In what might be a first, I agree with Rollins . . . in a way. I think it’s a good idea to connect these disparate subsidy programs, currently run by different agencies within the USDA and tracked using separate systems. But while it may be true that the IT systems are clunky and redundant, a much bigger problem is that the aims of the programs are so disconnected that they often work at cross purposes and fail to deliver lasting benefits to farmers, farm economies, taxpayers, and the public. Rather than just a superficial linking of farmer data and application forms, we need true synergy of program goals and outcomes, and Rollins’ plan won’t do anything about that.

Moreover, I’m deeply concerned about how this administration is going about overhauling these information systems in the name of efficiency—in particular, contracting with Palantir Technologies, one of today’s most notorious and antidemocratic corporations, to do the work (more on that later).

US agriculture depends heavily on taxpayer support

First, let’s back up and take a look at what the USDA programs in question have in common: distributing public money to farm operations. While many farmers and observers like to think of agriculture as a free-market system, that is far from the truth. Farming is heavily subsidized—based on USDA data, USAFacts estimates that federal agricultural subsidies since 1933 have averaged 13.5 percent of net farm income.

The USDA administers a wide variety of farm payment programs, but they generally fall into three major categories:

• Crop insurance and disaster assistance. The USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) oversees the Federal Crop Insurance Program, which insures farm operations against crop losses and underwrites the cost of insurance premiums. The RMA also operates programs including the Supplemental Disaster Relief Program, which provides additional compensation to crop insurance policyholders for losses related to qualifying natural disasters.
•  Commodity price supports. The Farm Service Agency (FSA) administers programs including Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage, which provide payments when farm revenue or covered commodity prices fall below set levels. These outcomes can be spurred by all kinds of economic forces and events, including some we’re seeing today: tariffs and trade wars, for example, and rippling disruption from a literal war.
• Conservation incentives. The largest voluntary programs that compensate farmers for undertaking conservation and pollution reduction practices on working farms are operated by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). These include the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program.

In 2024, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed all the programs that distribute taxpayer dollars to farmers and ranchers and tallied a total of $161 billion over the prior five years—an annual average of $32 billion.

Recent crises have spurred more farm payments, but distribution has been unequal

The GAO report found that more than 40 percent of farmer payments during fiscal years 2019 through 2023 addressed damage to farm income due to international trade disruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and natural disasters. In 2018 and 2019, for example, the USDA distributed some $28 billion through a new Market Facilitation Program (MFP) to bail out farmers hit by retaliatory tariffs on soybeans, pork, and other agricultural commodities in the wake of the first Trump administration’s ill-conceived trade war with China.

The largest farm subsidies have disproportionately gone to the largest, most industrial operations. As the libertarian Cato Institute put it recently, “Most welfare programs are for low-income families, but farm welfare is for high-income families.” This was borne out starkly during the first Trump administration: A 2020 analysis of USDA data by the Environmental Working Group showed that more than half of all MFP payments went to the top 10 percent of farms by income. Similarly, the USDA directed nearly a quarter of payments from the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, created by Congress in 2020 to help farmers struggling during the pandemic, to just the top 1 percent of farm operations.

By the end of 2020, nearly all of the US Treasury’s gain from tariffs on China went to farmer payments. Yet despite all that spending, farm bankruptcies spiked 20 percent in 2019 and stayed high through 2020.

USDA payments to farmers are skyrocketing

Recently, the USDA’s Economic Research Service tallied annual direct payments to farmers from all programs since 2022 and forecast the trajectory of spending through 2026. As illustrated in the graph below, conservation payments have remained flat, while price support payments and all other payments, after declining somewhat since the pandemic’s effects eased, are expected to balloon this year.

Linking subsidies to pollution prevention would have wide-ranging benefits

This brings me back to the USDA’s One Farmer, One File initiative. In a recent interview (paywalled), a USDA undersecretary said the effort seeks to streamline paperwork such as program application forms and eligibility documents across agencies and update internal software and data collection systems. The initiative, which is expected to be fully implemented by 2028, aims to reduce administrative time spent by both farmers and USDA staff.

That’s good, but what would be revolutionary is if the missions of the programs themselves were linked and their dollars collectively created lasting value and sustainability for farmers. That’s not happening today, and it’s not going to result from just an overhaul of data systems.

Take the interplay of the NRCS’s farm conservation programs and the RMA’s crop insurance. Science has shown that conservation practices that work with nature rather than against it—including planting cover crops and perennial crops, expanding crop rotations, and producing a wider array of crops and livestock on a farm—create healthy, spongy soils and buffer farmers from flooding, drought, and other events that commonly lead to insurance payouts and drive up premiums. A January 2023 GAO report examined options to link conservation, climate resilience, and crop insurance policy incentives, and later that year the Biden administration’s USDA took steps to make crop insurance rules work better for farmers using resilience-building practices.

But much more action is needed to bring about a fully integrated and self-reinforcing policy framework that requires higher levels of soil, water, and climate stewardship by all producers as a condition of receiving farm subsidies (as I proposed in this blog post in 2024). Such an integrated policy should also expand existing technical and financial support to ease the transition for farmers who have been locked out of conservation programs or have been reluctant to try them.

If we did this, it would be good for farmers of all kinds, who would begin to see the benefits of reduced reliance (and spending) on fertilizers and other inputs, greater flood and drought resilience from healthier soil, and more profitability. (See, for example, the story of an Iowa farmer who voluntarily adopted conservation practices and documented benefits that added up to an improved bottom line.)

Benefits would also accrue to taxpayers (decreased crop insurance costs from extreme weather), local water utilities and their customers (lower costs for removing agricultural pollution from drinking water, and better health outcomes), commercial fisheries (smaller dead zones), hunters and outdoor enthusiasts (cleaner rivers and streams for swimming and fishing, more waterfowl habitat), and consumers (better food access from diversified farms).

But . . . the USDA’s contractor raises the specter of authoritarian surveillance

Fundamentally linking farmer assistance programs in the way I’ve described is a long-term goal. In the meantime, streamlining these programs’ IT systems must be done carefully and with attention to participant privacy and data security. As much as Secretary Rollins talks about “putting farmers first,” I was surprised (okay, not really) to hear that the USDA had contracted with Palantir—an AI-based company that has been called “the most dangerous corporation in America”—to develop the One Farmer, One File system.

Palantir’s founder is Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist, Trump donor, and Jeffrey Epstein correspondent who has frequently expressed anti-democratic ideas and decried diversity. And Palantir is at the center of the Trump administration’s highest-profile and most controversial data-gathering and surveillance efforts—from its contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to its work with the Internal Revenue Service and the Pentagon. Many observers have expressed alarm about Thiel’s and Palantir’s role in the rise of an authoritarian surveillance state and threats to human rights worldwide.

So now Palantir is being handed the keys to USDA farmer data. What could possibly go wrong?

The report cancellation was announced in a brief press release from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Saturday (apparently in response to an internal leak of the cancellation decision) that spouted nonsense about its Household Food Security Reports. Conveniently for the current occupant of the White House and his enablers, the USDA will only release food insecurity survey data for 2024, the last full year of the Biden administration, and nothing beyond that.

It’s the latest sign that the president and his allies are hell-bent on eliminating science and data that don’t support their political agenda.

What is food insecurity?

To understand the significance of this development, you need to know that food insecurity is not the same as hunger, but it’s related. The experts at Feeding America define it in simple terms: “It’s when people don’t have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from.”

The Economic Research Service (ERS), the USDA unit that issues the Household Food Security Reports, further defines two distinct levels of food insecurity.

• Low food security (old label = food insecurity without hunger): Reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake.
• Very low food security (old label = food insecurity with hunger): Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.

In 2023, 47.4 million people lived in food-insecure households. But rates of food insecurity are not intractable and unchanging. Instead, food insecurity goes up and down as economic conditions and food prices change, and in response to changes in food assistance programs that help low-income households afford food. According to the USDA’s most recent Household Food Security Report, the share of US households experiencing food insecurity increased from 12.8% in 2022 to 13.5% in 2023. It was the second annual increase in a row and a reversal of the previous trend—rates had hit a two-decade low in 2021 following congressional action to increase food assistance and other benefits for families with children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a measure of individual or community well-being, food security/insecurity is limited. As a former colleague wrote back in 2023, “While current food insecurity rates may be shocking, they likely do not reflect the true scale of hunger and poor nutrition in this country. Our government only measures how much we eat, not whether what we eat is good for us, our communities, and our environment.”

That said, it’s the measure we have, and our national nutrition outlook won’t be improved in any way by discontinuing it. Instead, eliminating future reporting of food insecurity in the United States will only hide the cascading impacts of many of the policies President Trump and his allies are pursuing right now.

Why are food prices going up?

That brings me to the reasons for recent rising food prices, which anyone who goes grocery shopping regularly is familiar with. New data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index show that food prices increased by 0.5% from July to August, the fastest monthly change in three years. And compared to August 2024, last month’s overall grocery prices were up almost 3%. If this trend continues, it won’t be long before many previously food-secure households will start to have trouble affording enough food.

And sadly, it may well continue. When you start looking at all the policies coming out of the current White House, it’s not hard to see why.

A food industry analyst interviewed by CBS News named three drivers of high food prices: tariffs on imported food items, climate change, and a shortage of agricultural and food workers. In each case, the policies pursued by the president and his allies in Congress are exacerbating these problems rather than solving them.

