The North Star: Food security is community security

H.R. 7567 is written as an agriculture bill, but it reads like something bigger: a statement that food systems are national systems, and national systems only hold when local communities have the capacity to operate them. The bill is introduced as the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, and it is structured to carry USDA programs forward through fiscal year 2031—a long horizon that implicitly assumes long-term local capability, not short-term fixes. 12

In a Compass frame, this is the “North Star” shift: we stop treating rural regions as service territories and start treating them as operational environments—places where resilience is built through people, institutions, and interoperable infrastructure. H.R. 7567’s scope (commodities, conservation, rural development, research, and more) indicates that the future of food is not a single program; it is a system of systems that must be coordinated at the community level. 21

The Compass premise: Capacity is the infrastructure beneath infrastructure

Project Compass begins with a simple claim: the most critical infrastructure is human infrastructure—the skills, relationships, governance, and confidence that allow a community to adopt technology, steward resources, and sustain change over time. H.R. 7567 strengthens this claim by embedding “capacity assumptions” across titles that increasingly depend on connectivity, data, and cross-sector coordination. 21

If you read the table of contents as a map, you can see the shift. The bill doesn’t just fund outcomes; it expands the operational surface area of rural systems: conservation practice management, watershed work, emergency response, technical assistance, and—explicitly—rural broadband and middle mile expansion. In Compass terms, that means the federal government is effectively saying: the work now requires a stronger local operating system. 21

Bearing 1: Broadband is no longer a utility; it is eligibility

The most direct broadband signal in H.R. 7567 is the creation of a full Title VI—Rural Development, with a dedicated subtitle on “Connecting Rural Americans to High Speed Broadband.” This subtitle explicitly lists programs for rural broadband loans and grants, middle mile expansion, Community Connect grants, technical assistance and reporting requirements, and limits related to overbuilding. 21

In a Compass narrative, this reframes broadband as “eligibility infrastructure.” When broadband sits inside the same legislative architecture as conservation, credit, and rural services, connectivity becomes the silent prerequisite for participation: applying, reporting, coordinating, monitoring, and continuously improving. The implication is not merely “build networks”—it is “ensure communities can use networks to access and manage programs through 2031.” 21

Compass translation: The broadband gap is not only a coverage gap; it’s a capacity gap. Rural places without robust broadband are at risk of becoming administratively and operationally excluded from the very programs designed to support them. 21

Bearing 2: Smart communities emerge when agriculture becomes a data-bearing civic system

H.R. 7567 expands and reauthorizes conservation and watershed work (e.g., CRP, EQIP, stewardship), alongside studies and program structures that depend on coordinated planning and monitoring. Even without reading every page, the act’s architecture signals an increase in measurement, verification, and coordinated action across land and water systems. 21

Smart communities are not defined by gadgets; they’re defined by integration. When conservation programs, watershed programs, rural development programs, and research programs are all operating at once, communities need shared data practices, shared governance, and shared “rules of the road.” H.R. 7567’s structure supports that kind of integration by bundling these domains into a single long-horizon framework. 21

Compass translation: Agriculture is not just an economic sector; it becomes a civic platform. Farms, processors, conservation districts, and rural institutions become nodes in a regional system that must “sense, decide, and act” together—especially under disruption. 21

Bearing 3: Workforce and CTE are the “continuity engine” of rural modernization

H.R. 7567 is not a traditional workforce bill, but its contents point to a clear workforce reality: the future operating model of rural America will require a broader technical skill base. That is visible in two ways:

1) Title VII—Research, Extension, and Related Matters emphasizes education, extension, and institutional capacity across multiple program areas, including grants and fellowships and community college programming. 21
2) Title VI—Rural Development explicitly includes broadband, technical assistance, innovation infrastructure, and related rural service modernization—each of which expands demand for technicians, coordinators, and “hybrid” IT/OT roles in rural settings. 21

This is where CTE becomes central to the Compass story. If broadband is eligibility and smart systems are integration, then workforce is continuity: the capacity to maintain, troubleshoot, and adapt the system after the ribbon cutting. A community can buy equipment; it cannot buy institutional confidence unless it invests in pathways that create local expertise. 21

Compass translation: A modern farm bill implicitly becomes a modern skills bill when its programs depend on data, connectivity, and coordinated operations over multiple years. 21

The Compass model applied to H.R. 7567: Four moves communities can make now

1) Sense (build a shared understanding of conditions)

H.R. 7567’s multi-title approach suggests a world where communities track land, water, food logistics, and service delivery with increasing rigor. Communities can respond by building a local “sensing layer”: consistent mapping, shared metrics, and a governance habit of using evidence in decisions. 21

2) Connect (treat broadband as a multi-sector backbone)

Because the bill elevates broadband within Rural Development (including middle mile and program administration requirements), broadband planning should be done as cross-sector planning: agriculture + schools + healthcare + public safety + utilities, not a single-lane project. 21

3) Learn (turn programs into pathways)

Use the bill’s long horizon (through 2031) to justify training programs that outlast grant cycles: work-based learning with conservation partners, internships tied to rural utility operations, and stackable credentials that match local infrastructure realities. 21

4) Sustain (design for stewardship, not deployment)

The most overlooked failure mode in rural modernization is maintenance without a workforce. H.R. 7567’s structure highlights technical assistance, innovation centers, and ongoing program administration, which points to an enduring operations mindset. Build the local capacity to steward systems year after year. 21

A Compass closing: “The bill is not the change. The community is.”

H.R. 7567 is introduced and referred to committee; it may evolve. But its architecture already communicates the direction of travel: rural America is being asked to operate a more complex, more connected, more data-bearing system of food, land, water, and infrastructure—at national-security scale—through 2031. 12

Project Compass offers the human answer to a technical era: community capacity is not a side project. It is the only way the promise of policy becomes durable reality. Broadband is the circulatory system, smart-community integration is the nervous system, and workforce/CTE is the muscle memory that keeps the whole body standing when conditions change. 21

I was featured in **Rural Development: The Farm Bill & Michigan Chapter 3** from Progress Michigan (published Dec 4, 2023), discussing how broadband access shapes education, agriculture, healthcare access, and long-term rural opportunity in the Eastern Upper Peninsula.

More context and campaign page from Progress Michigan

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