Sample Legislation
Proposed Sample Legislation for Discussion and Adaptation
The Farm Security Initiative’s sample legislation translates analysis into actionable policy tools. These model bills are designed to be debated, adapted and enacted at the state or federal level, not as a unified package, but as a modular framework addressing specific structural risks. Together, they respond to the conditions driving farmland loss, risk transfer and systemic fragility across American agriculture. Each theme targets a distinct layer of the system, from land ownership and succession to markets, infrastructure and national food system stability, while functioning as an integrated whole.
Who This Is For
This material is intended to be used, not simply reviewed. Different readers will engage with these bills in different ways:
Policymakers and Legislative Staff
Use these model bills as starting points. They are written in standard legislative form and can be adapted to state or federal contexts. Provisions may be modified, combined or piloted to address specific policy gaps.Governors’ Offices, Agencies and Regulators
Use this framework to identify structural vulnerabilities in land ownership, market design, infrastructure and risk allocation. Several bills are designed to complement existing regulatory authorities.Farm and Rural Organizations
Use these proposals to ground advocacy in concrete legislative language and to evaluate where risk is accumulating within current systems.Researchers and Analysts
Use the themes and mechanisms as a map of system-level interventions. Each bill reflects a specific hypothesis about incentives, risk distribution and durability.Farmers, Ranchers and Community Leaders
You are not expected to read every bill end-to-end. Use the summaries to identify where current systems are failing and which policy tools may help rebalance risk and restore local control.
These bills are not mandates or endorsements. They are tools, offered for adaptation, debate and refinement.
Sample Bills for Discussion
Theme I: Land Security and Ownership
Protecting farmland from speculation, forced liquidation and excessive consolidation is essential to keeping land in productive use and under locally accountable ownership.
The Land Security Act
Establishes protections against speculative acquisition and forced liquidation, helping ensure that working farmland remains available to active producers.
Farmland Trust Act
Creates state-level farmland trusts, supported by federal matching funds, to preserve working farmland and lease it to farmers under long-term, stewardship-oriented terms.
Anti–Corporate Land Grab Act
Improves transparency and places limits on excessive corporate and foreign consolidation of U.S. farmland.
Water Security for Agriculture Act
Protects farmers’ access to sustainable and affordable water through irrigation investment, watershed cooperation and drought-resilience planning.
Theme II: Farmers, Families, and the Next Generation
As risk concentrates at the farm level, continuity breaks down. These bills address succession failure, entry barriers and human resilience as system outcomes, not personal shortcomings.
Farm Succession & Next Generation Act
Supports intergenerational transfer of farmland through tax incentives, legal assistance and structured succession planning.
Beginning & Young Farmer Support Act
Lowers barriers to entry for new farmers through grants, training, mentorship and access to land and credit.
Veterans in Farming Act
Provides training, land access and startup support for U.S. military veterans entering agriculture.
Farmer Mental Health & Resilience Act
Expands access to counseling, crisis services and peer support to address high stress and suicide rates among producers.
Theme III: Markets, Labor, and Community Investment
Market structure determines where risk goes. These bills strengthen bargaining power, labor access and local capital formation.
Farm Labor Access Act
Expands access to legal, reliable and fairly compensated agricultural labor while protecting workers and family farms alike.
Farmer Cooperative Development Act
Provides technical assistance, startup funding and credit access for farmer-owned cooperatives.
Community Farm Capital Act
Establishes local investment pools that allow citizens to invest directly in farms, keeping wealth local and capital affordable.
Fair Market Integrity Act
Strengthens transparency and enforcement to prevent predatory pricing, anti-competitive practices and market manipulation.
Rural Technology & Farm Community Innovation Act
Supports rural technology hubs, innovation centers and training programs that bring modern tools and skilled jobs to farm regions.
Theme IV: Resilience, Infrastructure, and Conservation
Climate shocks, infrastructure gaps and market volatility expose farms to risks they cannot hedge alone. These bills provide system backstops, not just incentives.
Conservation Incentives Act
Rewards sustainable land management with direct payments, tax credits and technical support.
Disaster Resilience for Farmers Act
Creates insurance, grant and recovery programs to help farms survive floods, droughts, fires and other disruptions.
Local Food Infrastructure Act
Invests in regional processing, storage and distribution to keep more value with farmers and communities.
Rural Broadband & Technology Access Act
Expands broadband and digital access critical to modern agriculture, education and rural economic viability.
Theme V: Building on Proven Global Models
Other democracies have already confronted the pressures now facing American agriculture: consolidation, speculation and continuity failure. These model bills adapt proven international mechanisms to U.S. legal structures—preserving private enterprise while strengthening stewardship and accountability.
Family Farm Continuity Act
Encourages residency-based ownership and succession within families and communities actively engaged in agriculture.
Farmland Ownership Transparency Act
Requires disclosure of beneficial ownership and foreign investment to strengthen market confidence and local oversight.
National Interest in Agricultural Investment Act
Establishes review of large-scale or foreign farmland acquisitions to ensure public benefit and protect food security.
Farmland Preemption Act
Authorizes state-level preemption mechanisms to protect working farmland from speculative or non-agricultural acquisition.
Inheritable Land Use Rights Act
Creates renewable, inheritable use rights that stabilize long-term access to land for smallholders and tenants.
Idle Land Recovery and Renewal Act
Establishes land banks that lease idle or fragmented farmland to active producers and new entrants.
Secure Use Rights Act
Strengthens tenant protections by guaranteeing renewal rights, investment security and conservation participation.
Theme VI: National Food System Stability and Resilience
Theme VI addresses fragility in the American food system by treating food production as critical national infrastructure rather than a cyclical market activity.
Over decades, consolidation, vertical integration, financial extraction and policy design have concentrated control over processing, storage, logistics, inputs, water and power, creating a tightly coupled system that fails under foreseeable stress. Weather volatility, trade retaliation, interest-rate shocks, labor disruption, cyberattack and capital withdrawal now propagate through market structure transferring losses to individual producers and rural communities that lack the capacity to absorb them.
Theme VI responds through a set of interlocking structural mechanisms, each necessary and none sufficient on its own. Market truth and price integrity establish transparent price formation and verified cost benchmarks. Enforceable limits on concentration reduce single-point-of-failure risk. Public capital restores resilient, regionally distributed processing and distribution capacity. Statutory reassignment of uncontrollable agricultural risk corrects the long-standing practice of forcing individual producers to self-insure against macro-level hazards. National resource precedence protects food-system access to water and energy during scarcity.
Within this architecture, Parity & Buffer functions as the system’s price-stability mechanism by anchoring market participation to verified regional costs before biological and financial risk is irreversibly taken. It does not fix prices or guarantee income. It operates as a limited, rule-based public option that activates only when markets fail, preserving private price discovery while preventing cascading collapse.
Together, these mechanisms form the structural backbone of the Farm Security Initiative. Without them, downstream reforms related to land security, succession, conservation, and community capital cannot hold. With them, agriculture can once again operate as a durable, distributed foundation of national food security, capable of absorbing shock rather than transmitting failure.