A committee-passed House bill to reauthorize the Farm Bill includes a new competitive grant program for community colleges to provide agricultural workforce training.
The House Agriculture Committee on Thursday advanced the Food, Farm and National Security Act, which is described as a “skinny” reauthorization of the Farm Bill – the governing legislation for all U.S. Department of Agriculture programs. The most recent Farm Bill, the Agriculture Improvement Act, expired in 2023.
The Food, Farm, and National Security Act aims to reauthorize and modernize the Farm Bill for titles and programs not addressed by last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation legislation. For this reason, the bill focuses largely on agricultural production rather than the Farm Bill’s largest and most contentious program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which was significantly modified in the reconciliation law.
Buried in the 800-page bill is an authorization for a new program to provide funding for community college agriculture and natural resources programs. It would provide competitive grants to community colleges, consortia of community colleges and career and technical education schools that provide workforce training in agricultural fields, with a priority for applicants that offer work-based learning opportunities.
The proposal differs slightly from the bipartisan Community College Agriculture Advancement Act that the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) endorsed. That bill places more emphasis on capacity-building for institutions to enhance agriculture programs and promotes greater coordination between community colleges and other higher education institutions. The new proposal is more directly focused on workforce and industry partnerships.
AACC welcomes all new federal grant opportunities for community colleges with agriculture programs and sees this proposal as a long-overdue recognition of the roles the colleges play in building the agricultural workforce.
