Senate Agriculture Committee member Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and a bipartisan group of House members are proposing to revive a $5-per-acre subsidy program for cover crops that USDA offered for two years using pandemic assistance funding.
As with the temporary program, the proposed payments would work as subsidies for crop insurance premiums.
The farm bill includes both mandatory and discretionary spending. Congress can change discretionary spending in the annual spending bills.
But most farm bill programs are mandatory spending, including crop subsidies, farm bill conservation programs and some forms of crop insurance. For those programs, the farm bill will set the funding structure for the next five years.