Brookings recommendations for this year's Farm Bill

Tony Pipa wrote this week on a Brookings Institute blog under the headline, "5 recommendations from Reimagine Rural for the 2023 Farm Bill and federal implementation."  "Reimagine Rural" is Brookings' rural podcast, which was new this year.  Here's an excerpt from Pipa's post, the second in a two-part series of takeaways from the podcast: 

The stories captured in the first season of the Reimagine Rural podcast offer important lessons at a pivotal policy moment for equitable rural development in the U.S. The current Congress is negotiating a new Farm Bill, the legislation agreed upon every five years that sets agricultural subsidies and authorizes the rural development programs managed by USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). Implementation is also underway for some of the most consequential place-based federal resources approved this century through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPs and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). All these pieces of legislation implicate rural places to a significant degree, either through programs exclusively focused on rural—or through programs that will necessarily include rural to a large degree.

To enable policy solutions that maximize the public benefit of these federal resources, the lessons from Reimagine Rural suggest a multi-pronged strategy that could be effective in the immediate term.

Here are the five items listed.  You'll have to look to the blog itself to learn more of the details on each.

1. Shift the mindset from decline to opportunity

2. Invest in readiness

3. Improve coherence

4. Invest at a meaningful scale

5. Increase transparency

The first post in this two-part series on takeaways from the Reimagine Rural podcast is here.