Columnist Jennifer Brhel has a direct message for farmers: the time to make decisions on the 2026 Farm Bill has arrived. Writing in the York News-Times, Brhel presses producers to stop treating the next farm bill as a distant Washington exercise and start engaging with it as a set of choices that will land on their own operations.

Her framing is blunt. The farm bill that Congress will assemble for 2026 is not something growers will simply receive. It is something they can shape — but only if they act while the legislation is still being drafted, amended and negotiated, rather than after the titles, payment structures and program rules are locked in place.

Why does timing matter for the 2026 bill?

Farm bills run on multi-year cycles, and each one sets the parameters that determine how a farm's revenue actually behaves: which commodity programs apply, how risk protection is priced, what conservation incentives exist and how support flows in a bad year. Those parameters reach directly into input budgeting, marketing plans and coverage elections.

Brhel's argument is that the decision point is earlier than most producers assume. By the time a bill is signed, the lobbying is over. Growers who want a say in how the next legislation treats their crops, their region and their risk exposure need to be part of the conversation now, during the drafting phase.

Who should be at the table?

The column directs its call broadly across the agricultural community:

• Row-crop and livestock producers whose program elections depend on what the new bill authorizes
• Landowners and tenants who will see any payment or risk changes reflected in lease and rental negotiations
• Local farm organizations and cooperatives that aggregate grower positions and carry them to lawmakers
• Rural community members whose local economies move with farm income

Brhel writes from York, Nebraska, a county where agriculture anchors the local tax base and the farm service economy. That vantage point shapes her argument: the farm bill is not an abstraction for her readers but the framework behind planted acres, equipment purchases and Main Street activity.

What happens if growers sit out?

The consequence of inaction, in Brhel's view, is that the bill gets written anyway — just without the priorities of working farmers embedded in it. Producers who remain silent through the drafting stage surrender the drafting stage's influence to whatever interests do show up, and then face the results at election time, when the options on the form in front of them have already been narrowed.

Her column is a reminder that farm bills are fundamentally political documents before they are agronomic or financial ones. Every title, every payment formula and every conservation requirement in the 2026 version will reflect who participated in the process and who did not.

For readers of the York News-Times, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Contact representatives. Work through farm organizations. Document what the current programs have done — and failed to do — on individual operations, so that testimony and comment letters carry concrete evidence rather than general frustration.

The 2026 Farm Bill will set the operating rules for American agriculture's next several years. Brhel's closing message to growers is that the decisions are being made now, and the industry's interests depend on being in the room while they are.