Take the president’s ever-changing and steep tariffs, many of which kicked in recently. These are driving up the cost of common imported foods including bananas, coffee, and seafood, along with staples like oatmeal, rice, and sugar. As winter arrives in the Northern Hemisphere in just a few months, more of the fruits and vegetables we eat will be imported from countries like Mexico and Peru, and if Trump’s tariff policies continue, they will be more expensive.

Food prices will also rise in response to extreme weather driven by climate change. A recent study examined 16 examples of extreme heat, drought, or heavy precipitation around the world between 2022 and 2024, to see how they affected food prices in the short term. In one example, after a summer of extreme western US drought in 2022, the price of vegetables in Arizona and California shot up 80% compared with the previous November. But the president and his cronies continue to deny the science and impact of climate change.

As for the shortage of food and farm workers, that is playing out the way many of us predicted, only worse. ICE raids on US farms and food processing facilities have arrested and scared off immigrant workers, leaving crops unharvested and straining capacity at meat and poultry plants.

And there’s another action the Trump enablers in Congress have taken that will surely worsen food insecurity in the months and years ahead. The infamous One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed on partisan lines earlier this year, took an axe to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps). The nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which studies the SNAP program, estimates that “approximately 4 million people in a typical month will lose some or all of their SNAP food benefits once the changes are fully implemented.”

If an administration and Congress were trying to make more people hungrier, they’d be hard-pressed to take a combination of actions that would do it more effectively than the Trump playbook.

Having more data is never a bad thing

The move by the USDA to cancel its food insecurity survey comes as efforts to suppress inconvenient science are intensifying across the federal government. At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other agencies, scientists, economists, and statisticians are being muzzled and their findings buried.

In the case of the food insecurity study, the Trump loyalists now running the USDA justified its cancellation by calling it “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” Let’s take those one at a time.

How are the data redundant? The USDA survey serves as the official data source of national food insecurity statistics. There is no secondary or alternative report with that information. Without it, we simply won’t know.

Costly? Compared to what? The entire budget for the ERS, which produces the food security reports along with many, many other studies, was $310.5 million in FY 2024. That’s a mere 0.2% of the entire USDA budget, which itself is just 3% of all federal spending. It’s a tiny price to pay for data and analyses that inform a broad swath of food, farm, and rural policies. What’s really costly is food insecurity itself. Research from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that US food insecurity levels in 2016 led to approximately $52.9 billion in unnecessary spending on health care—about 4% of total annual health care expenditures.

Politicized? The ERS has produced these reports for three decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In charging politicization, the Trump administration is yet again making an accusation that is actually a confession. Canceling studies that highlight problems you don’t want to solve—and are actively making worse—is the epitome of politicization.

And extraneous? How? Understanding trends in the ability of people to afford enough food seems deeply relevant to a healthy, functioning society. It’s relevant to the stated mission of the USDA itself: to “provide leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues based on public policy, the best available science, and effective management.”

We the people deserve the truth

According to a new report from colleagues here at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the current Trump administration carried out a mind-boggling 479 attacks on science in just its first seven months. That’s about as anti-science as you can get. And when it comes to burying inconvenient data, the intent is clear: If we don’t measure or report [FILL IN THE BLANK], we can say it isn’t happening.

To make matters worse in this case, new Wall Street Journal reporting suggests that USDA leadership is retaliating against ERS employees accused of alerting the media and the public to this study cancellation.

In its hastily issued statement last weekend, the USDA said its food insecurity reports “do nothing more than fearmonger.” But the truth is that people in this country are already afraid for the future, and with good reason.

We don’t need to have bad news withheld—we need to know exactly what problems our country is facing, and what our government is doing to solve them.

Rollins designated her deputy, Stephen Vaden, to fill in the details and implement the plan. Not coincidentally, Vaden presided over a damaging, discriminatory, and likely illegal relocation of USDA research staff in the first Trump administration in 2019, when he was the department’s General Counsel. The USDA cannot afford a repeat of that debacle.

Already, Rollins has done serious damage in just over six months. After giving a speech to employees about public service on her first day at the USDA back in February, she made a mockery of those words, canceling grants, burying science, and abetting Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in driving out more than 16,000 USDA employees. A recent White House budget request, if passed by Congress, would cut billions from the USDA, further chipping away at its ability to support farmers, protect our food supply, and ensure that everyone in this country can eat.

With this reorganization plan, Rollins seems committed to finishing the job of dismantling the department she is supposed to serve.

Of course, all of this isn’t happening in isolation. Across the government, the Trump administration has been cutting other valuable government functions indiscriminately and treating highly skilled federal employees as “waste” to be eliminated from agency balance sheets. At the Union of Concerned Scientists, we’ve written about how we’re all put at risk from efforts to fire scientists and dismantle science at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Now it’s apparently the USDA’s turn to take the hit.

After stakeholders including members of Congress from both parties reacted to the Rollins reorganization memo with surprise and alarm, she indicated that the department would accept public comments on the plan through late August. It appeared to be an afterthought, and it bypassed the normal notice and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. Senators have continued to object to the rushed and secretive nature of the process and have called for more time and transparency for public review and input. The USDA quietly extended the comment deadline to September 30, but comments from stakeholders—likely including many Big Ag corporations and lobby groups—remain hidden from public view.

Although the USDA’s invitation for feedback appears more symbolic than substantive, we submitted the following comments and are sharing them here to put our concerns on record.

August 26, 2025

The Honorable Stephen Vaden
Deputy Secretary of Agriculture
U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Ave SW
Washington, DC 20250

Dear Deputy Secretary Vaden:

On behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and its more than 600,000 supporters nationwide, I am writing to comment on the USDA reorganization plan laid out by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in Secretary Memorandum: SM 1078-015on July 24, 2025.

We urge USDA to:

1. Withdraw SM 1078-015 and suspend further staff relocations or reductions in force.
2. Engage stakeholders transparently, including Congress, farmers, and USDA employees, in any future reorganization discussions.
3. Prioritize mission-critical capacity—including science, technical assistance, and inspection—over arbitrary cuts.

Farmers, rural communities, and consumers depend on USDA’s expertise. Relocations that drive out seasoned scientists and other skilled staff weaken the department’s capacity, undermine its mission, and shortchange taxpayers. We urge you to change course before more damage is done.

UCS is a national science-based non-profit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. We combine independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices.

We value the mission of the USDA to support farmers, protect our food supply, and ensure that everyone in this country can eat, and we are troubled by the likelihood that this reorganization will undermine that mission by driving out scientists and other dedicated public servants.

Prior forced relocations of USDA staff hurt the department and its mission

In her confirmation hearing, Secretary Rollins told the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry that “[a]ll Americans are important. But the farmer . . . is the American important to all Americans.” And in a speech to USDA employees on her first day on the job, she spoke about the principles of public service that she valued in USDA employees, and that would guide her leadership of the department. However, this reorganization plan is not in keeping with those statements.

Public service requires public servants. Yet by mid-April, as many as 16,000 of those public servants—more than one in six USDA employees—had reportedly departed. Many were illegally fired, some were reinstated under court order but expected to be fired again, and after all this chaos and reported abuse, many thousands reluctantly resigned under so-called deferred resignation programs (DRPs). Despite the magnitude of these losses, the forced relocations at the heart of this reorganization plan appear designed to drive thousands more public servants out of the department.

As you know, there is ample evidence of this from your time as USDA General Counsel in the first Trump administration. In 2019, you and then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue carried out an abrupt relocation of scientists and staff at the USDA’s two science agencies—the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)—from USDA headquarters in DC to Kansas City, Missouri. Chaos ensued, as documented by a report from the USDA’s own inspector general and two others from the Government Accountability Office (here and here): the relocation violated the law, was based on faulty data, and ultimately hobbled these science agencies, as some 75% of their employees eventually left their jobs rather than uproot their lives and families. The USDA lost hundreds of experienced scientists, spending millions at the expense of taxpayers and farmers who count on USDA services, with little to no benefit.

That relocation was clearly not planned with the needs of USDA science, farmers or taxpayers in mind; it squandered millions of dollars and stalled hundreds of important studies and grants. It was a serious setback for science and taxpayers, and a disservice to the farmers, rural communities, and consumers the USDA serves. Yet now, the reorganization plan Secretary Rollins has tasked you with implementing seems to double down on this past grievous error.

Gutting the USDA’s staff (again) is bad for farmers and all Americans

Secretary Rollins told the Wall Street Journal in April that proposed job cuts would not disrupt services—for example, reporting and forecasting about the farm economy—that farmers rely on. But how can it not? Empty chairs don’t crunch data. They also do not:

• Help farmers make climate-informed planting decisions—The USDA’s Climate Hubs provide much needed regionalized research and technical assistance for farmers facing increased climate challenges. Combined with the president’s budget proposal, which would zero out funding for these centers, further staff losses would harm farmers’ efforts to increase their resilience and protect future harvests.
• Keep invasive crop pests away from US farms—As many as 700 employees of the USDA’s Plant Protection and Quarantine division had departed by mid-April. These scientists, skilled workers, and senior administrators were tasked with inspecting fruit and vegetable shipments to intercept foreign pests and acting to limit damage from pests already present on US farms and forest land.
• Detect and limit new bird flu outbreaks—The layoff of scientists, inspectors, and critical office staff in early 2025 proved to be ill-conceived and damaging for the implementation of Secretary Rollins’ strategy to curb avian influenza as several fired employees were essential to her plan and needed to be rehired. The USDA is still leading the battle against the avian influenza strain that reached the United States in 2022 and further disruptions to staffing would impair their ability to respond to new threats.
• Inspect our food for safety—By early May, 555 employees at the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service had accepted a deferred resignation offer. These highly trained public servants were responsible for ensuring the safety of our meat, poultry, and egg products through inspections at slaughtering and packaging establishments.

