Rebecca Lin is a second year student at the Harvard Kennedy School and a guest contributor to this blog. How programs become “orphan programs” In the early hours of December 21, 2024, the American Relief Act of 2025 was signed into law. The act provided a one-year extension of the 2018 Farm Bill, which had already expired three months earlier….
Matt Suzor is a third-year law student at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and a guest contributor to this blog. Update: Since this blog post was written, the 2025 budget reconciliation bill passed. The impacts of the budget bill on the Thrifty Food Plan, effective immediately, call for cost neutrality every five years. This could prevent benefits…
Grace Huddleston is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. The SNAP proposal in H.R. 8467, Section 4129, the most recent House version of the 2024 Farm Bill, would implement research-oriented programs to commence over the next several years with the goal of gathering data to better understand the efficiency…
Katie Kraska is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. Despite the potential that cultivated meat products hold for revolutionizing how food is produced, mention of this technology is nowhere to be found in House or Senate Farm Bill drafts or outlines. Given some recent state-level developments, that may be…
Katie Kraska is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. Aquaculture is making waves in conversations about the future of farming. The industry now surpasses global production from wild caught fisheries, sparking domestic debate as lawmakers work to reauthorize the farm bill. Encompassing any propagation, breeding, rearing, and harvesting of…
Josie Dudzik is a PhD candidate in Nutrition and Dietetics at New York University and is a guest contributor to this blog. She was an intern in the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic during the summer of 2024. Background The 2018 Farm Bill paved the way for domestic hemp production by reclassifying hemp as legal to grow…
Nick Blumenthal was an intern in the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic during the summer of 2024. In 2018, American agriculture found itself at the epicenter of a geopolitical storm. An escalating trade war between the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, led to a barrage of tariffs that hit farmers particularly hard. From…
Mike Orlando is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. On February 14, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, head of the USDA, testified in front of the House Agriculture Committee (the “Ag Committee”). He urged the Ag Committee to act quickly to pass the next farm bill, noting that delays…
Naima Drecker-Waxman is a law student in the HLS Food Law & Policy Clinic and a guest contributor to this blog. There is a long history of racial discrimination in access to and delivery of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs. Under directives from President Biden and Congress, USDA formed the USDA Equity Commission to evaluate equity issues in USDA…
Kaitlynn Dixon is a law student at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and a guest contributor to this blog. Organic farming was first developed in the early 1900s by agricultural researcher Sir Albert Howard, emphasizing the impact that preserving soil’s natural biome has on crop viability. As agriculture became more industrialized in the 1940s, relying heavily on chemical fertilizers…