WHAT IS THE FARM BILL?
Every five years, Congress must reauthorize the U.S. Farm Bill. This bill authorizes hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for everything from crop insurance for America’s farmers to food assistance for hungry families. It also includes $6 billion in annual conservation funding to improve soil health, increase water quality, conserve wildlife habitats, and harness the power of God’s creation to build resilience to climate-fueled extreme weather and lock away soil-enriching carbon. The current Farm Bill expires in 2023, and Congress is currently working on drafting a successor.
A conservation-forward Farm Bill is critical to protecting God’s creation, defending our kids’ health, and safeguarding our families, farmers, and food systems from climate-fueled disasters.
Learn more about the Farm Bill and how creation care extends to our nation's farmlands by subscribing to Regenerate, EEN's monthly faith and agriculture newsletter. With a diverse array of content from Upper Midwest Coordinator Tim Olsen, along with expert guest writers, this newsletter is for farmers and non-farmers alike. Sign up by clicking the link below!
Why Does the Farm Bill Matter for Christians?
What Farmers Are Saying
This year, EEN held twelve “Faith and Agriculture” listening sessions across Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to hear directly from farmers in the field about their priorities for the newest Farm Bill. Here's what we heard:
1. Keep new conservation benefits for farmers fully intact and stop efforts to repurpose conservation funds to other areas
2. Advance on-farm data collection and monitoring of soil and water health
3. Help conservation programs and incentives actually reach farmers by investing in technical assistance, staffing, public-private partnerships, and peer-to-peer information exchanges
4. Reduce barriers for conservation on rented lands and increase support for next generation, beginner, young, and underrepresented farmers to acquire land
5. Make a bold investment in transformational resilient agriculture research
How you can get involved
Join us in lifting your voice to support American farmers by sending a message to lawmakers about the benefits of a climate-smart, conservation-forward Farm Bill for the health and wellbeing of our children, food systems, farmers, and God’s creation. Click the link below to get started.
Learn More About Faith & Agriculture
Kent discusses the realities of the condition of Iowa's land and soil, the programs that have been helping, and closes with a call to action for Christians to steward the land productively, but not excessively.
Professor and author, Beth Madison shares a reflection on her childhood immersed in the wonders of both faith and science and how she's passing these ideas along to others.
Dr. Fred Cannon writes a guest blog for our faith and agriculture newsletter, Regenerate. He discusses the depleting groundwater in the American West and how we can be better stewards of our nation's waterways.
EEN's Upper Midwest Coordinator, Rev. Tim. Olsen, provides a simple at-home strategy for getting gardens and growing started earlier in the year.
EEN's Upper Midwest Coordinator, Rev.Tim Olsen, shares about the faith and farming philosophy of award-winning Minnesota farmers, Grant and Dawn, ahead of EEN's February Faith & Agriculture Webinar.
EEN Board Member, Ron Vos, discusses how Christian farmers can apply a Christian worldview to their farming practices and illustrates how faith and farming should not be mutually exclusive.
Situated in the rolling loess landscape of NW Iowa’s Sioux County, the Agriculture Stewardship Center (ASC) is a 200-acre teaching and research farm supporting the educational activities of the Dordt University Agriculture Department. Operating since the early 1980s, the Dordt ASC supports teaching with hands-on opportunities for several emphasis areas in agriculture.
Iowa farmer and friend of EEN, Ray Gaesser, provides us with a harvest report after a season of intense and varied weather paired with the climate smart practices he utilizes on his farm. Ray urges farm communities and neighbors to come together and support each other in building soil health and resilience to benefit everyone.
Guest writer Doug Bos shares how extreme weather impacts soil health and farmers' ability to produce a plentiful, nutritious harvest. Learn how the Rock County Land Management Office in Minnesota seeks to support farmers in improving their soil health for the good of the community and God's creation.
This article explores some of the triggers of stress among farmers and how a long-term commitment to following soil-health principles may reduce the intensity of farm related stressors. Included is the story of Feikema Farms, data from a 2019 SDSU study, and ways we can all support our rural communities.
