by Ben Tindall, Washington State Standard
April 21, 2026
As the 2026 Washington state legislative session came to a close, there was at least one thing worth noting: some of the worst anti-farm ideas introduced this year did not make it across the finish line. That is the good news.
The bad news is that stopping bad bills is not the same thing as confronting a crisis. And that is the true indictment of this legislative session.
Early in the year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued its Farm Income and Wealth Statistics. Drawing from 2024 USDA data, Washington now ranks 50th in the nation in net farm revenue. That is dead last in profitability and the number itself is staggering.
According to the USDA data, Washington agriculture posted negative $396 million in farm income in 2024. That represented a collapse of more than $1.3 billion in lost farm revenue from 2023 to 2024.
Once those numbers from the USDA report were issued, Save Family Farming joined 17 other agricultural organizations and associations in sending a letter to legislative leaders laying out the facts in plain terms.
And yet, instead of responding with urgency, too many in Olympia spent the session entertaining legislation that would have driven labor costs higher, piled on new restrictions, and handed anti-farming activists and opportunistic attorneys more weapons to wield against the very people still fighting to keep Washington farming alive.
At the precise moment agriculture needed a lifeline, Olympia behaved as though 2026 was just another year for ideological theater. Our elected leadership acted as though this was just another opportunity to appease political interests hostile to agriculture and just another chance to place new burdens on a farming community already on its knees.
That is what makes this past session so infuriating. The worst bills died, but so did any serious effort to address the actual crisis.
Consider House Bill 2616. Save Family Farming is grateful to Reps. Kristine Reeves, Tom Dent and Lisa Parshley for sponsoring legislation intended to address the crisis in agriculture. The effort acknowledged that a crisis exists and attempted to provide a lifeline for farmers. But the leadership within the House Committee on Consumer Protection and Business granted the bill a public hearing only after the policy cutoff, denying relief and making the process feel more like performative pandering.
When Washington ranks 50th in the nation in farm profitability, committees offering nothing more than placating gestures is not leadership.
Washington agriculture is losing on many fronts as critical food and processing infrastructure disappear, plant closures and other losses across the agricultural supply chain have disrupted farm markets, eliminated jobs, weakened local economies, and inflicted harm on farmers, farm workers, and entire communities.
When processing capacity vanishes thanks to the high costs of operating in Washington, farmers lose market access, workers lose paychecks, towns lose economic anchors and the state loses tax base and production capacity.
This is how an industry is dismantled. Not all at once, but piece by piece. It’s buyer by buyer, processor by processor, job by job and farm by farm.
Olympia cannot hide behind ignorance. Legislators were warned. They were given the numbers. They were given the stakes. They were told what this meant for farms, workers, processors, and rural communities.
Decision-makers cannot claim to support agriculture while ignoring the worst profitability numbers in the nation. They cannot claim to care about farm workers while advancing policies that make it harder for farms to survive. They cannot claim to stand with rural communities while the industry that sustains them is allowed to bleed out in plain sight.
Washington cannot afford another session where the priorities are so disconnected from the reality facing farm families. It cannot afford another year in which lawmakers spend more time devising new ways to squeeze agriculture than developing serious ways to save it.
The next session must be different because for many farms, there may not be many more chances.
If the second-largest economic sector in this state can be driven to dead last in profitability yet still fail to provoke meaningful urgency from Olympia, then the problem is not that lawmakers were not warned. The problem is that too many of them looked at a collapsing farm economy and decided it was acceptable.
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