American agriculture deserves the certainty that comes with a farm bill, says National Pork Producers Council CEO Bryan Humphreys.
“It is not a request of American agriculture that we get a farm bill through the House and through the Senate, it is an expectation of American agriculture and the U.S. pork industry that we get a farm bill with the solutions we have asked for across the line,” Humphreys said at the National Pork Industry Forum in Kansas City.
He’s appreciative of the long hours put in by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA) and the bipartisan support of both Republicans and Democrats to get the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, or Farm Bill 2.0, through the House Agriculture Committee.
Affordable Food Should Not Be a Luxury
America’s pork producers want the same thing consumers want – an affordable, safe and delicious food supply. Pat Hord, an Ohio pig farmer, appreciates the Trump administration’s focus on food affordability and is optimistic about how Farm Bill 2.0 could help make that a reality.
Hord testified on behalf of America’s pork producers to the House Agriculture Committee last summer about the effects of Proposition 12.
“The Supreme Court said, ‘Hey, this is an issue for Congress to fix.’ We can argue whether the Supreme Court got it right or not on this, but the bottom line is they said it needs to go back to Congress to fix,” Hord says. “We’re doing what they’ve asked us to do because we know it’s not sustainable to have a patchwork of a bunch of states requiring different things.”
As a pig farmer, it makes him uneasy to think about what could happen if different production standards continue to be forced onto farmers. But he points out that in the end, consumers will suffer the most.
“We’ve documented the effects of Prop 12 and how it has lowered pork consumption in California and increased prices for consumers,” Hord says.
Food affordability is just one of the reasons why Thompson has worked so hard to find a fix for Prop 12 in the farm bill.
“In California today, I’m told there are grocery stores that now sell bacon by the slice and not the slab because people can’t afford it,” Thompson explains. “Consumption of pork products has dropped because affordability has been reduced significantly. The cost has gone up. People who are struggling financially probably aren’t eating pork products at all, and those middle class are making decisions and maybe choosing other proteins they’re able to get more for their money.”
Stop the Patchwork of Regulations
Beyond pork producers, Humphreys says everybody in the country needs to understand what a patchwork of 50 different state regulations would do to all of American agriculture, manufacturing, automotive and more.
“Everyone should be calling their members of Congress and demanding a solution to this, because it’s beyond just agriculture,” he says. “This is something if we don’t get fixed, will plague the entire U.S. economy.”
Humphreys urges people to call their members of Congress to remind them of the importance of the stability that will come from passing Farm Bill 2.0.
