Rebecca Wolf is Senior Food Policy Analyst at the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch. Get involved in the fight for a fair Farm Bill at foodandwaterwatch.org.

Amidst the Congressional chaos of the past week, one important deadline passed rather inconspicuously. The Farm Bill expired on September 30, the last day of the federal fiscal year. Passed every five years, the Farm Bill is a suite of policies passed on a bipartisan basis to keep our food and farm system running. The longer our legislators delay, the more we flirt with brinkmanship for critical programs that keep people fed and ensure farmers are paid.

Iowa needs a fair Farm Bill. With more factory farms than any other state, millions of acres in mono-cropped corn and soy, and a mounting clean water crisis, Iowa offers a clear case study of the failures of modern corporate agricultural policy. Iowa’s legislative delegation must seize this opportunity to pass bold reforms that support farmers, rural communities, and clean water — not Big Ag.

This fall, Food & Water Watch and our allies in the Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture are holding a series of roadshow events on the Farm Bill. At meetings in Des Moines and Grinnell, farmers, organizers and community leaders met to discuss the history of corporate Farm Bill policy making and its impacts in Iowa, as well as the policies needed to pass a fair Farm Bill for all.

To understand where we’re going, it’s important to understand where we’ve been. The original Farm Bill created a social safety net designed to support farmers and ensure a stable food supply. After decades of corporate lobbying in Congress, today’s Farm Bill looks more like corporate welfare. As a direct result of policies like the 1996 “Freedom to Fail” Farm Bill, which dropped the floor out from under farmers by removing price controls and market supports, Iowa’s farms and rural communities have been transformed into fuel for an engine that funnels the state’s natural resources into corporate coffers.

Today, 63 percent of Iowa is covered in intensive soy and corn farms, growing crops to feed cars and livestock, while thousands of dirty factory farms litter rural communities, flooding waterways and drinking water supplies with manure, cancer-causing nitrates, and other contaminants. As Food & Water Watch’s report on The Hog Bosses documents, it is farmers, rural communities and our environment that suffer, while an increasingly small number of corporations reap the rewards.

Iowa legislators must support reforms in four policy areas to pass a fair Farm Bill:

We need a moratorium on factory farming. Factory farms are the linchpin of Big Ag’s system, and a drain on Iowa’s rural communities. Passage of The Farm System Reform Act would halt all new and expanding factory farms in Iowa and nationwide, and provide billions of dollars to transition farmers out of this unsustainable system.

We need to keep conservation funding out of Big Ag coffers. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) is one of USDA’s premier conservation programs, designed to invest in small-scale, conservation projects that promote sustainable agricultural practices. Today, the vast majority of funding goes to factory farms for expensive scams like factory farm biogas, which subsidizes excess manure production and contributes heavily to the worsening climate crisis. Passage of the bipartisan EQIP Improvement Act would help keep factory farms from gobbling up conservation funding.

We need to restore competition to the agriculture industry. As it stands, a handful of corporate goliaths control the vast majority of the food we grow and eat, relying on dirty factory farms and underhanded practices that pass foreign meat off as domestic, to consolidate power and undermine smaller producers. Passage of the bipartisan American Beef Labeling Act would bring mandatory country of origin labeling back to beef, bolstering small and medium-sized farmers, while the bipartisan Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act would strengthen antitrust enforcement to break up the biggest players.

Last but not least, we need to reshape our commodities programs by putting an end to King Corn, and helping farmers get off the ethanol treadmill. Iowa’s fencerow to fencerow corn and soy farms benefit factory farms and the ethanol industry, not farmers. Instead, we need to transition to tried-and-true supply management policies like price floors and grain reserves that bring fairness back to farming.

Iowa’s legislative delegation must heed their constituents’ demands and pass a fair Farm Bill for all.

Top photo is by Rebecca Wolf and published with permission