News Summary

• Tucked inside the 2026 Farm Bill is a provision that would reimburse farmers 90% of the cost of adopting AI and precision agriculture technologies.
• The private sector standards governing those technologies would be set not by the USDA, but by the tech industry itself.
• This could be a Trojan horse of sorts for something called “precision agriculture’ and artificial intelligence (AI), which big tech firms will be able take advantage of farmers and further wrest control over the food system from them.
• The irony should be noticed that EQIP, a program with the purpose of bringing conservation into farming, is now being used to fund forms of technology powered by data centers that drain our water, cause air pollution, and gobble up farmland.