“You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field,” said President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. That pretty much describes the Agriculture Department bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. Although the big building on Independence Avenue is full of smart and well-meaning people, there’s no getting around the fact that they’re far removed from the regular business of farming.

It doesn’t have to be that way—at least not according to a couple of Republican senators, Josh...