Two clocks run out tomorrow night. The extension that has kept the 2018 farm bill alive expires on September 30, 2025. So does the money that pays USDA's staff, because the federal fiscal year ends the same day and Congress has not passed a spending bill. A farmer reading the headlines could be forgiven for thinking every program shuts at midnight.
It is not that simple, and the difference matters if you have a conservation contract, a dairy margin policy, a loan in process or an application sitting in a county office. This piece sorts the two deadlines, lists what keeps running and what pauses, and ends with what to do this week.
Two deadlines on one night
The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 was signed on December 20, 2018 and written to run through 2023. When Congress could not agree on a replacement it extended the old law twice: once in November 2023, to September 30, 2024, and again in the American Relief Act of December 2024, to September 30, 2025, covering the 2025 crop year and milk through December 31, 2025. That second extension ends tomorrow.
The other clock is appropriations. By law the federal fiscal year begins on October 1. As we publish this on Monday, NPR reports that congressional leaders left a White House meeting without a plan, that the stopgap the House passed earlier this month failed in the Senate, and that funding expires at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday unless that changes. The House stopgap, passed September 19, would fund the government through November 21. It carries a few small agricultural extensions, such as livestock price reporting, but it does not extend the farm bill.
Keep the two apart in your head. A farm bill lapse is about legal authority: whether USDA may sign a new contract or take a new enrollment. A funding lapse is about people: whether the staff who process your file are at their desks.
What a farm bill expiration does and does not do
Jonathan Coppess at the University of Illinois wrote the clearest short account of this when the same deadline came around last year, and his farmdoc daily explainer still holds. Programs fall into three groups.
First, programs with permanent authority and their own baseline keep going. Crop insurance is permanently authorized and does not expire. SNAP and the big farm payment programs have mandatory funding that continues. The Economic Research Service explains the distinction: mandatory programs are funded by statute, mostly through the Commodity Credit Corporation, while discretionary programs get their money through annual appropriations.
Second, discretionary programs, which include most rural development, research and farm loan work, keep running for as long as appropriations do. The farm bill's expiration does not touch them. A funding lapse does.
Third, some programs lose their authority or their money at midnight. On the night of last year's expiration Roger Cryan, then the Farm Bureau's chief economist, wrote that list out: new CRP enrollment, the livestock side of EQIP, the specialty crop block grants, the organic certification cost-share, the export promotion programs and a string of small programs with no baseline of their own. This year the list is shorter, because of July.
What the July reconciliation law already settled
On July 4, 2025 the President signed the reconciliation bill, Public Law 119-21, whose agriculture title rewrote large parts of the farm bill without calling itself one. For the programs that move the most money, it replaced one-year extensions with dates in 2031.
Commodity programs: ARC and PLC now run through the 2031 crop year, with reference prices raised. The University of Illinois team puts corn at $4.10 a bushel instead of $3.70, soybeans at $10.00 instead of $8.40 and wheat at $6.35 instead of $5.50. Up to 30 million new base acres can be added, and the payment limit rises to $155,000. Marketing loans run through 2031 too.
Dairy: Dairy Margin Coverage is extended through 2031, the Tier 1 limit goes from 5 million to 6 million pounds, and production history is reset to the best of 2021, 2022 or 2023.
Conservation: the law rescinded the unspent Inflation Reduction Act money for EQIP, CSP, ACEP and RCPP and wrote higher amounts into the baseline through fiscal 2031. Under section 10601 of the law, EQIP gets $2.655 billion in fiscal 2026, rising to $3.255 billion a year from 2028, and CSP climbs from $1.3 billion to $1.375 billion by 2029. Coppess calls the trade a silver lining with a catch: smaller increases now that grow into a larger and potentially permanent one, a trade that takes many years to pay off and depends on future Congresses keeping the money at the authorized levels. Unlike the rest of the farm assistance in the bill, it was not paid for with cuts to SNAP. The earlier round of that fight is in the conservation title and the IRA money.
The orphans: the same law went back for programs that had been living hand to mouth. In its horticulture, research and miscellaneous sections, specialty crop block grants rise to $100 million for fiscal 2026, the organic certification cost-share runs through 2031 and the organic data initiative gets $10 million for the same period, the 1890 land-grant scholarships get $60 million, and animal disease prevention gets $233 million a year through 2030. The Farm Bureau counts $66 billion for farm programs in all. We laid out both sides of subsidies long ago in the pros and cons; the practical point today is that the money programs do not lapse tomorrow night.
What still lapses on September 30
Three things still hang on the old law.
The Conservation Reserve Program. The July law did not renew CRP's authority, which the 2018 law wrote through fiscal 2023 and the two extensions carried only to September 30, 2025. Existing contracts keep paying, but USDA cannot take new offers until Congress acts. If you were planning a filter strip or a grassland enrollment this winter, it waits.
