House Passes Tax Bill With SNAP Cuts, Billions for Immigration Enforcement, and Climate Rollbacks
(7/7/25) President Donald Trump’s massive tax bill was passed by the U.S. House July 3 and signed into law by the President on July 4, reports Civil Eats. Highlights:
- The bill includes the biggest-ever changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s largest hunger-relief program. Expanded work requirements are expected to lead to 5 million Americans losing their grocery benefits, while a $65 billion cost-shift to states could lead to states cutting benefits or discontinuing SNAP altogether. Around 11.8 million people are expected to lose Medicaid coverage and 4.2 million will be cut out of Affordable Care Act insurance plans. Farmers rely disproportionately on those plans.
- The bill includes $67 billion for commodity farm payments, but Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee pointed to the fact that farms and other sectors of the food chain will also be hit by the SNAP cuts as families’ purchasing power dwindles. They estimate the cuts will lead to a $25 billion drop in farm revenue over 10 years. SNAP is also responsible for close to 250,000 grocery jobs.
- The bill will eliminate Biden-era tax credits for solar and wind farms and other renewable infrastructure projects unless they come online before the end of 2027, a provision that will stop many projects because they often take years to get permits, raise funds, and construct.
The Land Stewardship Project belongs to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). Check out NSAC’s analysis of the tax bill here.
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DOGE Keeps Gaining Access to Sensitive Data. Now, it Can Cut Off Billions to Farmers
(7/11/25) National Public Radio reports that a staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, recently got high-level access to view and change the contents of a payments system that controls tens of billions of dollars in government payments and loans to farmers and ranchers across the country. Highlights:
- A source working for the USDA provided evidence of DOGE’s high-level access to the payments system called the National Payment Service. The access is a highly privileged level of permissions that the USDA employee says no other individual at the agency has and goes against normal access protocols.
- The National Payment Service system is housed at the Farm Service Agency (FSA) — a part of the USDA primarily tasked with keeping American farmers and ranchers afloat with programs like disaster relief, conservation grants, and loans. The news of DOGE’s access and scope of potential use of farmers’ personal and economic data comes at a time when the United States’ agricultural producers face multiple financial challenges, including concerns over President Trump’s tariffs, rising production costs, and climate-related disasters.
- There are concerns that DOGE’s unfettered access to sensitive data gives it the capacity to change that data or even deny and cancel payments.
Are you a farmer who is concerned about access to government farm programs? Check out our federal policy web page for information on contacting an LSP organizer.
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‘We just want water’: Farmers Fear Impact of Massive Dairy Project
- The project is being proposed by Riverview Dairy, which is based out of Morris, Minn. The operation would be the largest dairy in North Dakota and is planned atop a critical water source, just two miles from both the Red River and Wild Rice River, and within two miles of 28 domestic wells.
- Local residents and members of the Dakota Resource Council held a press conference where they raised concerns about the proposed project’s impact on local water quality and quantity. “If our well goes dry, the only way possible we get water is we got to bring it in ourselves, or sell the farm, or move off, or whatever, because we won’t have water,” said Merrill Miranowski, a Wilkin County, Minn., farmer.
- A second Riverview farm proposed in North Dakota’s Traill County would be twice as large as the one planned in Richland County. That permit has not yet been approved by the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is taking comments until July 22 on changes to the state’s rules governing the storage and disposal of liquid manure in large feedlots, among other things. For details on making your voice heard, check out out LSP’s latest action alert.
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‘A Sickening Sight’: Honeybee Die-off Imperils Minnesota’s Honey Harvest
(7/14/25) Between June 2024 and March 2025, commercial beekeepers lost an average of 62% of their colonies, the largest U.S. die-off on record, according to the Star Tribune. Highlights:
- Minnesota is fifth in the country for honey production, home to roughly 1,400 commercial beekeepers and 120,000 bee colonies. As the state’s beekeepers head into the summer honey harvest period, many are concerned over the financial damages that come with these massive colony losses.
