By Melissa Angell

With the 2018 farm bill expiring at the end of the week, farmers and food advocates alike are clamoring for Congress to pass a new measure to keep the country's food systems from imploding. 

The farm bill is usually renewed by Congress every five years and encompasses a wide range of programs for crop insurance, conservation, nutritional assistance, and crop subsidies. The bill's purview, and respective impact, is vast -- it affects those who work with food, and basically anyone else who isn't growing their own.

But Congress is expected to blow past the deadline as it deals with a government shutdown looming over Washington. "I think the mistakes that have been made as a country in the past stem from not looking at agriculture as being a national security issue and recognizing that without the American farmer, we don't have a domestic food supply," says Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA), the vice chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

Still, lawmakers seem unbothered: Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stated in late August that Congress would "figure it out." 

While the farm bill has moved out of committee, it's still unclear when it'll make its way to the floor and go up for a vote. But whenever Congress does pass the farm bill, which has garnered bipartisan support, it's expected to be the largest one yet: the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the total spending clocks in at $1.51 trillion. 

The 2018 farm bill, which received $428 billion from Congress, set out to accomplish a lot. It didn't just benefit farmers and conservationists, but also millions of Americans who turned to it for food assistance. About 80 percent of the bill focuses on nutrition. It is the vehicle, after all, that reauthorizes the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps low-income families put food on the table.

Republicans further restricted SNAP benefits in this year's debt ceiling deal, raising work requirements for people between 50 to 54 years old. Even though a handful of far-right politicans have sought to diminsh the program, Democrats like Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), have advocated for expanding SNAP benefits to include local produce and dairy.

The bill also draws the line between hemp and marijuana--cannabis grown with less than .3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol THC is hemp, anything more is considered marijuana and subject to different regulation.

And with climate change making weather more extreme, the bill extends reassurance to farmers who may see depleted harvests as a result of natural disasters or other black swan events. 

That's why relief from natural disasters is one of the priorities that Catherine de Ronde, vice president of economics and legislative affairs at Agri-Mark, a dairy cooperative, is advocating. "We would like to see support for a permanent disaster relief program for milk," she says, adding that support for the dairy industry has been very ad hoc.

She points to floods in Vermont two months ago. If roads become impassable and prevent milk trucks from getting to a plant, farmers may be forced by health regulations to dump the raw milk. In such an event, the farmer absorbs the cost of lost milk. 

But the biggest priority for de Ronde's farmers is expanding the dairy margin coverage program. That's an insurance program farmers pay into to that insures against any decline in operating margins.

To Jenni Tilton-Flood, a dairy farmer at the Clinton, Maine-based Flood Brothers Farm, it's not just a farm bill, but a food systems bill. Tilton-Flood is also looking for increased protection in the dairy margin coverage program and other insurance programs within the next farm bill. She says that her farm, which has 1,700 cows, produces more than five million pounds of milk per year, but that coverage under current insurance programs stops covering losses at five million pounds. So she's looking to increase the limit.

"It would be horrific if farmers did not know what the plan was for what will be available for us and where our reassurances are," Tilton-Flood said. "It's like our insurance company telling us that we'll get back to you next year about whether or not these things are going to be covered."

If Congress fails to act, the supports for dairy would revert to the minimum prices set in original farm bill programs that date to the 1940s--something that's referred to by the industry as the dairy cliff. The minimum price in the 1940s was far higher compared with where it is today, which would then require the Department of Agriculture to buy up dairy products, which would boost the price of milk, potentially doubling the cost per gallon. According to previous estimates, a gallon of milk could cost upward of $7.

But if anything, de Ronde says, Congress would likely extend the current farm bill for one more year as a last resort.

So the good news is that lawmakers still have a cushion to cobble together a new measure. But a lot is at stake if Congress doesn't put forward a new bill. "If we don't have a farm bill, there's a quick reaction and turn around--inflation is going to hit us, and we will never get our way out of it," Tilton-Flood said.