(DCNF)—As a massive farm bill heads toward a House floor vote this week, its more than 300 amendments and disputes over key provisions are raising questions about whether the bipartisan coalition behind the legislation can hold.
Divisions stem from disputes over the Save Our Bacon Act, a provision tied to federal limits on state agricultural standards and one particular amendment that would prevent states from implementing their own pesticide labeling and bar consumers from suing pesticide companies.
On April 24, Republican Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna introduced an amendment to strike the Save Our Bacon Act, a bill that seeks to block states from implementing their own production standards and has drawn support from industry stakeholders, including the largest pork manufacturer in the U.S., Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned company.
During a Tuesday House Rules Committee Hearing, the committee declined to allow a floor vote on Luna’s proposed amendment to strip the Save Our Bacon Act.
Luna’s amendment has garnered bipartisan support, with more than a dozen cosponsors, including Democratic California Rep. Jim Costa and Republican New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew, according to Marty Irby, president and CEO of Capitol South. Irby warned the farm bill faces an “uphill battle” unless the disputed provisions are removed. Irby added that some agricultural groups could support final passage if the Save Our Bacon language is stripped from the bill.
Luna has also taken a hard stance, warning Monday in a post on X that she would “blow up the farm bill” if certain provisions are not removed, including sections she said would “shield pesticide makers from liability” and “weaken warning labels.”
A spokesperson for Luna did not immediately comment to the DCNF.
Democratic Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree and Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie are leading a bipartisan effort to remove pesticide labeling provisions.
“If farmers contract a form of cancer or non-Hodgkins lymphoma from this chemical, if this makes it into the Farm Bill, you won’t be able to sue for that,” Massie told reporters last week.
During a rally outside the Supreme Court yesterday, Massie highlighted that Americans are under attack by a foreign pesticide company, telling Lindell TV that “this administration has sided with a German company trying to get immunity from the harm that their products may cause.”
The House Rules Committee drafted a rule to advance Luna’s version of the pesticide amendment, setting it up for a floor vote this week, according to Politico.
Pesticide-heavy environments could raise cancer risk by up to 150%, according to a recent study released April 27 and conducted by Institut Pasteur.
As disagreements among lawmakers continue, more than 300 agricultural groups representing farmers and ranchers have urged Congress to pass the bill, according to a letter sent to House leadership on April.
While another 300 farm groups urge Congress to reject the Farm Bill, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC)’s April 24 press release.
The push from outside groups underscores the competing pressures lawmakers face as amendments reshape the bill ahead of a final vote.
As House leadership moves forward, the volume of amendments and internal disagreements leaves the bill’s future uncertain, even with a planned floor vote. The outcome of the House Rules Committee process — and which amendments are allowed to receive votes — could ultimately determine whether the legislation can secure enough support to pass.
Past farm bills have historically been bipartisan, built on farm subsidies and nutrition programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The current state of the farm bill is amendment-heavy, with over 300added before the House vote.
The surge of amendments reflects growing divisions among lawmakers as competing interests over nutrition spending, farming subsidies and federal regulations make it challenging to maintain the traditional coalition.
Republican Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson introduced the Save Our Bacon Act in July 2025. Hinson is the odds-on frontrunner to be the GOP nominee in the state’s hotly contested November Senate race.
A spokesperson with Hinson’s office defended the bill, noting that it “reaffirms livestock producers’ right to sell their products across state lines, without interference from arbitrary mandates, further adding, “while large, integrated packers like Smithfield can afford to comply with mandates like Prop 12, small, independent American farms and ranches cannot.”
When asked whether the congresswoman worries about the benefits the legislation would have for the Chinese-owned pork industry, the spokesperson noted that the argument that China is benefiting from the Save Our Bacon Act is being pushed by special interest groups.
A vote on the farm bill is scheduled for this week, after passing the House Agriculture Committee on March 5. The legislation relies on a “logrolling” process, in which lawmakers support provisions outside their priorities to pass the entire bill.
In the previous farm bill signed into law in 2018, SNAP accounted for roughly 80% of the bill’s total budget, according to AgriSompo. After SNAP cuts were enacted in separate legislation, the program would account for roughly 72% of spending, according to a CRS report.
The House Agriculture Committee did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The farm bill governs a wide range of programs, including crop insurance, commodity support, nutrition assistance and conservation funding.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