A handful of small programs with no baseline. The Farm Bureau's economists count the history: the November 2023 extension put $177 million into 19 of the 21 orphan programs for one year, and the December 2024 extension put in nothing. The July law picked up most of that list, from feral swine control to the bioenergy program for advanced biofuels. A few, such as the Biobased Markets Program and the Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant program, both named in the 2023 extension, do not appear in its text. If you depend on one of these, assume it is paused until a new farm bill or extension names it.
The suspension of permanent law. This is the dairy cliff, and it will be back in the news in December. The 1938 and 1949 farm acts were never repealed; since the 1996 farm bill, each farm bill has suspended them for its own crop years. The July law never touched that suspension, so the one in force runs only through the 2025 crops and, for milk, through December 31, 2025.
If nothing is extended by then, the 1949 Act directs USDA to support milk at 75 to 90 percent of parity, a formula anchored in 1910 to 1914 prices that USDA still publishes every month. In its August 29 report the parity price for all milk stood at $69.80 per hundredweight for July 2025, and the price farmers actually received was 31 percent of that. Three quarters of $69.80 is more than $52, well over twice the market. Nobody expects USDA to buy cheese at that price; Congress has extended the suspension at the last minute twice in two years. But the cliff is a December 31 problem, not a September 30 one, and a dairy farmer should plan on the margin program, not on parity.
If the money stops too
A funding lapse is the blunter instrument. NPR's summary applies to USDA as much as any agency: anything deemed nonessential is put on hold, new applications are delayed, and hundreds of thousands of federal workers go without pay. This year the White House budget office has told agencies to prepare permanent layoffs rather than the usual furloughs.
The last long lapse is the reference. In the shutdown that began on December 22, 2018, Farm Bureau's economists described most of USDA as shuttered a month in, with 62 statistical reports unpublished and the January supply and demand estimates never issued at all.
The practical line for a farm runs between money already committed and work not yet done. A signed EQIP contract keeps its money. A payment that still needs a county office signature waits. A loan closing scheduled for next week may not happen next week.
If you have an application pending
Backlogs were the normal state of affairs before any of this. Coppess's analysis of NRCS data found EQIP received about 120,600 applications a year from 2017 to 2022 and funded about 36,600, roughly 31 percent. A lapse adds delay to a queue that was already long. It does not disqualify you. This is what we would do this week.
Know which clock your program is on. ARC, PLC, marketing loans, Dairy Margin Coverage, EQIP, CSP, ACEP and RCPP are authorized and funded through 2031 by the July law. A pending application there is waiting for staff, not for Congress. CRP is waiting for Congress. A discretionary grant, such as the value-added and local food grants we sorted in USDA grants worth a small farm's time, is waiting for an appropriations bill.
Finish your paperwork before the doors close. Farm records, the conservation compliance form, the payment eligibility form and direct deposit details are what hold up a payment once staff return. If any of it is incomplete, call your county office on Tuesday; the ARC and PLC page and the DMC page both send you there to enroll, and that office is the bottleneck.
Get the carry-over answer in writing. Ask your district conservationist whether your EQIP or CSP application stays in the pool for the next ranking and what its ranking date is. Our walk-through of how EQIP and CSP payments work for a small farm explains why the ranking date matters more than the filing date.
Dairies: enroll for coverage, ignore the cliff. Coverage is law through 2031 and the Tier 1 limit is higher. Watch FSA for the 2026 sign-up window and have your 2021 to 2023 production records ready, since that is the new history base.
Loans: move the closing forward if you can. If an FSA loan is near closing, ask whether it can be signed before Wednesday. If not, line up bridge terms with your bank now rather than in week three of a shutdown. FSA microloans and beginning farmer loans covers how those loans are built.
Crop insurance is unaffected. Sales closing dates run through your private agent under a permanent law. Fall-seeded crops close as scheduled. For a diversified farm, WFRP and Micro Farm are the policies to ask about.
Two asks before December 31
Whether or not Congress manages a full farm bill this fall, two small things need doing before the year ends: extend the suspension of permanent law and renew CRP's authority. Both have been done in a single section of a spending bill before. If you call or write, ask for those two by name, and say what a closed county office costs a farm your size. The groups that track this daily are in our organizations directory. Our note on being involved explains why a short, specific message from a farmer carries more weight than a form letter.
The long view
The farm bill lapsed in 2023 and again in 2024, and farms kept farming. The 2018 law was built for five years and is entering its eighth. We argued in our farm bill explainer that a small regenerative farm should treat these programs as tools, not as the business, and this week is a reminder of why. Programs pause. Soil does not. The fall cover crop goes in on the weather, not on the fiscal calendar, and a farm that thinks long term keeps its records tidy, its lender informed and its conservation plan moving whether or not the office in town has its lights on.
So this week: sort your programs by clock, finish the paperwork, get the carry-over answer in writing, and then go back to the field. Washington will still be there when you come in.