Four Case Buckets for the Ag Resolution by Jonathan Helton

Before the first tournament, it's worth knowing what kinds of cases you'll be hitting all year. Here are the four buckets I expect agriculture cases to fall into.

1. Farm support rollbacks

This category covers the highest-profile cases: Crop insurance reform and the U.S. sugar program. For anyone who believes the Renewable Fuel Standard is topical, that case fits here, too. Smaller cases — export subsidies, marketing orders and other deregulation or subsidy cuts — could fall under this bucket.

These are classic Stoa fare for a reason: Nobody likes a poorly managed government program that picks winners and losers.

There will be a decent evidence base to support reform for most of these. For some cases — RFS in particular — those bases, and the negative blocks against them, already exist.

However, affirmatives should beware judge fatigue. More than anywhere else in this resolution, I expect long-time Stoa parents to walk in with opinions about the high-profile cases in this bucket already formed.

Expect these cases to be common early season but to quickly face a negative arms race as "The Case" gets copied. More on that below.

2. Food freedom

Why should the government tell Americans what food they can eat? Cases that expand what Americans are allowed to buy and eat fit here. Raw milk legalization fits here. So do cases reforming meat inspection laws.

These affirmative cases will rely on free market narratives. Their simplicity will create a thematic core that negatives will need to neutralize early in the round.

Expect these cases to be common early season, then fizzle if the evidence base turns out to be thin. Any food freedom case that can avoid large disadvantages, however, will be well-positioned to win outrounds.

3. Public health

On the other hand, maybe the government should be careful about what's allowed in America's food supply. Cases with a strong public health theme include limitations on pesticides, antibiotics, PFAS "forever chemicals," fertilizer runoff and possibly food additives. Be on the lookout for food labeling cases here as well.

For anyone wanting to put in the work, most of these public health cases will be punishing. These cases could be the most dangerous in the meta, but they require a lot of front-end research and can face the value disadvantage of "Consumer choice."

Expect a few of these cases to be common in the middle and late season. The cases in this bucket that make it to NITOC will be dangerous — negatives, beware.

4. Technical fix

This is the catch-all category. Running a farmworker visa case? It goes here. A change to how organic standards are measured? Yup. Updating conservation incentives for farms? That too. These cases do not focus on whether a given philosophy is good or bad; they focus on whether a program works. (For more on those philosophies, see our post on agricultural narratives.)

Expect these cases to show up in the middle and late season as more experienced teams and teams that have refused to copy The Case move to their second case.

The upside is novelty: judges often find these cases the most interesting. The downside is that they are often complicated and require time to explain. They also lack the clean deregulatory narrative available to the first two buckets.

A team that starts with a technical fix case could have a formidable affirmative by mid-season, both because they will have ironed out any major issues and because negatives will have focused their energy on developing the arms race against The Case.

The Case

So what is The Case?

Whatever affirmative wins the first one or two tournaments is likely to be copied. It happened with the dredging case Europe year, POHs (the physician-owned hospital case) in healthcare year, and with CARSI (the Central America Regional Security Initiative case) last year. These cases tend to have simple plan construction and a decent evidence base.

If I were betting, I'd put money on a crop insurance or sugar program case early season.

But don't copy The Case.

If you end up behind the meta and the research arms race, your copy will not last you the season. Anyone who debated energy policy remembers that none of the top four teams ran RFS. NITOC RFS rounds were challenging for affirmative — whether due to the meta, judge bias or a combination of the two. Likewise, the end-of-year meta was not kind to CARSI at NITOC last year.

This rule is not universal, but unless you and your partner are willing to outwork everyone else, think hard before copying.

Instead, find your own idea — or copy a lesser-known case — and develop it throughout the season.

Final note

The pending farm bill is likely to complicate the meta. The Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its version on September 16, and Chairman Boozman has signaled a floor vote after the November midterms. This means a conference with the House, and any final passage, lands squarely in the middle of the season. If a bill passes in December or January, expect new cases to drop in January and February as the evidence base adjusts.