Senate Ag Committee meets on farm bill

The Senate Agriculture Committee held a closed-door, bipartisan, members-only meeting on the farm bill Wednesday afternoon.

After the meeting that lasted for more than an hour, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., told The Hagstrom Report he held the meeting so that members could “tell us where they’re at. It was really productive.”

Boozman said he plans to release a draft bill in “early” June and hold a markup on the bill “later” in June.

Boozman acknowledged that there is “lots of concern” about the provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that will require the states to pay a portion of the costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program depending on the state’s payment error rate. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has complained bitterly that to get the OBBBA passed, Republicans added a provision that gives states with the highest error rates more time before the provision goes into effect while states with mid-level error rates, including Minnesota, will have to absorb the costs next year.

Klobuchar told The Hagstrom Report in an email, “This was a constructive meeting where members on both sides of the aisle raised their priorities for a bipartisan farm bill, including addressing the SNAP cost shift.”

SNAP “is a big issue,” a senior Senate Agriculture Committee majority staff member told The Hagstrom Report after a half-hour staff meeting that followed the member meeting.

Both Republican and Democratic aides said the base bill will not contain a provision to preempt states from labeling chemicals like glyphosate, nor will it include a provision negating California’s Proposition 12, a law requiring pork sold in the state to come from animals raised under certain conditions. The House-passed farm bill contains both those provisions, but Boozman has repeatedly said he does not intend to include them because they would interfere with getting 60 votes to pass the bill.

More than 100 measures proposed by members of both parties will be included in the bill, the senior Republican aide said.

Klobuchar raised the issue of whether the bill will make changes to the law scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 12 that would ban most psychoactive hemp-derived cannabinoids, a Republican aide said.

The meetings took place in Room 318 of the Russell Senate Office Building because the Senate Agriculture Committee hearing room is undergoing renovation.