GREENWICH, N.Y. — I recently wrapped up my season coaching my youngest daughter’s sixth-grade basketball team. For anyone who coaches youth basketball, you can appreciate the degree of cat herding that often takes place in order to put a product on the floor that at least resembles something somewhat akin to an organized product.

The feline rodeo takes on added degrees of entertainment when you’re dealing with the emotions of pre-teen girls who kind of like basketball, but often just more enjoy spending time with their friends, well maybe not that friend, at least not today, but I’ll love her again tomorrow, but for now I’m upset that she’s not running as hard as me, and why isn’t Susie at practice today, and who was the boy she said she liked … you get the idea.

Despite my best efforts in practice, player sickness and short attention spans mean the immediate pregame plan often ends up boiling back down to a few key staples: be aggressive, know who you’re guarding on defense, and for goodness sake when a shot goes up don’t just stand there and stick your arms in the air, get your butt into somebody and box out.

And then there is the highly detailed scouting report. This often involves taking about a minute to look back through the scorebook, find the last time we played the team of the day and see who their top couple scorers were. “OK, we need to be sure to guard No. 4 and No. 11, and if you’re not guarding No. 4 or No. 11, be ready to help whoever is.” Pretty thorough, right? Well hey, at least it gave them some idea of what to expect.

With that sound coaching logic still fresh in mind, let’s do a quick scouting report of past farm bills to see if we can all get some idea of what we might expect to play out over the next seven months, given that the current version, the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, is set to expire on Sept. 30, 2023.

First and most important, you can probably immediately throw that September time frame out the window. As one farm bill veteran told me, you can almost set your clock that it will be six to nine months after the existing farm bill is set to expire before a final agreement is reached. That means somewhere between March and June of 2024 is a better guess of when the next farm bill will be finalized. In the meantime, Congress will likely pass extensions of the existing version to get by until a new agreement is reached.

Those extensions are crucial, because if the farm bill were to expire without a new bill in place or if programs were not granted an extension by Congress, all of the programs would return to the 1949 bill, meaning reverting to support price programs for the limited number of commodities covered by the 73-year-old law. Without getting too far into the weeds, let’s just say that wouldn’t be pretty.

But Kyle, you and your sources don’t know what you’re talking about, because the 2018 bill got passed relatively smoothly in the year it was set to expire, so what do you know? Granted, that actually happened, but according to the Congressional Research Service it was the first time in nearly 30 years, since the 1990 farm bill, that a farm bill was enacted within the year it was set to expire and prior to the new-crop planting season.

Let’s scout further back to the farm bill origins. The farm bill is an omnibus, multiyear law that governs an array of agricultural and food programs. It is ideally renewed roughly every five years. The first version of today’s farm bill was passed in 1933, and there have been 18 farm bills total since that time, passed in these years: 1933, 1938, 1948, 1949, 1954, 1956, 1965, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1981, 1985, 1990, 1996, 2002, 2008, 2014 and 2018.

As you can see in typical government fashion, nothing is really typical. Those years don’t exactly fall in perfect five-year increments, although I suppose we can at least give the ones in the 1940s a pass due to that little thing called World War 2 throwing a wrench into the works. But you can also see that since 1990, things have been much more stable following that five-year plus six- to nine-month, i.e. nearly six-year, pattern. So a 2023 farm bill happening more like sometime in the first half of 2024 seems more fitting.

What will it take to get to that point? As we discussed before, initial ag committee hearings have begun in the U.S. House and Senate, and hundreds of interest groups have begun to plea their case for changes, corrections or perhaps no changes at all. At some point, likely later this spring or summer, the ag committee chairs and ranking members in both houses of Congress will finally get initial farm bill markups done and try to get them passed through committee, with plenty of arguments about possible amendments and who didn’t run all their laps … oops, sorry, that was a traumatic flashback from my basketball girls springing up again.

Once the bills are passed in committee, they will go to the floor of the House and Senate for more debates, possible amendments, etc., before a version ultimately passes in each full chamber. This is often more of a chore in the House, since there are a lot more people involved in coming to an agreement, 435, versus the 100-member Senate.

The House and Senate farm bill versions then go to conference committee. What is that you ask? I could try to explain it myself, but let’s go with the friendly neighborhood Google explanation: “A conference committee is a temporary, ad hoc panel composed of House and Senate conferees formed for the purpose of reconciling differences in legislation that has passed both chambers.” So, this group of Congressional appointees takes the two farm bill versions and, again will a likely fair amount of cussing and discussing, melds them together into a single version that then goes back to the floors of the House and Senate where it will hopefully get passed and sent on to President Biden for his signature.

Seems simple enough, right? And all of this is supposed to happen before the end of September, right? After initial writeups in each Congressional ag committee may not even happen until summer, right? And all of this taking place in a political environment where holding hands and singing Kumbaya is the norm, right? Yeah, not exactly, and probably not.

But you never know. Scouting reports have been known to be wrong, and of all the bills that battle their way through Congress, the farm bill has a long history of being actually rather bipartisan. As one of my farm bill experts said, farm bills are written in purple, not blue or red.

So take heart readers, it could be rather lengthy, but it’s usually not the ugly bloodbath other bills can be. After all, we’re not dealing with the emotional whims of preteen girls here angling to get out of running laps or more curious about who likes what boy and why … but it does involve 535 politicians … OK, come to think of it, hand me my whistle and point me back to the hardwood.

Kyle Sharp grew up and lives on his family’s farm near Amanda, Ohio. He is a graduate of The Ohio State University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural communication. Twenty years in ag media, 10 years operating the family dairy farm, many experiences through 4-H and FFA, and a family with a keen interest in politics have helped him see many sides of farming life.