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House Ag Committee lawmaker calls farm crisis a ‘five-alarm fire’ as aid talks continue

A member of the U.S. House Ag Committee says she fears farmland will be lost and young farmers pushed out of production if additional assistance isn’t approved by Congress.

Michigan Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet tells Brownfield, “Anything that destabilizes our farmers and causes them to close— I’m hearing from sugarbeet farmers that are generational sugarbeet farmers that are worried that they’re not going to be able to keep their farms working over the next couple of years—that is a five-alarm fire from my perspective.”

McDonald Rivet is a co-sponsor of the Democratic proposed Farm and Family Relief Act of 2026, which would provide nearly $30 billion in farmer aid on top of the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program’s $12 billion.

She says $330 million would be allocated to sugarbeet growers.

“Sugarbeets have a very specific line item because they have been left out of a number of the packages that we’ve seen over the last year and needed to be dealt with in a different way,” she shares.

She says the U.S. needs to invest in the people who produce the nation’s food and support a system that can sustain itself.

“We have to be able to provide relief,” she pushes. “These relief packages are important, but this can’t be what we do every single year. We actually have to get stable, sane tariff policies that create predictability.”

McDonald Rivet says she expects the funding levels to be finalized as part of committee work this month, with Republicans saying $15 billion is more likely to get support from Congress.