Just as with the administration’s dangerous cuts to public health and medical research, all of this amounts to self-sabotage. Secretary Rollins herself seemed, albeit belatedly, to understand that when she sent urgent emails in April to some employees who had accepted, or were considering, early resignation under the latest DRP, asking them to reconsider.

With the current reorganization memo, the Secretary seems to be reversing course again and indicating that maintaining mission-critical staff is not a priority of the administration.

Conclusion

US farmers and consumers already face substantial uncertainty as a result of global trade chaos, worker deportations, rising costs for farm inputs and food, and a climate crisis that the administration seems determined to deny. As we have noted above, too many USDA scientists and staff have already been driven from their important jobs helping farmers and the public navigate these challenges.

The USDA can ill afford another exodus of talented public servants. Further losses will undermine the agency’s ability to provide vital programs and technical support to farmers and rural communities who need them, at a time when their ability to stay afloat is already strained. We urge USDA to change course.

Sincerely,

Karen Perry Stillerman
Deputy Director, Food and Environment Program
Union of Concerned Scientists

But if there has been depressingly little political will to fix the pollution problem to date, just imagine what will happen if future dead zones aren’t even measured. With the Trump administration’s ongoing decimation of federal science agencies, that’s exactly what could happen.

Tracking a fertilizer-fueled dead zone that won’t die

The annual Gulf dead zone forecast and measurement are part of a project to track progress toward a commonsense goal that the US government, states, and Tribes have agreed to, at least in principle, since 1997. As I wrote on this blog almost exactly a year ago:

Government agencies at the federal, state, and Tribal levels, led by the US Environmental Protection Agency, came together in 1997 to establish the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force (HTF) with the mission of reducing the effects of hypoxia and the size, severity, and duration of the dead zone. The HTF has set a variety of pollution reduction and water quality goals over the years. But the persistent, infuriating truth is that the HTF and its member agencies are not meeting their own targets.

On the contrary, they are failing badly.

In that blog post last year, I pointed to an earlier version of the graph below as evidence of that failure: it shows the persistence of hypoxia—the lack of oxygen in the waters off the Gulf Coast—from year to year. Now here we are again talking about a dead zone that is still far too big.

The reason it’s too big, in large part, is industrial agriculture’s flagrant overuse of chemical fertilizer. That overuse is responsible for water pollution all across the Corn Belt, even before it flows downstream to the Gulf. A recently released water quality report for Polk County, Iowa, highlights agricultural pollution as a major threat to the region’s rivers, streams, and ultimately its drinking water. The Central Iowa Source Water Resource Assessment found that high nitrate levels, often exceeding federal health limits, are affecting the rivers that provide drinking water for the county and the city of Des Moines, and that the largest contributor is nitrogen fertilizer from farms.

It’s a vicious cycle: Fertilizer overuse degrades the soil and its ability to keep excess fertilizer from running off, which in turn leads to more overuse. Rinse, repeat. A recent study from Iowa State University revealed that nitrogen fertilizer application rates in the Corn Belt have been increasing by about 1.2% every year for the past three decades.

This is bad for drinking water in farm communities and downstream cities. It’s bad for wildlife and recreation in rivers and lakes. And in the Gulf, where fish, shrimp, and other creatures are killed or driven offshore by the lack of oxygen in a dead zone, it’s bad for people who make their living from those resources: A 2020 report from my team at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) found that agricultural nitrogen runoff has caused up to $2.4 billion in damages to fisheries and marine habitat every year since 1980.

Federal agencies and scientists are critical to tracking fertilizer pollution

This year’s Gulf dead zone prediction-and-measurement cycle began, as always, in the spring, when snowmelt and seasonal rains were flushing that excess fertilizer out of midwestern farm soils and into streams across the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin. This vast watershed drains all or part of 31 states (including the Corn Belt) and two Canadian provinces before flowing into the northern Gulf off the coast of Louisiana. Each May, scientists in the US Geological Survey (USGS) National Water-Quality Project sample nitrogen and phosphorus influxes at scores of monitoring stations throughout the drainage basin, and use sophisticated modeling and mapping tools to predict what these will mean for pollution levels in the Gulf later by July.

Scientists at NOAA and partners from several university research groups use those data to forecast the size, location, and duration of the Gulf dead zone likely to occur over the summer, when warming coastal water and microbial activity converge in ways that cause oxygen levels to plummet (i.e., hypoxia). In early June this year, the team predicted a hypoxic zone of “average” size. It’s something of a parlor game, in certain super-nerdy circles, to guess what US state a given year’s dead zone will be compared to—this year, the scientists threw in a twist, predicting a size of 5,574 square miles, equivalent to three Delawares! When the scientists actually conducted the research cruise to measure and map the dead zone from July 20 to 26, they found that it was smaller than predicted in area, but still “widespread and severe” and well over double the size of the goal.

As I pointed out around this time last year, it’s clear that making a dent in the dead zone is going to require new farm policies that compel the agricultural sector to stop flagrantly overusing fertilizer. But it’s also going to require that we keep tracking the problem.

How Trump’s attacks on federal agencies—and science itself—could kill the messenger

This past spring, even as USGS scientists were preparing to carry out their piece of the dead zone forecast project, Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were rampaging through federal agencies, creating havoc that exceeded even my pre-inauguration expectations. In April, they terminated leases for the USGS Water Data Centers, among other office closures. Moreover, reporting in May indicated that as many as 1,000 USGS employees would be laid off in June. Court orders paused layoff plans at many agencies, but they appear likely to move forward soon. It is unclear if there will be personnel to staff the monitoring stations by next year.

Then there’s NOAA. My colleagues in the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS recently compiled evidence of the Trump regime’s campaign to destroy federal science in its first six months. Among federal science agencies, they found that NOAA has faced some of the most destructive attacks. From the report:

NOAA, the nation’s foremost climate science agency, has faced reckless firing of staff, budget cuts, and slashed resources for climate research, satellite programs, data, and modeling. Under Department of Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s watch, the agency’s weather forecasting and climate monitoring capabilities are being undermined and many National Weather Service offices are dangerously understaffed—undercutting critical resources that communities, first responders, farmers, mariners, businesses, and local decisionmakers rely on to protect lives, infrastructure, and economic activity. Critical NOAA data and tools are also being discontinued, including snow and ice data products and climate.gov, a free public portal for essential information on climate science and impacts.

Ditto for the annual Gulf measurement, which is led by Louisiana scientists using a NOAA research vessel, equipment, and funding. It’s one of many important services the agency provides—along with climate science and monitoring, hurricane forecasting, fisheries research, and more—that is now at risk. Staff losses at NOAA between January and May have been dramatic, and President Trump’s proposed FY26 budget for NOAA calls for even deeper cuts.

Congress—which holds the power of the purse—has just begun the process of negotiating the FY26 budget. While it’s promising that a Senate committee recently repudiated the Trump NOAA budget, substantial damage has already been done and we are a long way from agreement on an appropriations bill.

You can tell Congress to protect NOAA from dangerous budget cuts by taking action here.

Meanwhile, the Hypoxia Task Force led by the Environmental Protection Agency may be in disarray, and academic partners who have been critical to tracking the Gulf dead zone could also have difficulty carrying out their work in the years ahead. US universities everywhere are feeling the effects of the Trump regime’s war on science. The team that made the Gulf dead zone prediction includes scientists at four US universities—Louisiana State University, the University of Michigan, North Carolina State University, and William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science—along with Canada’s Dalhousie University. Federal grants have been a critical funding source for many institutions of higher education—in 2024, for example, federal grants reportedly accounted for 57% of the University of Michigan’s $2 billion overall research budget.

Will anyone still have resources for important work like tracking agriculture’s contribution to water quality and dead zones next spring and summer? How will researchers, farmers, fishers, and the public get an accurate sense of the impact fertilizer overuse and pollution is having on our waterways and the Gulf? And how can we hope to hold our government or Big Ag accountable for setting goals that will shrink the dead zone?

Decimating funding for research and public science isn’t just about saving a few bucks—it’s about stripping us of the tools that allow us to understand the full scope of the challenges we face, to advocate for evidence-based policy solutions, and to hold the powerful accountable for the harm they continue to cause. I hope that next summer, when another dead zone will surely bloom in the Gulf, we will at least know about it.

But Rollins, the Trump administration, and Elon Musk’s DOGE aren’t going to protect us from bird flu or rising consumer prices. Instead, by catering to billionaires and corporate interests, decimating federal agencies, relentlessly denying and attacking science, and refusing to learn lessons from the last pandemic, they are threatening to make this and many other problems much, much worse.

Linked to industrial agriculture, bird flu has no simple fixes

HPAI is a zoonotic disease, an infectious illness that can be transmitted between animals and humans. There are many such diseases, notably Ebola (now spreading ominously in Uganda) and the coronavirus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic, along with various bird and swine flu variants. Experts describe HPAI as a dynamic virus because it mutates frequently and circulates within and between a wide variety of animal species, including wild and domesticated birds and cats, dairy and beef cattle, rats, and many other mammals.

