While many states can’t create their own farm bills because they don’t allow “omnibus” bills, legislators can pass multiple bills at the same time in a sort of package format, said Kendra Kimbirauskas, senior director of Food, Agriculture and Rural Economies at the State Innovation Exchange.

Kimbirauskas, who works with state legislators on progressive food and farm policies, said there might also be reason lawmakers want to avoid passing larger farm bills.

Bigger bills can come with some of the same controversial “riders” that happen at the federal level, since it’s easier for lawmakers to slip things in.

For example, last year, North Carolina lawmakers tucked a provision that would have given pesticide companies immunity from lawsuits claiming their products caused health harms into their version of a state farm bill, the North Carolina Farm Act of 2025. The bill didn’t pass, but at the state level, industry groups might wield more power, since it’s a smaller playing field, Kimbirauskas said.

The biggest challenge for states looking to spur agriculture innovation, though, is finding the funds.

“Most of them are operating with huge budget shortfalls and now they’re having to make up for all of these other things like housing and Medicare and SNAP,” she said, referring to recent changes made by the federal government. “There’s the aspiration of what folks really do want to do and then overlaying that is the reality of what can be done.”

Still, she said, state legislators are leaning into farm fixes that don’t require a lot of funding, like state-level right-to-repair laws, and there are other examples of state-level agriculture investments picking up speed.

In Minnesota, the state legislature created a farm-to-school program in 2019 to enable more schools to buy produce and meats from nearby farms. It started with $500,000 in funding the first year. Last year, despite a tighter budget, lawmakers working across the aisle increased the funding to nearly $2.5 million.

“At the end of the day, what farmers and what communities need is a farm system where we can have good food in our communities and get a fair price for that, and farm-to-school is just a win-win-win across the board,” said Sean Carroll, the policy director at the Land Stewardship Project, which has advocated for the Minnesota legislation. “It is not controversial in the state. It’s bipartisan.”

Notably, Carroll said, there’s also no powerful group that lobbies against farm-to-school funding.

During a tumultuous year for their state, Minnesota lawmakers also created the first state grant program specifically designed to replace funding that the Trump administration cancelled last year, helping food banks buy fresh food from local farms. The Farm to Food Security Grant Program is funded at $700,000 annually for two years, and the state’s agriculture department put out its first request for applications in mid-February.

Just across Pennsylvania’s state line, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s administration passed the Chesapeake Bay Legacy Act, which created the state’s first guidelines around regenerative agriculture and gave regenerative practices a boost.

That came despite a challenging budget outlook, Maryland Secretary of Agriculture Kevin Atticks said. “The state leases a lot of land to farmers, and going forward, the farming practices [on that land] must be deemed regenerative under this definition.”

The bill also codified a program that the Maryland Department of Agriculture is launching, called Leaders in Environmentally Engaged Farming (LEEF), a sustainability certification that rewards farmers for practices that sequester carbon and contribute to healthier ecosystems.

Now, Atticks said, he is making big plans for when the state’s budget issues began to ease, which will likely include a legislative package of investments in local food and farms.

Because of the way Maryland’s legislative process works, a typical farm bill isn’t possible. “As an example, if we wanted to do something about farmers growing food and also mandate that school lunches had to incorporate local food,” he explained, “those are in two completely different sections of law, and so that would need to be two bills—one to deal with the eating and one to deal with the growing.”

Still, some ideas from Pennsylvania will likely make their way into the legislation. “We’ve had meetings with Secretary Redding’s team about their farm bill,” Atticks said. “Ours will notably look different than any other state’s, but we do have plans to continue highlighting agriculture in the state, because it’s going to be critical in the next couple of years.”

In fact, some D.C. insiders think that there may never be a typical farm bill at the national level again, given last year’s fracturing of the coalitions that used to help move the legislation. If Congress does manage to get the process back on track, it’s going to take a while.

In Redding’s mind, states should start to think about their own laws as the central tool for agricultural policies, with complementary federal laws—not the other way around.

“You can’t do what we do without [federal farm bills], but the narrative is not about what Congress is going to do. The narrative has become, ‘What is Pennsylvania going to do?” he said. “That’s an important change, and I think it has actually allowed us to talk about our own definition of agriculture and recognize that we’ve got organic producers and urban producers and folks doing amazing things in communities that have never been acknowledged before.”

Plus, there’s the simple fact of getting around D.C.’s deep divide. Far from being a fight for funding, in Pennsylvania, across party lines, Redding said the farm bill “has been the most predictable and supported element of the budget for the last nine years.”