Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack was playing to the crowd recently when he told a field day gathering of organic farming advocates at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania that the mantra “get big or get out” is on its way out.

“There’s got to be another option,” our colleagues at Lancaster Farming reported that he said. During his speech, Vilsack implied that big is “bad” and small is “good.”

Wait a minute. Since when is the size of a farm the determining factor of whether it is good or bad?

Furthermore, what, exactly, is a good farm? Or a bad one?

Vilsack’s agency, USDA, says the average size of the 1.9 million U.S. farms is 463 acres — hardly sprawling. Is that too big?

What we think the good secretary was trying to say isn’t that size matters when passing judgment on farms. Rather, he was saying that the economics of farming need to change.

“My hope and prayer is that the next farm bill (in several years) is different from the one we’re talking about now,” he said.

He proceeded to rail against rice and soybean farmers getting too much money from USDA and, presumably, other farmers getting too little.

He may be right. But he makes it sound as though farmers write the farm bill and he, as the secretary of agriculture, has no power to influence it.

Which, of course, is nonsense. Congress writes a farm bill every five years — or whenever it can get its act together. As the agriculture committees in the House and Senate consider what to put in the next farm bill, they seek the opinions of farmers and ranchers — and folks like Vilsack.

For the record, farmers and ranchers get zero votes on the farm bill, and Vilsack’s boss, the president, can veto it if he doesn’t like it.

That’s hardly a legislative steamroller with farmers at the wheel.

Then Vilsack said something else that was interesting, about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. He implied that Congress wants to reduce SNAP, which represents 82% of the spending in the next farm bill.

SNAP spending has more than doubled in the past five years. In 2019, SNAP cost $60.4 billion and in 2021 — after the COVID outbreak — it skyrocketed to $113.7 billion. That’s an increase of 88.2% in two years.

SNAP spending has continued to go up, to $127 billion in 2023. Our suspicion is that Congress is only trying to tap the brakes on SNAP spending now that COVID is under control.

Again, Vilsack implies that “big” farms are behind any efforts to reduce SNAP and that Congress needs to have a “conversation” before slowing the increase in SNAP spending.

Vilsack was clear that he doesn’t like how the farm bill is put together, but in the end he made no substantive suggestions for what he would like to do, or how.

If he has some concrete ideas, we’re all ears.