The latest variant of the virus that causes HPAI was first detected in wild birds in eastern Canada in December 2021. It was diagnosed for the first time in a commercial poultry facility a few months later and has since been detected in poultry in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. As of March 11, variants categorized as H5 have affected more than 166 million chickens, ducks, and other poultry. The virus has also spread in dairy cows, with confirmed cases in nearly 1,000 dairy herds across 17 states. More than 80 domestic cats, a particularly vulnerable species, have been sickened, many apparently through contaminated raw pet food. There have been 70 confirmed (and seven probable) human cases in the United States, and one death.

Raising food animals like chickens and dairy cows in overcrowded industrial conditions heightens the risk of disease outbreaks of all kinds, including HPAI. More than 81% of US egg-laying hens live in flocks of 30,000 or more birds, with the largest barns housing hundreds of thousands of hens under a single roof. These indoor facilities aren’t impervious to wild birds, mice, or other animals, and infections spread quickly in crowded conditions. Climate-driven changes to migratory bird patterns and industrial poultry’s encroachment on critical waterfowl habitat in places like the Chesapeake Bay and California’s Central Valley may also be increasing the risk of transmission between wild and domesticated birds. When outbreaks on poultry farms are detected, the quickest way to stop them is to cull (or slaughter) entire flocks, an expensive and imperfect response, and workers can still be sickened in the meantime—most of the confirmed human cases of avian influenza since 2024 have been in poultry and dairy workers.

The Rollins “plan” is incoherent and contradictory

So what’s the solution? In her second week on the job, Rollins claimed to have it, laying out her plan in a February 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed. The piece is behind a paywall, but this excerpt conveys the gist of it:

The Agriculture Department will invest up to $1 billion to curb this crisis and make eggs affordable again. We are working with the Department of Government Efficiency to cut hundreds of millions of dollars of wasteful spending. We will repurpose some of those dollars by investing in long-term solutions to avian flu, which has resulted in about 166 million laying hens being culled since 2022.

Rollins specified that $500 million would be dedicated to “helping U.S. poultry producers implement gold-standard biosecurity measures,” and that the USDA’s Wildlife Biosecurity Assessments program—launched by the Biden administration in 2023 as a four-state pilot to consult with commercial poultry producers about avian flu risks—would be offered “at no cost to all commercial egg-laying chicken farms.” She also pledged “up to $100 million in research and development of vaccines and therapeutics” for laying hens (though vaccination creates challenges in exporting to countries that don’t allow it). To address egg prices in the short term, she said the administration would pursue temporary egg import options and seek to remove “unnecessary regulatory burdens on egg producers,” specifically, California’s cage-free requirement, long a target of Big Ag.

Essentially, the plan doubles down on global industrial egg production. Or does it? Just three days after her op-ed ran, Rollins was on Fox & Friends suggesting that consumers keep backyard chickens for eggs. Critics panned that suggestion, and for good reasons. Most US consumers live in urban or suburban homes and apartments (what backyard??) and few of us have experience raising poultry. Moreover, backyard chickens kept in the open without training or biosecurity measures are uniquely vulnerable to HPAI infection from wild birds and transmitting the disease to people, making this not just a non-solution but a potential way to worsen the problem at hand.

An anti-science, pro-Big Ag administration can’t be trusted to solve this problem

It’s almost impossible to see how the measures Secretary Rollins has laid out will solve the problem. But more than that, there’s plenty of reason to believe that the Trump administration will make it worse. That’s because the administration has shown itself, in just its first couple of months, to be a deadly combination plate of anti-science and pro-industrial agriculture, with a side of absolute chaos.

Even in this anti-science administration, Rollins’ brand of science denial is egregious. Even before she was confirmed, I could see that in her record of climate denial. Then came this stunning exchange in her responses to written questions from senators considering her nomination in February:

Question: Do you believe that climate change presents a threat to American farmers and ranchers? If so, how?

Answer: We all know the climate changes throughout the year, but the cause and solutions are not widely understood or defined.

Oof. This doesn’t sound like someone we can trust to evaluate science and make decisions on any important topic, including the safety of our food supply. And Rollins’ anti-science views are all the more concerning when Elon Musk’s DOGE is also busy decimating the USDA and its ranks of actual scientists with illegal firings, harassment, and general chaos. Recall that DOGE last month “accidentally” fired staff working in various USDA agencies working on the response to bird flu before “trying” to hire them back.

Meanwhile, Rollins’ USDA is on track to be populated by Big Ag execs, a concerning proposition consistent with the Trump administration’s you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours approach to Big Oil and Big Tech. As the Union of Concerned Scientists has shown, the agribusiness industry wields enormous policy clout through its lobbying, regardless of who controls the White House or Congress. In the first Trump administration, the USDA’s leadership was stacked with former employees of Dow, the Corn Refiners Association, and other agribusiness heavy hitters, and the pattern seems to be repeating. Some of the same industry characters are cycling back into the USDA in bigger jobs than they had before: junk food lobbyist Kailee Tkacz was installed as Rollins’ chief of staff, while pesticide executive Scott Hutchins has been put forward for the USDA’s chief scientist role he was nominated for (but never confirmed) in 2018.  

Of the many lessons we can take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, one is that the highly consolidated corporate controllers of our food system will jump at the chance to boost their profits while deflecting any blame for the harm they cause. The meat and poultry industry, led by Tyson Foods, lobbied the first Trump administration to keep “essential” workers on processing lines during the pandemic and lied to their workers about the risks, even as infections spread and hundreds of workers died. Then the meat processors and other food companies took advantage of pandemic disruption to raise prices and record billions in profits.

Now, as we stare down a bird flu crisis, the industrial egg industry may take center stage. By early 2023, the largest egg company was already cashing in on flu-driven shortages, with profits surging seven-fold, and a new report suggests that Cal-Maine and others may be jacking up prices. The Justice Department is investigating.

But while egg prices and related hand waving from the USDA have received a lot of attention, let’s not forget that HPAI is first and foremost a looming public health crisis. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), not the USDA, is charged with protecting people from diseases including HPAI, which means we’re relying on HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to make good public health decisions. That is not reassuring at all, given his anti-science stance on vaccination and recent echoing of fringe theories on the growing measles outbreak.  

Bottom line: The idea that the Trump administration will be the ones to fix the nation’s long-simmering bird flu problem is laughable. Or it would be, if the situation weren’t so deadly serious.

The mass firing of inspectors general was illegal

First, let’s recap what happened with the IGs, and why it was bad (which is to say, illegal) on its face.

Less than a week into President Trump’s second term, the media reported that he had fired IGs from at least 17 agencies. He claimed this was “a very common thing to do” but, in fact, the abrupt mass firing of these independent watchdogs—whose role is to identify and investigate potential fraud, corruption, and other wrongdoing in government agencies—is neither common nor lawful. A president can fire an IG but, according to the Inspector General Act of 1978 (updated in 2022), this requires 30 days’ written notice to Congress spelling out “the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal.” That didn’t happen here; instead, the IGs reportedly received an email from the White House indicating that their jobs were being terminated immediately “due to changing priorities.”

Recognizing the illegality of the move, IG Hannibal “Mike” Ware of the Small Business Administration, who also leads the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) and had received a White House email himself, shot back a reply indicating that CIGIE “[did] not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss Presidentially Appointed, Senate Confirmed Inspectors General.” On that basis, at least one of the affected IGs, the USDA’s Phyllis Fong, refused to comply and instead went to work as usual the following week. In so doing, she became one of the first government employees in the new administration (though not the last) to be physically escorted from her office.

The Congressional Research Service subsequently wrote:

President Trump’s January 2025 action appears to be a direct challenge to the enforceability of Congress’s removal procedures under the IG Act. If this matter is litigated, the executive branch may seek to curtail Congress’s options to control even procedural requirements for removals. A judicial decision limiting Congress’s authority to impose such rules could substantially impact fundamental oversight of agency programs, spending, and staff.

The matter is indeed being litigated. Eight IGs, including Fong, filed suit February 12 to reverse their dismissals. While a judge refused to immediately reinstate the IGs, the suit is proceeding and Senate Democrats have weighed in with a court brief supporting the IGs, whose work serves Congress as well as their agencies.

The USDA’s inspector general had taken on Trump and Musk

It’s unclear why Trump wanted to remove so many IGs all at once. No one (not even this legendary question answerer) knows for sure, because again, no written justification was submitted. I’m guessing it was because he didn’t want them getting in the way of the wide-ranging illegal power grab he was planning. But when it comes to individual IGs like the USDA’s Fong, there may also be something else going on, a combination of payback and protection of Musk’s business interests.

The possible payback? Well, Fong is long-serving, having been appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush, so she has faced off against Trump wrongdoing before. Perhaps most notably, her office reviewed his first administration’s abrupt and chaotic relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and its National Institute of Food and Agriculture from Washington, DC, to Kansas City, MO. The move decimated these science agencies, causing half their staffs to quit, taking with them invaluable experience and expertise. In a 2019 report, Fong and her office concluded the relocation was likely illegal, in that it violated a law that prohibits spending money on agency reorganizations without approval from congressional appropriators (a determination echoed by the Government Accountability Office in 2023). That probably didn’t sit well with Team Trump.

And the possible protection for Musk? It turns out that Fong’s office was also investigating one of his companies, the $5 billion brain implant startup Neuralink, a fact that received sparse media attention at the time of Fong’s removal. According to a 2022 Reuters article:

The federal probe, which has not been previously reported, was opened in recent months by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General at the request of a federal prosecutor, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The probe, one of the sources said, focuses on violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and test some animals.

