Photo by Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images Every five years, farmers and agricultural lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill to debate the farm bill, a massive food and agriculture funding bill that helps families afford groceries, pays out farmers who’ve lost their crops to bad weather, and props up less-than-profitable commodity markets, among dozens of other things. The last farm bill was passed in 2018, and in 2023 Congress extended the previous farm bill for an additional year after its negotiations led to a stalemate. That extension expires today, and Congress seems poised to settle for another one. House Republicans and Democrats’ primary dispute is over on how much funding will go to food programs like SNAP and the Thrifty Food Plan . Another reason for this unusual standoff — in past cycles, the bill passed easily with bipartisan support — is a grant authority called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which has become a flashpoint for a fight over the relationship between agriculture and climate change. At first glance, the program might not sound all that controversial: it “helps farmers, ranchers and forest landowners integrate conservation into working lands,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, funding a wide variety of conservation practices from crop rotation to ditch lining. In contrast to other huge programs in the farm bill, such as crop insurance, EQIP costs only around $2 billion per year, which is measly by federal spending standards. So why is it such a sticking point? The Biden administration’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act expanded EQIP and three other USDA programs with billions of new dollars for on-farm improvements, but the bill specified that the money had to go to “climate-smart” conservation practices. This was stricter than the original EQIP, which allows farmers to use money […]