A sweeping $867 billion farm bill that includes food assistance programs for roughly 440,000 Nevadans and promotes rural agriculture programs beneficial to the state’s farmers and livestock producers was passed by the House on Wednesday following Senate approval earlier this week.

President Donald Trump called the bill, approved by a 369-47 vote, “a big win for the farmers” and is expected to sign it into law.

Nevada’s congressional delegation — Democrats Dina Titus, Jacky Rosen and Ruben Kihuen and Republican Rep. Mark Amodei — voted in favor of the bill.

Titus called passage of the five-year authorizing legislation a “victory for families, animals and the environment.”

Senators voted 87-13 on Tuesday to pass a compromise version of the legislation that stripped out a controversial House GOP measure requiring states to impose work requirements on food stamp recipients aged 18 to 59. The work requirement for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was taken out of the final conference committee version of the bill to advance the legislation through the Senate.

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., both voted to approve the conference bill.

Cortez Masto said the bipartisan bill preserves “food assistance programs and includes provisions that prioritize the needs of tribal communities.”

440K Nevadans get food aid

Titus said the conference committee that crafted the final bill rejected “House Republicans’ cruel cuts to SNAP and instead makes investments in farmers markets and food banks to boost nutrition among families and seniors.”

About 15 percent of Nevadans — or 440,000 people — received food assistance under SNAP in 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is higher than the roughly 12 percent national average.

Of that total, about 1,300 Nevadans received SNAP benefits through the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, or FDPIR.

The average monthly SNAP benefit for each household member in Nevada in 2017 was $118, according to USDA.

Rosen said protecting the programs was imperative for families and senior citizens who “who rely on these benefits to make ends meet.”

A congressional non-partisan budget estimate projected 1.2 million people nationwide, or 4 percent of SNAP recipients, would have lost benefits under the original House GOP bill.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said that while Congress missed an opportunity to improve work requirements for nutritional benefits, it would provide a “strong safety net for farmers and ranchers.”

The bill does tighten accountability of the food stamps with a program designed to prevent people receiving assistance from getting benefits from multiple states.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., praised measures in the bill to provide accountability to nutrition programs and provide training and educational assistance to put people back to work.

“This legislation is about empowering the individual,” Ryan said.

‘Relief and certainty’

Ryan also said the legislation expands farm subsidies and provides stability for those producers growing crops and livestock that have been subjected to tariffs as a result of a trade dispute between the Trump administration and China.

The bill “provides relief and certainty to guard against the volatility of the agriculture economy,” Ryan said.

Associations and trade groups representing farmers, cattle and livestock producers hailed passage of the bill in the waning weeks of Congress and nearing a deadline for authorizing legislation to direct spending on programs for the next five fiscal years.

Republicans and Democrats sought expanded access for rural families to broadband, which remained in the bill. A measure to create a working group to look at regulatory barriers to Wi-Fi access to rural families was part of legislation introduced this year in the Senate by Cortez Masto.

The bill also legalizes hemp, a strain of cannabis without the levels of THC in marijuana and grown for products that are widely available in the United States in the form of clothing, oils and household goods.

Titus has championed the lifting of restrictions on hemp, and also supported the final bipartisan compromise bill that removed language that she said would have weakened the Endangered Species Act “and imperiled wildlife in Nevada” by easing restrictions on pesticide use, dumping and vehicular traffic in protected habitat.

The bill also cracks down on organized dog fighting and cock fighting and bans the sale of dogs for the meat trade, according to the Los Angeles-based Animal Wellness Action group.

That nonprofit also praised inclusion in the bill of language co-sponsored by Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that would create a grant program to allow domestic abuse shelters to accommodate pets with victims of family violence