The article went on to say that Neuralink employees were growing increasingly concerned about animal welfare at the company. Employees said that pressure from CEO Musk to speed up development had led to “botched experiments” requiring repeat testing and more animal deaths. These problems had also “raised questions internally about the quality of the resulting data.” Employees said Musk told workers to “imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster.”

Imagine, Elon Musk rushing a project without regard for people or data.

Neuralink has found itself under considerable regulatory scrutiny beyond the USDA IG’s probe. The company has reportedly been investigated by the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Department of Transportation. The Transportation IG was also part of the January dismissals. And just last week, FDA staff reviewing Neuralink were part of a mass civil service firing by Musk-led DOGE.

The USDA and other agencies need independent watchdogs

The IGs illegally fired by the Trump administration are already warning about the impacts of this loss of independent, nonpartisan watchdogs, who exist to root out waste and fraud and to check abuses of power in federal agencies. As the USDA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) website indicates:

USDA OIG’s work promotes economy, efficiency, and integrity in USDA programs and operations. USDA’s budget is one of the largest in the Government, and the Department’s nearly 100,000 employees run approximately 300 programs. These programs provide a wide array of services and benefits nationwide, including providing the Nation with nutrition assistance, ensuring public safety, and distributing benefits to the Nation’s farmers and producers in the wake of natural disasters.

Established in 1962, the USDA OIG recommends policies to increase the department’s efficiency and effectiveness; identifies and investigates fraud, waste, and mismanagement; reports criminal violations to the US Department of Justice (and other problems it sees to USDA leaders and Congress); operates a whistleblower hotline; and more. I just perused the USDA OIG news page and found recent releases describing successful efforts to break up a multistate dogfighting conspiracy, recoup wrongfully obtained crop insurance and farm benefits, and convict a store owner who defrauded the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, just to name a few.

As far as I can tell, Phyllis Fong was killing it. But don’t take it from me. In November 2024, Fong and her office received the Alexander Hamilton Award from her peers at CIGIE for outstanding achievements in improving the integrity, efficiency, or effectiveness of agency operations. Fong describes what led to the award as an investigation by her team that uncovered and stopped an $11.5 million scheme to defraud USDA programs intended to help Black, Hispanic, and women farmers.

I’ll also note that Fong’s OIG played an important role in watchdogging the USDA’s pandemic response starting in 2020 under the first Trump administration. With an avian influenza pandemic potentially looming—not to mention the other crises the new administration’s actions are causing—there’s a critical need for a knowledgeable, principled IG like Phyllis Fong.

As a Senate committee prepares to question Rollins at her confirmation hearing this week, they should take a hard look at her record, which includes far more anti-science rhetoric, inflammatory political statements, and ties to polluting industry than demonstrated interest and expertise in agriculture or food policy.

Rollins has virtually no farm and food policy experience

Rollins and Trump have touted the Texas farm she grew up on, her childhood participation in 4-H and Future Farmers of America, and a bachelor’s degree in agricultural development as her bona fides for the job of secretary of agriculture. But that degree is from 1994, and as far as I can tell, Rollins hasn’t spent much time thinking about agriculture, or the public policies that guide it, since then.

Instead, her resume looks like this: She pursued a law degree, worked as deputy general counsel and then policy director for then-Governor Rick Perry of Texas, and led a state-based free-market think tank that advocated for school vouchers and fossil fuel interests and against environmental safeguards. Starting in 2018, she worked in the Trump administration, first as head of the White House Office of American Innovation and then as acting director of the US Domestic Policy Council. After Trump’s re-election loss in 2020, she co-founded and led the America First Policy Institute. This anonymously funded think tank, described as Trump’s “White House in waiting,” has had so little interest in agriculture under her leadership that its website lists no staff members with relevant expertise and highlights only one issue: the misdirected concern about Chinese ownership of US farmland.

Essentially, in more than three decades, Rollins has never had a job solely focused on food and agriculture policy. No wonder her nomination came as a surprise to farm groups as well as Trump surrogates and Mar-a-Lago denizens. Senators should press her on why she wants to be the next secretary of agriculture, how she believes her background has prepared her for this challenging role, and why she thinks she is qualified.

Her anti-science climate denial and fossil fuel ties are troubling

Climate change is having increasing impacts on farming and food production. In 2022, the Biden administration and Congress took a major step to boost the resilience of US agriculture and food production, investing nearly $20 billion in incentives for farmers to adopt climate-friendly practices on farms. While some in Congress have attempted to divert this funding, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has continued to use it to empower farmers to be part of the climate solution. But the USDA’s approach to climate change could change dramatically if Brooke Rollins takes the helm.

Rollins has been described as a “climate skeptic,” but that really means that she denies the reality of climate change, its causes, and the devastating impacts that are already happening and will continue to worsen. In 2018, then-White House aide Rollins told participants at a right-wing energy conference that “we know the research of CO₂ being a pollutant is just not valid”—a perspective that is extreme even in the Trump era—and she advocated withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in the first Trump administration, a move the new administration has already taken (again) with a Day One executive order.

And while climate denial or misrepresentation is something of a religion in Trumpworld, Rollins has a particular reason to invalidate climate science and efforts to decarbonize the US economy: fossil fuels are the family business. Her husband, Mark Rollins, is the president of HKN Energy, an oil exploration company operating in Iraqi Kurdistan and sister company to Hillwood Energy, a Texas-based, Perot family-owned oil and gas company. (She also has ties to the CEO of the Fertilizer Institute, which represents an industry that is highly dependent on fossil fuels and highly polluting in its own right.)

Climate denial and meddling with science at the USDA was a big problem in the last Trump administration, when a major report on climate and agriculture was buried, an unqualified non-scientist was (unsuccessfully) nominated for USDA chief scientist, and two science agencies were decimated through an abrupt relocation from Washington, DC, to Kansas City, MO. The Senate should ask Rollins if she intends to repeat that shameful history.

She promotes hateful and dangerous conspiracy theories

Rollins has a lengthy track record of divisive, dangerous, and hateful rhetoric. In the press and on social media during the Biden administration, she labeled federal employees the “deep state,” characterized federal law enforcement as the “political police of the regime,” and claimed the government would “come for you and me next” after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago to recover stolen classified documents in 2022.

She has characterized social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and women’s marches as inherently violent and leveled a laundry list of misdirected allegations, falsely accusing Democrats and “the left” of attempting to assassinate candidate Trump, seeking to jail their political opponents, and engaging in election manipulation, insurrection, and “the slow overthrow of the Constitution.” And during the 2024 campaign, she called on Trump voters to “become ungovernable,” an appeal that carried echoes of the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has more on Rollins’ dangerous and incendiary rhetoric and worldview.

Given her apparent antipathy for social justice movements, I have to wonder what Rollins thinks about the 66 recommendations made in early 2024 by the USDA Equity Commission to address a long history of racial discrimination and level the playing field for farmers of all kinds. Or whether she supports her new boss’s cruel mass deportation plans that will hurt farmworkers—and that are worrying even farmers who voted for him. Senators should ask her.

Policy questions the Senate should ask Rollins

Before they hand over the keys to the USDA, the Senate must vet Rollins thoroughly. In addition to digging into her lack of qualifications and overall unsuitability for the role at her hearing this Thursday, members of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry should ask specific questions about her intentions on a range of food and farm policy issues confronting the USDA. My colleagues and I at the Union of Concerned Scientists have prepared a detailed list of such questions, including:

• Under your leadership, how will the USDA work to protect, support, and improve access for small farms, beginning and young farmers, and other farmers who have been historically underserved and faced discrimination? How will you prioritize the unfinished work of implementing the Equity Commission’s recommendations?
• What qualifications do you believe are necessary in a candidate for assistant secretary for civil rights at the USDA? How will you improve the discrimination complaints process at the department?
• Do you acknowledge that human-caused climate change is real and is already harming farmers, and that shifts in farming practices that build healthy soil can buffer farmland from flooding and drought, making farmers and our food supply more resilient?
• Given the strong interest among US farmers in voluntary conservation practices such as use of cover crops, no-till, and techniques to prevent soil erosion, do you agree that the USDA should continue its work to support and encourage the use of such practices to help farmers build resilience against floods, drought, and extreme weather?
• How would you ensure that farm and food system workers are supported by the USDA under your leadership?

Find our full list of proposed policy questions for Rollins here. If your senator is on the committee—made up of senators from 20 states—urge them to ask Rollins one or more of these questions. Find their contact information and suggested language here.

We don’t know whether anyone or anything—the courts, Congress, principled federal employees, or public outcry—will be able to curb the worst of the intended cruelty. But many people will surely suffer, and the hardship likely won’t be limited to immigrants and their families. Because while undocumented (or unauthorized) immigrants work in many sectors in this country, they are especially overrepresented in jobs that are vital to keeping us all fed.

According to the most recent estimates by the Pew Research Center, some 11 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States in 2022. About three-quarters of those (8.3 million) were part of the nation’s labor force. The largest numbers of unauthorized immigrants resided in California, Florida, and Texas, where they made up 7%–8% of each state’s workforce. (It’s no coincidence that those three states are major agricultural states employing large numbers of farmworkers.)

Before I get into the ripple effects that mass deportation would have throughout our farm and food system, I must say this: Deporting millions of people for the crime of seeking a better life for themselves and their families in an increasingly dangerous world is morally abhorrent. The plan will likely split up families—after all, Trump aide Stephen Miller, the architect of the first Trump administration’s inhumane policy that separated thousands of children from their immigrant parents, will be at the center of the new deportation push. The administration will almost certainly return people to dangerous and desperate situations in their home countries, or even to countries where they have never lived. And deportations will have negative effects on whole communities.

