In Farm Bill Fight, Montana Congressmen At Odds With MAHA Majority

By Tom Lutey, Montana Free Press

Organic farmers like Bob Quinn don’t win many farm bill battles, so Thursday’s U.S. House vote thwarting a proposed ban on state-issued cancer warnings on pesticides hit him like a surprise forecast for two weeks of rain.

The Kamut farmer from Big Sandy in north-central Montana had expected the pesticide industry to prevail.

“They have so much power and influence,” Quinn told Capitolized. “I take my hat off to those representatives who stood up to that.”

The bipartisan vote stripped from the 2026 farm bill language that would have barred states from requiring such labels. The vote to remove the prohibition, thus opening the door to state-level pesticide-warning requirements, passed 280-142, with 13 lawmakers not voting. Seventy-three Republicans voted to remove the prohibition, and six Democrats voted in line with most Republicans to bar states from requiring the labels — a good example of how complicated food politics can be.

No state currently applies pesticide warning labels, which are the realm of the EPA, but a lawsuit currently before the U.S. Supreme Court questions whether states should be able to require cancer-warning labels on pesticides when the EPA doesn’t.

All six Democrats who voted to ban the labels — two from California, and one each from Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas — represent regions where fruit and vegetable or cotton and peanut crops are grown with high pesticide treatments. Three are members of the House Agriculture Committee responsible for the farm bill. One sits on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture.

Montana’s U.S Reps. Ryan Zinke of the Western District and Troy Downing of the Eastern District, both Republicans, voted to ban state cancer warning labels on pesticide products. There hasn’t been a member of Montana’s delegation on the House Agriculture Committee since Steve Daines served on the committee in 2013. Former Democratic Sen. Max Baucus was the last Montanan on the Senate Agriculture Committee, in 2014.

Zinke “believes the best chance of the [farm] bill’s passage came with including that provision [banning pesticide warnings] in the base text,” Zinke’s staff said in a statement issued Thursday.

Downing’s office didn’t respond when asked to explain the representative’s vote.

After the vote, representatives aligned with Health and Human Services Director Robert Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (aka MAHA) movement declared victory on social media. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Florida, who authored the amendment to remove the labeling ban language from the farm bill, said the unamended bill would have let pesticide companies off the hook for health problems.

“I do not support giving blanket immunity to corporations at the expense of American families,” Luna said on X. “Pesticides are linked to a 30 percent increase in childhood cancer and over 170 studies corroborate the evidence.”

Montana is in the bottom half of states for pesticide use per cropland acre, according to U.S. Geological Survey data, in part because Montana farmers grow fewer crops genetically engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, a widely used pesticide. The state ranks third nationally for wheat production at 4.85 million acres, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and no “Roundup Ready” wheat product is approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for commercial sale.

The state’s largest crop with a Roundup Ready option is canola, at 190,000 acres.

The farm bill is a long way from passage. The Senate Agriculture Committee’s markup of the bill is still unscheduled.

Quinn hopes the door remains open to state warnings on pesticides, and that they help lead to diminished pesticide usage.

“We have glyphosate in our rain, that is enough already,” Quinn said.

After amendments, the House passed the farm bill 224-200.

Big Sandy farmer Bob Quinn.

Photo by Jason Thompson / MTFP