precision agriculture, as well as digital agriculture and automation.
"Precision agriculture" is defined as "managing, tracking, or reducing crop or livestock production inputs, including seed, feed, fertilizer, chemicals, water, and time, at a heightened level of spatial and temporal granularity and biological targeting to improve efficiencies, reduce waste, and maintain environmental quality." Notice the way that's worded. Big tech pitches farmers with the promise that investing in their tools will mean spending less money on pesticides and fertilizers, but that's not a requirement here. The bill says "precision agriculture" is about "managing, tracking, OR reducing ... inputs."
With the addition of "precision agriculture," EQIP would be stretched to the breaking point, but the 2026 House Farm Bill wouldn't expand its budget. On the contrary, EQIP would be cut by $1 billion. With big tech's "managing" and "tracking" hoovering up scarce resources, there will be far less EQIP money for regenerative agriculture practices. Not a new problem, unfortunately. Before "precision agriculture," most EQIP dollars went to helping factory farms manage their manure lagoons.
Federal Farm Politics Have Never Been Worse
In 2025, 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" put even more money into the pockets of the richest landowners by:
- eliminating a provision that restricted people with adjusted gross incomes of $900,000 or more from receiving certain USDA benefits,
- increasing 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
- enrolling 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 farm subsidy payments. Another way Members of Congress enriched their landholding donors was through disaster relief. In 2024, Congress set aside $30 billion in disaster aid for farmers. In 2025, 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 came from a 30 percent reduction in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps), leaving more than three million people without food and many millions more with 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 was part of a larger heist.
The Big Beautiful Bill made $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 Scrap the 2026 House Farm Bill!