In addition to being morally repugnant (and impossibly expensive), these plans would be extraordinarily damaging to a food system that relies heavily on immigrant workers, destabilizing local economies and driving up food prices for all of us.

The US food and farm system relies heavily on immigrants

Precise estimates and characterizations of the undocumented population are tricky, for obvious reasons, but we know they make up an outsize share of the food and farm workforce. In 2017, the Pew Research Center estimated that 9% of workers across the US food system, including food production and food processing, were undocumented immigrants. A 2019–2020 Department of Labor survey narrowed in on crop farmworkers and found that nearly half (44%) of the workers interviewed did not have work authorization.

While there are certainly some migrant farmworkers who travel from one location to another following the cycles of various crops, the majority of undocumented workers in the food system are “settled” workers, consistently employed at a single location. This means that in many communities, undocumented workers are neighbors, customers, and important contributors to local economies. But they are rarely treated as such, and in recent months, the Trump campaign ratcheted up anti-immigrant sentiment with its demonizing rhetoric.

Food system workers already face many dangers and injustices

By and large, unauthorized workers in the food system are filling dangerous, dirty jobs that US citizens do not want. Whether documented or not, workers across the US food and farming system are routinely subjected to a litany of hazards. Workers who plant and pick fruits and vegetables face extreme heat—which kills farmworkers every year in Danger Season—coupled with toxic pesticide exposures and wildfire smoke. Dairy workers are at risk of injury from contact with large animals, slipping on wet surfaces in milking parlors, falling into manure pits, and infection with H5N1 avian flu. Workers in large poultry-growing operations similarly face a growing risk of bird flu infection. And workers in meat and poultry processing plants have some of the highest risks of severe occupational injury, including repetitive motion and ergonomic injuries, cuts from knives wielded in close quarters, and exposures to hazardous chemicals.

Communities in which food and farm workers live often have unsafe drinking water polluted with pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, and manure, as well as other hazards. These workers also perversely face high rates of hunger and food insecurity.

Low wages are the norm for workers in today’s highly consolidated food system, which was built on a long history of exploitation. But for undocumented workers in this system, there is an additional element of fear every day on the job. Because of their tenuous legal status, they are more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in the form of wage and safety violations, sexual harassment and violence, and more.

Farmworkers and their organizations have been building collective power to expose these injustices and advocate for solutions, and in the last Congress workers and their allies identified 10 bills that would lead to greater dignity and safety. But the incoming Trump administration promises a different future, beginning with the threat of mass deportation. Even if they are not deported, increasing fear in response to violent anti-immigrant rhetoric from Trump and his allies may drive undocumented food system workers underground.

And then what?

The terrifying early days of the COVID-19 pandemic provide the answer to this question.

When food workers are harmed, we all lose

In the spring of 2020, many food workers were deemed essential. While others of us stayed home, supermarket employees, food delivery workers, and food processing workers put themselves at risk of infection, grave illness, and death, every day. In a way, the pandemic merely exposed and exacerbated the hazards and injustices many of these workers already faced. And when these workers got sick with COVID, we saw immediate impacts, especially in meat and poultry plants, which struggled to operate without enough healthy workers.

In 2020, changes in food demand, as restaurants and schools shut down, caused crops to rot in the fields and farmers to dump milk and eggs they couldn’t sell. In 2025, a lack of workers due to actual or threatened deportation could produce eerily similar results. Without enough people to milk the nation’s cows, pick its fruit and vegetables, and process and deliver food, supply chains could break again, wages could spike, and increased costs would almost certainly be passed along to consumers in the form of higher supermarket prices.

It is ironic that a candidate whose team campaigned (albeit fraudulently) on the price of eggs may, in his hateful zeal to rid the country of immigrants, cause a spike in the price of milk. But here we are.

The primary perpetrators of this bullying effort are tech billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-leaders of the dubious, Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE isn’t actually a department, though it is unclear exactly what it is. Its real goal doesn’t appear to be government efficiency so much as taking a sledgehammer to government, including federal science agencies, using proposed methods that seem designed to create maximum chaos.

Media reports suggest that DOGE now has a staff of at least 50, who paid Musk-owned X for the privilege of applying for their jobs and now work out of offices leased by Musk-owned SpaceX and communicate secretly via an encrypted messaging platform. DOGE and transition team representatives have begun meeting with staff of actual federal departments (and reportedly asking them who they voted for in November). Journalists and commentators have raised a litany of problems with this approach: conflicts of interest and lack of transparency, legal issues with creating government bodies outside of established rules and procedures, how DOGE staff will be hired and paid, the accuracy of predictions of budget savings DOGE could achieve, and the inappropriateness of billionaires shaping our public science agenda.

With all that as grim context, let’s look at the bullying tactics themselves, of which there are at least four.

1. Promoting mis- and disinformation about government workers and federal science

Since buying X, Elon Musk has used the social media platform to spread disinformation, according to civil liberties experts, European Union officials, and even Musk’s own AI. Much of that was focused on last November’s election, but Musk and DOGE have since turned their efforts to making false claims about government spending and generally promoting the misconception that the federal government is bloated with civil servants whose work isn’t needed.

In fact, the federal workforce is smaller than it was in 1945 (or in 1990 under Republican president George H.W. Bush), and it even grew slightly during President Trump’s first term:

While the real number of federal employees has remained steady for decades, as a percentage of the US population and the nation’s overall labor force, the federal workforce has shrunk substantially. In 2024, federal employees (excluding the Postal Service) represented just 1.5% of total civilian employment. At $293 billion in 2024, federal workers’ salaries and benefits were just 4.3% of the total federal budget. Federal employee compensation is dwarfed by payments to government contractors, which amounted to $759.2 billion in 2023. And while Trump has long tried to brand the federal workforce as a DC institution, just 15% of federal employees work in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, with the rest—the vast majority—working outside the region, in offices across the country.    

Finally, Musk, Ramaswamy, and DOGE probably don’t want you to know that some of the largest categories of federal jobs are dedicated to medicine and public health, engineering, and various scientific disciplines—professions that the public largely trusts to keep us healthy and safe. The following graph from the Pew Research Center puts this in perspective.

Nevertheless, unserious commentators and unscrupulous politicians have a long history of targeting publicly funded science and scientists by taking their work out of context and painting it as silly and wasteful, and we should expect more of that from President-elect Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy. But the truth is that publicly funded science in the public interest is vital to the nation, and that science that might sound weird can result in important breakthroughs for people’s health and well-being. (Lizard spit, anyone?)

2. Harassing individual employees online

Sowing disinformation and distrust of federal civil servants is just a prelude, making it easier to take the next step: vilifying individual federal employees and setting them up for harassment.

We’ve seen this in the past—consider the case of climate scientist Michael Mann, who as an employee of public universities in the late 1990s and early 2000s was subjected to hate mail, threats, defamation, and spurious legal attacks from anti-science forces allied with the fossil fuel industry. Early last year, Mann won a judgment against his defamers, but that hasn’t stopped threats against climate scientists. And now, we’re seeing Musk and DOGE use similar tactics against individual federal scientists.

Shortly after the election last November, Musk reposted tweets revealing the names and titles of four people (all women, by the way) holding climate-related federal positions that the original poster called “fake jobs.” Internet hordes jumped in with a barrage of harassment and threats. It was so bad that one of the women, an official at the US International Development Finance Corporation who holds degrees in engineering, business, and water science from Oxford and MIT and whose work focuses on helping countries increase their climate resilience through diversification of agriculture, shut down her social media accounts.

Expect more of this as well.

3. Making many government jobs harder

Another way DOGE is looking to create hardship for civil servants is by forcing them back into the office full-time, ending established remote and flexible work arrangements in the hope that many will quit. Never mind that as recently as May 2024, federal employees eligible for flexible telework options were already spending more than 60% of their time in the office, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Like many federal employees and millions of others across the country, I have worked mostly remotely since the COVID-19 shutdown in early 2020. Remote and hybrid workers know how these arrangements can improve work-life balance, making workers happier and more productive. This isn’t just opinion, though—data bear out the benefits for employers, including around recruitment of new employees. And this is how you know that more efficient and effective government isn’t really the end goal for Musk, Ramaswamy, or their DOGE allies in Congress.

4. Making some government jobs impossible

Similarly, the DOGE crew are looking to force out additional federal employees by moving their jobs hundreds or thousands of miles away from where they live. Specifically, self-appointed Senate DOGE Caucus leader Senator Joni Ernst has proposed to relocate 30% percent of the DC-based federal workforce to other parts of the country, notwithstanding that, as above, most federal workers already work outside of DC.

We’ve seen this movie before. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue carried out an abrupt and disingenuous relocation of scientists and staff at the USDA’s two science agencies—the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture—from USDA headquarters in DC to Kansas City. Chaos ensued, as documented by a report from the USDA inspector general and two others from the Government Accountability Office (here and here): the relocation violated the law, was based on faulty data, and ultimately hobbled these science agencies, driving out more than half their employees, reducing their ability to produce timely research reports on important topics, and increasing the processing time for research grants.

Why this matters—and what you can do about it

We all deserve to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and have confidence that our food and medicine is safe. We deserve to know that our government is using science to protect people, homes, and critical infrastructure from natural disasters. Every day, scientists, experts, and other civil servants across the federal government get up and do the hard work to ensure that happens—and to put forward the best available science and evidence so it can inform the public policies and safeguards that protect us all.

