Friends,

House Ways & Means Committee Approves Farm to Table Meat Sales

All session long, I have been working on this bill, and I was able to get it through the Agriculture committee and now the Ways and Means committee. It is now eligible for a floor vote.

On Wednesday, April 9, 2025, the House Ways & Means Committee passed House File 179 unanimously. The bill creates a new type of food processing entity that is licensed and inspected by the Department of Inspection, Appeals and Licensing agents that can store officially processed packaged meat or poultry raised by the licensee and offered for sale at a premises or farm on a wholesale or retail basis. The bill legalizes the on–farm storage of processed inspected packages and allows the sale on wholesale or retail basis for such packages by the producers. The annual license/inspection fee level to be assessed upon on–farm meat and poultry production operations with wholesale or retail packaged sales is $75. The measure further in a Code renumbering process strikes and replicates existing provisions applying to ‘small food processing premises’ that specify annual license/inspection fees of:

a) $150 if gross sales of processed and marketed meat is less than $200,000;

b) $300 is gross sales for is at least $200,000 but less than $2–million; and

c) $500 for operations with gross annual sales exceeding$2–million.

Senate File 167: SSA Final Agreement

This week, we passed a final SSA agreement after months of negotiations. While our original proposal included more money for schools, this final agreement includes a couple of key wins secured by Iowa House Republicans.

This final agreement includes:

— A 2% increase in SSA for Fiscal Year 2026 plus an additional $5 per student. This results in more than $105 million more in school aid.

— This year also brings phase two of the teacher salary increase. This will include almost $35 million additional dollars for public schools.

— The State Cost Per Pupil amount increases to$7,988 per student which includes an additional $5 for per pupil equity, which was a key component fought for by House Republicans. This is an increase of $162 per pupil.

— The operational sharing cap increases from 21–25, an additional $942,087 for public schools.

— An additional 3% increase in transportation equity, in addition to the 2% increase. This equates to $1,554,938 more for public schools.

Altogether, these increases equate to a 2.8% increase in state funding to public schools. House Republicans secured more than $4.7 million in additional investments for public schools through our negotiations. These increases represent many of the specific funding issues we hear from our school districts. While each line item may not affect each individual school district equally, one line item may have a big impact on addressing the issue a specific district is facing. House Republicans are working to respond to the specific concerns we’re hearing from our schools in a responsible manner.

Democrats’ False Claims on School Funding

Democrats repeated the misleading claim that we are increasing ESA funding by 44% while increasing public school funding by 2%. They say this to make it sound as if we are spending more on private schools than on public schools. But that is far from the truth. The cost per pupil of ESAs increases each year at the same rate as the number we set for SSA. This year is the final year of expansion in the ESA program that allows all families to qualify. This is why the increase looks greater this year.

Even with this expansion, the cost of the ESA program does not even come remotely close to the amount we spend each year on public schools. Check out the graph below for a side by side comparison. In the FY 2025 budget, state aid to public schools accounts for 43.62% of the entire state budget. That’s the biggest piece of the pie by far. ESAs, meanwhile, account for 2.01% of the total state budget.

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Email Josh Meggers at

joshua.meggers@legis.iowa.gov