Leave it to a famous philosopher, Yogi Berra, to sum up the way Congress has handled renewal of the Farm Bill. “It’s like deja vu all over again,” the former Yankee catcher once said.

And it is.

After extending the 2018 Farm Bill for a year, Congress has dawdled in carrying out its duty to write a new Farm Bill.

We stand corrected. The House Agriculture Committee did its job earlier this year and sent the bill to the House floor for a vote, but the rest of Congress was too busy doing, well, something. Like running for reelection.

As a result, the Farm Bill was set to expire at the end of September, leaving farmers and ranchers in the lurch.

Programs covering crop insurance, land conservation, trade, nutrition, credit, rural development, research, extension, forestry, energy development, horticulture, marketing, regulatory reform and any number of other facets of agriculture are covered in the bill.

In short, the Farm Bill touches every corner of U.S. agriculture. Without a new Farm Bill, every one of the nation’s more than 2 million farms and ranches will be hurt and 46 million agriculture-related jobs will be impacted.

The old Farm Bill “does not fit the needs of American agriculture today,” American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall recently told a gathering of Western members of Congress. “Whether it’s COVID, whether it’s inflation, whatever it might be, it does not fit the needs that agriculture has today. And it is time for us to get this done.”

Amen.

We understand that many members of Congress are seeking reelection this fall, and that a new president will be chosen. We understand there are a hundred-and-one other important issues awaiting the attention of Congress, ranging from unrest in the Middle East to immigration to Ukraine.

But members of Congress need to understand this: Not one of those issues is more important than passage of a new Farm Bill. It will impact the U.S. economy in a way that no other legislation does.

A particularly important part of the Farm Bill is funding for SNAP, the acronym for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The annual cost of SNAP more than doubled, from $63 billion to $127 billion, between 2019 and 2023. The number of SNAP recipients also increased, from 36 million to 42 million, during the same period.

Much of the additional aid was needed to help Americans through the COVID pandemic, which the federal government bungled, throwing millions out of work and needlessly shuttering businesses and schools. We as a nation are still recuperating, and SNAP is an important means of helping.

SNAP is occasionally a sticking point for members of Congress debating a new Farm Bill, but as the nation continues to claw its way back from the COVID catastrophe, we see no need to punish the victims.

It is time to pass a new Farm Bill. Delay will only hurt farmers, ranchers — and the rest of the nation.

As for those in Congress who argue the Farm Bill should be better, we quote another famous philosopher, Voltaire. He said: “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”