When bullies attack science and harass federal scientists, they are fundamentally threatening the health and safety of us all. That’s not right, and we shouldn’t accept it.

The good news is that there are things you can do to stand up for federal science and scientists. If you are a federal scientist or other civil servant (or know somebody who is), we have compiled a list of resources to help navigate the Trump administration. We are also actively working to ensure that Trump’s cabinet nominees are asked during their confirmation hearings about their plans for protecting science and scientific integrity—urge your senator to do so today.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we all need to remember—I’m reminding myself here, too—not to overreact to the inflammatory statements, outrageous executive orders, and other things DOGE and the Trump administration will likely say or do over the coming weeks and months. They hope to stun us into silence and inaction starting on Day One, but more often than not, it will likely be empty bluster and rhetoric or merely the start of a long and drawn-out legal or policy fight that will take months or years to resolve.

So don’t fall for their shock-and-awe campaign. If we prepare for a long fight and keep standing up for science together, we can ensure that, ultimately, the bullies don’t win.

This is the worst kind of déjà vu.

I was working on food and agriculture policy here at the Union of Concerned Scientists back when Donald Trump assumed the presidency and began blowing up the federal government in 2017. I expect more of the same (and worse) this time around. And while attention has rightfully been focused on candidate Trump’s threats to immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, women’s health, climate action, science-based policymaking, the rule of law, and the democratic process, his return to power also promises to wreak havoc on our food system.

Trump 2.0 will be as bad as you think for farmers and eaters

We don’t have to look very hard to find clues to what Trump-ifying the farm and food sectors would look like. We’ve seen this movie before, and I wrote a whole report documenting how, in just the first year of his first administration, President Trump’s US Department of Agriculture (USDA) sidelined science, undermined key public health and safety protections, and prioritized the interests of large agribusiness companies over the public interest, betraying farmers, consumers, and rural communities.

But now there’s also Project 2025, which (despite the candidate’s denials) was authored by Trump insiders and is widely believed to be a blueprint for his next administration. Taken together, the signposts point to these likely outcomes:

• A mass deportation initiative that will target many farmworkers. Deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants—and even seeking to remove legal immigrants and denaturalize US citizens—was one of Trump’s most oft-repeated promises on the campaign trail. In addition to being morally repugnant and impossibly expensive, these plans would be extraordinarily damaging to a food system that relies heavily on immigrant workers, destabilizing local economies and driving up food prices for all of us.
• Ill-conceived tariffs and a new trade war. Trump’s obsession with tariffs promises to raise consumer prices, increase farmers’ costs, and reignite the agricultural trade wars that marked his first term. That trade chaos hit US commodity farmers hard, and the subsequent bailouts to assuage rural anger left taxpayers footing a staggering $28 billion bill.
• Fresh attacks on USDA food assistance and healthy eating programs. President Trump’s first term was marked by multiple attempts by the administration and its congressional allies to restrict access to food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) and school meal programs. We’re likely to see new, Project 2025-driven attacks on these programs and on health-improving dietary guidelines, with negative impacts for urban and rural communities alike.
• Abandonment of new USDA antidiscrimination policies. For generations, US farmers of color have faced discrimination from the USDA and other institutions. The Biden administration reckoned deeply with that racist history and its present-day implications, establishing an Equity Commission to guide future USDA policies and directing $2 billion in financial assistance (from the Inflation Reduction Act it championed) to farmers who had been harmed. On the heels of an openly racist and hate-filled Trump campaign, there is no question that this progress is now at risk.
• Cuts to highly effective, in-demand farm conservation programs. Our industrial model of agriculture is environmentally damaging and has created massive soil erosion and water pollution problems. USDA conservation programs are popular with farmers and effective at reducing pollution, but they are underfunded. Project 2025 seeks to double down on President Trump’s abysmal first-term environmental record, and derides USDA attention to the environment as “ancillary.”
• Erasing climate action from the USDA’s mission. While the Biden administration prioritized climate action, President-elect Trump still proudly calls climate change a hoax. His first-term war on climate action included burying a USDA climate response plan. The Project 2025 authors have egged him on and called on the next agriculture secretary to eliminate all official references to transforming our food and farm system and to “remove obstacles that hinder food production,” which in their view includes any attention to agriculture’s climate impact.
• Letting Big Ag corporations make the rules. The “revolving door” of lobbyists-turned-policymakers spins in every administration, and giant agribusiness corporations and interest groups spend millions lobbying whoever is in charge. But Big Ag found an especially willing ear in President Trump’s USDA and his ethically-challenged agriculture secretary. Expect more of the same. (In a weird twist, there’s also some possibility, however remote, for better outcomes. In the waning days of the campaign, we saw suggestions that Trump had “promised” his rival-turned-surrogate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a role in his administration’s food, health, and agriculture agencies. Candidate Trump said he intended to “let [RFK Jr.] go wild on the food,” whatever that means, while RFK Jr. made a video in which he espouses positions on Big Ag and regenerative farming that I actually agree with. But I’ll believe it when I see it.)

It’s a grim picture, but we’re ready to fight

Before President-elect Trump even takes office, the outgoing Biden administration should shore up the USDA, its staff and scientists, and the myriad programs they administer that are making people’s lives better. At UCS, we’ll be pressing President Biden and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to

• Secure and quickly distribute funding for the administration’s climate-focused conservation investments and policies. Despite efforts in Congress to claw back this funding, the USDA has spent a substantial portion of the nearly $20 billion in conservation funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (including nearly all the dollars allocated to the highly effective Conservation Stewardship Program in fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024). Secretary Vilsack’s USDA should move quickly to get as much remaining funding as possible out the door before January 20. And they should do everything they can to make sure that members of Congress, the new administration, and the public understand these investments have been good for farmers and our future and shouldn’t be undermined.
• Fulfill USDA’s commitment to end discrimination and promote equity. While Secretary Vilsack has made progress on this front, there is much more to do. The USDA Equity Commission’s February 2024 recommendations provide the roadmap, and the department should fulfill as many of them as it can before the end of the Biden administration. Creating an Office of Small Farms is one good place to devote energy before the change of administration.

Defending science and scientists is paramount

President-elect Trump has promised to fire government scientists and dismantle science agencies; this matters because when science is sidelined people get hurt. In his first term, his administration made multiple attempts to muzzle USDA scientists and science agencies. Science is key to good policymaking for agriculture, food systems, and rural development, and the first Trump administration did serious damage to the USDA’s science agencies with a forced relocation of staff at the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture that caused substantial brain drain.

President-elect Trump has a well-documented aversion to science, and on the campaign trail this fall he called federal employees “crooked people” who are “destroying this country,” so you can bet his next administration will look for ways to remove more of them from the USDA and other agencies.

President Biden has been working to shore up the federal workforce to prevent civil servants from mass firing. There may not be much more that his administration can do, but they should explore all options to protect scientists and staff at the USDA and across the government.

When President-elect Trump takes office in January, UCS will be ready on day 1 to expose his attacks and defend science. Attacks on scientists are almost always attacks designed to benefit polluters and wealthy corporations who put profits over the health of our communities, our kids, and our planet. UCS is mobilizing immediately with the 17,000 scientists in our network and with partners to launch an emergency campaign to fight attacks on federal science and scientists.

We’ll be watching for and ready to respond to

• Signs of corporate capture at the USDA, starting with nominees for agriculture secretary and other key positions—like the role of USDA chief scientist, for which we beat back an appallingly unqualified nominee in 2018.
• Attacks on science-based policies and USDA data. We will fight back against disappearing data, silenced scientists, suppressed and censored scientific studies, and other assaults on the science and scientists who keep us safe every day.
• Rollbacks of USDA climate and equity policies and investments. We will defend the safeguards that protect the health and safety of people across the United States, especially those overburdened by pollution.

I won’t sugarcoat it: The coming months will be extraordinarily challenging and dispiriting. But we can make a difference, because while the incoming Trump administration will be better prepared this time, so will we.

We know that chaos and disinformation are the playbook, and we can be ready to act—to speak out against unfair policies, to defend science, to organize locally, to use our voices to call out and challenge disinformation. It will be hard, and it will be draining, but it will be critical to protecting our food system, safeguarding science, and defending our democracy.

How big will the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone” be this summer? I don’t know the answer, but it’s a perennial question this time of year, after spring rains have flushed excess fertilizer from Midwestern farm fields downriver into a warming Gulf, which encourages algae to bloom and then die, sucking oxygen from the water. In June, scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that this year’s resulting dead zone would be larger than average, covering an area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut. We’ll know in the next week or two if they were right.

In the meantime, I can think of three better questions: Why is there a dead zone in the Gulf anyway? What are policymakers doing about it? And what will it take to actually solve the problem?

Let’s tackle those questions one at a time.

Why is there a dead zone in the Gulf?

The scientific term for what’s going on in the Gulf this summer, and every summer, is eutrophication, a process in which too much nitrogen and phosphorus in a body of water set off a biological chain reaction. This results in hypoxia, a condition in which there is so little oxygen in the water that it can’t support aquatic life. In the Gulf, much of the problem stems from fertilizer runoff from upstream farmland.