- Steve Ellis, a Barrett, Minn., beekeeper, currently has 600 hives in his bee yard. He estimates that his yard will produce 25% less honey than average this summer, which amounts to $10,000 to $12,000 of lost income.
- Virus-carrying parasitic mites have been particularly devastating to honeybees this year. However, pollinators are also impact by pesticides and lack of foraging habitat. The quality of bee forage in Minnesota has declined over the past few decades due to the growth of corn and soybean monocultures.
LSP’s Brian DeVore has written extensively about the key role pollinators play in our farm and food system. Check out one of those articles here.
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Ag Fertilizer Runoff Likely Will Force More Drinking Water Restrictions
(7/10/25) The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports on a years-in-the-making report analyzing the quality of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, the main sources of drinking water for the Des Moines region. Highlights:
- This summer, hundreds of thousands of Iowans have had to adhere to water use restrictions to provide treatment plants an opportunity to keep up with removing nitrates from drinking water. Researchers found that central Iowa rivers have some of the nation’s highest nitrate levels, routinely exceeding the federal drinking water standard. While some pollutants are naturally occurring, the researchers concluded that most of the nitrogen in the two rivers comes from farmland.
- More frequent and extreme storms because of climate change will heighten the problems nationwide, Rebecca Logsdon Muenich, an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Arkansas, told the Capital Dispatch. Muenich said farm conservation practices such as establishing wetlands and landscape buffers can help keep nitrogen out of water supplies. But the growth of the livestock industry, availability of cheap crop fertilizer, and lack of regulation over nitrogen application make nitrate levels hard to control.
- Larry Weber, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa who worked on the nitrate report, said individual farmers aren’t necessarily to blame for the crisis. They’re doing their best to survive market demands and operate within federal farm policy. But he said the broader industry and the state could do more to invest in conservation methods to prevent pollution. Wallaces Farmer recently reported that a particularly wet June in north-central Iowa washed significant amounts of nitrogen fertilizer out of crop fields. “…obviously, we are losing a lot of nitrogen,” an Iowa State University Extension agronomist told the magazine.
Check out LSP’s Soil Builders’ web page for resources on farming practices that build soil health and reduce its reliance on inputs such as nitrogen fertilizer. LSP’s blog, “Nitrate’s Season of Reckoning,” is here.
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4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment
(7/9/25) Bill McKibben, writing in The New Yorker, says that despite all the bad news about climate change, the growth of solar energy is something to feel positive about. Highlights:
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It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.
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People are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every 15 hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power.
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Last year, 96% of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States 93% of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.
Can solar power and working farmland co-exist? A pair of LSP Farm Beginnings grads have developed a livestock business centered around grazing beneath solar arrays. The West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris, Minn., is researching grazing dairy cows beneath solar panels.
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Farm Bankruptcies This Year Already Exceed 2024 Levels
(7/15/25) Farmdoc reports that more farms nationwide filed for bankruptcy in the first three months of 2025 than across the entirety of 2024. Highlights:
- The 259 filings in the first three months of 2025 are the most in any year since 2021. “Once you see this on a national level, it’s a clear sign that financial pressures that we saw before in 2018 and 2019 are kind of reemerging,” said Ryan Loy, an Arkansas System Division of Agriculture extension economist.
- Economists say the increased bankruptcy filings are likely due to low commodity prices, high input costs, weather challenges, and uncertainties about the impact tariffs will have on the ag economy.
- “With higher input costs and lower commodity prices, row crop farmers have used cash reserves and working capital,” reported AgWeb’s Margy Eckelkamp.
LSP’s Farm Beginnings course offers participants a chance to learn from farmers and other ag experts about holistic financial management, goal-setting, and innovative marketing. The early bird discount application deadline for the 2025-2026 class is Aug. 1. Looking for an alternative to input-intensive corn-soybean rotations? LSP is holding a small grains networking meeting in western Minnesota Aug. 2. Details are here. Feeling financially or emotionally stressed? See LSP’s Farm Crisis Resources web page for local and national resources.
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