The 2026 farm bill quietly hands big tech control over American farmland. Here’s the fine print

Anthony Pahnke is vice president of Family Farm Defenders and an associate professor of international relations at San Francisco State University in San Francisco

Tucked inside the 2026 Farm Bill is a provision that would reimburse farmers 90% of the cost of adopting AI and precision agriculture technologies — 15 percentage points above the normal EQIP cap. The private sector standards governing those technologies would be set not by the USDA, but by the tech industry itself. This could be a Trojan horse of sorts for something called “precision agriculture” and artificial intelligence (AI), which big tech firms will be able take advantage of farmers and further wrest control over the food system from them.

Besides receiving the attention from the ever-dwindling number of farmers in our country, the Farm Bill cycle usually comes and goes every five years without anyone raising much of a fuss.  In fact, the 2018 Bill expired in 2023 and has been renewed three times since without much commotion. 

This cycle portends like those others, as parts of the legislation’s most costly and contentious sections, or titles, like Nutrition, were shoehorned into Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)’ last July.

But closer inspection of the current Farm Bill that is now meandering through Congress — entitled The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 — reveals some potentially troubling inclusions worth digging into. 

A Farm Bill Cycle Like No Others

A quick review of the current House version of the Farm Bill doesn’t reveal anything too unusual. The legislation’s 11 titles is the same number as what was in the law back in 2018. Still, how “precision agriculture” appears in the Conservation Title should raise some eyebrows. 

Not only is precision agriculture defined, but it is complemented by a list of what are deemed appropriate technologies, including GPS, yield monitors, data management software, and the particularly strange sounding, “Internet of Things and telematics technologies.”  

That last........

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