ABSTRACT

The Role of Agricultural Subsidies in Transforming the U.S. Food System

by Sophia McLoughlin

The US food system is in a state of failure for both people and planet: leaving nearly 48 million Americans food insecure (Rabbitt, 2025), depleting natural resources such as soil and water at unsustainable rates, emitting vast quantities of greenhouse gases, and contributing to over a million deaths annually from diet-related diseases. Despite the extensive costs to taxpayers, current subsidized crop insurance and commodity support programs primarily support large-scale industrial agriculture, which intensifies land use, degrades soil, and contributes significantly to climate change. The need for a more sustainable and equitable food system is urgent. This thesis examines the role U.S. agricultural subsidies have played in perpetuating industrial farming practices that undermine both environmental health and public well-being, and investigates how U.S. agricultural subsidies can be restructured to promote the widespread adoption of regenerative farming systems on a national scale. This paper argues that in order to create a more resilient food system that supports long-term environmental sustainability and equitable access to nutritious food, agricultural subsidies must be reformed and restructured to incentivize the adoption of agroecological practices, and the eventual transition from conventional farming systems to regenerative ones. This analysis focuses on how reforming Titles I, II, and XI of the Farm Bill could drive this transition. By exploring potential methods of reform and evaluating their political feasibility, this paper seeks to identify solutions that bridge partisan divides while addressing the intertwined crises of food insecurity, environmental degradation, and climate change. This paper hypothesizes that a limited subset of crop insurance reforms—particularly those which focus on eliminating wasteful spending—may be achievable in the current political landscape and could lay the groundwork for further, more impactful reforms in the medium and long term. Through a detailed review of scholarly literature, gray literature, and informal interviews, this thesis provides a comprehensive assessment of how agricultural subsidy reform can reshape U.S. agriculture to better nourish people while ensuring the long-term sustainability of our food systems, and finds that while U.S. federal agricultural subsidy programs are in urgent need of reform, the scope of politically feasible changes that advance regenerative farming remains limited under the current Trump administration. However, certain reforms are both possible and potentially impactful—particularly when strategically framed to align with fiscally conservative priorities.