June 13, 2018

The Senate Is About to Vote on Its Farm Bill. What the Hell Is the Farm Bill, Anyway?

And why should I care?


Every five years or so, Congress takes up a massive piece of legislation known as the farm bill, which covers everything from supporting farmers to ensuring that those short of food don’t go hungry. The cost of the bill is nearly $100 billion a year. Right now, Congress is in the middle of the farm-bill cycle again.

While the Senate is close to a vote on a bipartisan measure, the far more partisan House version of the bill put forward by Republican leaders was voted down last month. The next step is anyone’s guess.

But what, exactly, is the farm bill? How does it work? And why should anyone care? The video above, produced by the Food & Environment Reporting Network, unpacks this complex law, the most important piece of legislation that shapes America’s food, farm, and anti-hunger programs.

Produced with FERN, non-profit reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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