No August Vacation Here
The U.S. Senate went home early Saturday morning and won’t be back until after Labor Day. That’s a four-week break.
Most of us, if we have time off, have to stay late for days before getting our work done ahead of time. Not Congress.
Many of you don’t get time off, because you’re working to feed and fuel the world and farming doesn’t lend itself to vacations scheduled on a calendar. Congress is different.
And because of that, there’s no progress on a five-year Farm Bill…which has not been passed since 2018, and was behind schedule then. It should have been passed three years ago…but was not.
The U.S. lost more than 156,000 farms between 2017 and 2025, according to 2026 U.S. Census data. From 2024 to 2025 alone, farm bankruptcy filings jumped by 46%, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
But apparently that’s not good enough. Some in the Senate this past week held up the bill because states would have to contribute to what we used to call food stamps; that was part of other legislation.
Apparently they don’t realize that without proper support for farmers, there won’t be food for the folks to buy with food stamps, or SNAP cards, or whatever they use these days.
Discouraging doesn’t begin to address this failure, the best example of why both parties aren’t doing very much to serve citizens these days.