A particularly large dead zone in 2024 could be the product of a perfect storm of three trends:

• Excessive fertilizer use – Fertilizer use on US farms tripled between 1960 and 1980 and has remained high ever since. According to the latest Census of Agriculture, commercial fertilizer products were applied on 236.8 million acres of farmland in 2022. But it’s not just that farmers are applying a lot of fertilizer—rather, it’s that they are applying far more than their crops can actually use. Globally, researchers have estimated that only around 35% of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to crops is taken up by the plants it is meant to feed, with the rest being “excess.” The United States is estimated to be responsible for nearly 11% of that excess nitrogen.

• Shortsighted farmland management practices – How crops and soil on farms are managed has a big impact on what happens to all that wasted fertilizer. The predominant practices across much of the US Midwest include growing just a few kinds of crops, with a heavy emphasis on a short-season annual crop (corn). Soil is left bare after the fall harvest, and many farmers, encouraged by Big Ag chemical sellers, apply fertilizer to those bare fields. To make matters worse, a system of underground drainage infrastructure known as “drainage tile,” used across the Mississippi River watershed to prevent waterlogged fields, has the additional effect of funneling unused fertilizer directly into waterways and down to the Gulf.

• Heavier rainfall patterns driven by climate change – Scientists began measuring the dead zone in 1985, and its size has varied with the weather conditions. Years that have featured particularly rainy spring and early summer weather along the Mississippi River have tended to produce the largest dead zones, while dry years see less fertilizer flushed downstream. 2024 has been particularly wet in the Midwest, but climate change is fueling both heavy rainfall and droughts, and we can expect more of this ping-ponging. A 2021 analysis on rainfall patterns and runoff in one Illinois county showed how climate-driven extreme rains wash ever more fertilizer into rivers and ultimately the Gulf.

The dead zone in 2023 was smaller than average, but really, what does that even mean anymore? Even an average dead zone—a vast expanse of low-oxygen ocean water that annually reaches the size of a small US state such as Rhode Island (as in 2020), Delaware (2018) or New Jersey (the largest ever recorded in 2017)—is not okay. It’s damaging to the Gulf ecosystem and the people in the region who depend on fishing and seafood for their livelihoods. A 2021 UCS analysis put a price tag on that damage: up to $2.4 billion every year since 1980.

What are policymakers doing about the Gulf dead zone?

The simple answer to that question is: not nearly enough. Government agencies at the federal, state, and tribal levels, led by the US Environmental Protection Agency, came together in 1997 to establish the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force (HTF) with the mission of  reducing the effects of hypoxia and the size, severity, and duration of the dead zone. The HTF has set a variety of pollution reduction and water quality goals over the years. But the persistent, infuriating truth is that the HTF and its member agencies are not meeting their own targets.

On the contrary, they are failing badly.

As shown in the graph below, only once in the last 39 years has the Gulf dead zone been measured and found to be smaller than the current goal.

The problem is, governments haven’t taken a level of policy action sufficient to achieve the target outcome. It’s a situation that reminds me of the classic Seinfeld car rental episode: It’s not enough to take the reservation set the pollution reduction goal, you have to hold the reservation meet the pollution reduction goal.

And it’s not just the Gulf that is feeling the effects of persistent fertilizer runoff. This pollution also places a heavy burden on upstream waterways and on drinking water systems across the Midwest, from rural communities in Iowa to cities like Toledo, Ohio.

To be fair, policymakers at the state and federal level have tried some things:

• USDA conservation incentives – My colleagues and I have written for years on this blog about a handful of conservation programs run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which offer financial incentives and support for farmers to adopt practices shown to improve soil health, reducing fertilizer use and runoff and generating other benefits. The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), for example, is a highly effective program that delivers $4 in returns (including the value of cleaner water) for every dollar invested, according to 2018 UCS analysis. But CSP and other programs aren’t reaching enough farmers to make a dent in the problem, even with the additional dollars Congress invested in these programs in 2022.

• Fertilizer regulations in Minnesota – Minnesota is the rare state that has tried to adopt tough fertilizer regulations to protect water resources, specifically the groundwater that provides drinking water for tens of thousands of Minnesotans. The long and winding road of the state’s Groundwater Protection Rule is chronicled here, but suffice to say that the initial proposal in 2017 ran headlong into opposition by farmers and the collection of agribusiness interests I think of as “Big Ag.” The upshot is that the final rule, which took effect in September 2020, prohibits application of nitrogen fertilizer in the fall and on frozen soils in areas vulnerable to groundwater contamination. But it was watered down and hasn’t been enough to solve the problem that communities are calling a public health crisis. The US Environmental Protection Agency notified Minnesota state agencies in November 2023 that it will intervene if the state doesn’t take stronger action. A few months later, a new bill to tax fertilizer was proposed in the state legislature, but its future is uncertain.

• Crop insurance discounts in Iowa – As a major contributor of nitrogen to the Gulf, Iowa has taken a different tack, encouraging its farmers to take a very specific step—planting cover crops in the off season between crops—to reduce water-polluting runoff. Starting with a pilot program in 2017 and continuing through this year, the state has offered a $5 per acre crop insurance discount to farmers who adopt this soil-covering strategy. The program may well have boosted the use of cover crops in the state: according to the USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture, Iowa farmers reported planting nearly 1.3 million acres of cover crops in 2022, a 33% increase over reported planting in five years earlier. But in a state with nearly 30 million total farm acres, it’s just a drop in the bucket.

At the end of the day, all these interventions haven’t been enoughto solve the problem in the Gulf and other fertilizer pollution hotspots, which we’re reminded of with every summer dead zone measurement.

What will it take to finally solve agriculture’s pollution problem?

After nearly four decades of experience with the Gulf dead zone, it should be clear that we can’t continue to rely on the same policy tools to manage fertilizer pollution and expect a different result. Instead, we should demand a new approach, one that not only helps farmers to shift their practices but also insists that they do so. This could start with addressing the ways that much of the nation’s farm policy, particularly its biggest taxpayer-funded subsidies, actually incentivize pollution.

Take the Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP): This program provides taxpayer-subsidized insurance, primarily for large-scale commodity growers, that protects farm income against everything from weather and disaster-related crop losses to crop price fluctuations. But unintentionally, the program also undercuts conservation and soil health by encouraging farmers to plant and produce as much as possible, with little regard for sustainability and resilience. UCS made a case back in 2016 that this perverse incentive is a major driver of fertilizer overuse and other polluting practices. Even the free market advocates at the R Street Institute agree, and their new explainer makes a direct connection between the FCIP—which paid nearly $12 billion in premium subsidies for farmers in 2022—and eutrophication and dead zones.  

But what if we could harness the need to insure farms against uncertainty, to both help and push them to farm more sustainably and resiliently?

There’s new support for that idea in one of the unlikeliest of places, the heart of the Corn Belt. In a surprising move in October 2023, the editorial board at the Des Moines Register made a compelling case. Citing the state’s heavily eroded soils and fertilizer-fouled waterways, the editorial board concluded:

Payment of insurance and other subsidies must be connected to farmers doing their work in a way that respects soil and water instead of treating it as a resource to be pillaged.

Whoa.

But the Register wasn’t finished. In June, noting the fact that congressional progress on a new food and farm bill was stalling, the paper issued another editorial under this head-turning banner: “Farm bill needs to be radical, demand more from farmers on conservation.” In it, the paper again pressed the case that farm policy business-as-usual, which it characterized as “ask[ing] for cooperation while dangling cash,” is woefully insufficient. The piece ends with this mic drop:

Taxpayers shell out billions to farmers in the form of crop insurance, which has become so lucrative that it incentivizes bad behavior, such as planting corn on steep slopes. So, granted, crop insurance is far from a perfect vehicle for transforming farm policy to both support farmers and safeguard our soil, water and planet. But the size of the checks issued to farmers makes it an obvious place to start. Plus, tying conservation standards to crop insurance subsidies could serve as both a carrot (paying ultra-generous subsidies to farmers who measurably reduce erosion, as an example) and a stick (making the insurance subsidy awarded for meeting conservation standards so lavish that farmers can’t afford not to reach them).

Drafting precise ways to demand more of the agriculture industry will be exacting and politically difficult work. Democrats and Republicans should get started on it now.

I wholeheartedly agree. Though it might seem radical (to use the Register’s word), it’s not far-fetched to think that with smarter policies, we could have much smaller dead zones to measure in future summers.

And therein lies a big part of the Big Ag problem: mergers and acquisitions across the food and agriculture industry have enabled big companies that touch every corner of our food system to keep getting bigger and more powerful.

Big=bad when it comes to corporate power over food

Big isn’t always bad. But when a few companies grow so large that they control the market for goods and services we consider essential, that is bad. We’ve seen this in the digital technology sector. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta have all been accused of using their market power to undermine competition and limit consumers’ choices. In a 2023 national poll, 60% of respondents across party lines said that Big Tech has too much power, and nearly half said government should do more to regulate these companies. And indeed, federal agencies have filed lawsuits against all four tech behemoths.

Just as with Big Tech, a small number of giant corporations have amassed monopoly or near-monopoly power over pieces of our food and agriculture system in recent decades—and many are still seeking to get bigger by gobbling up other companies. Corporations across the food system increasingly have the power, by virtue of their size, market domination, political connections, and deep pockets, to set prices, meddle with science, evade regulation, and write the rules to benefit themselves.

If anything in our lives is essential, it’s food and the means of producing it. The average U.S. household spent more than 10% of their disposable income on food in 2022. But food is not just essential to each of us as individuals. It’s also a major chunk of the US economy, accounting for 5.6% of US gross domestic product (GDP) and employing more than 22 million people. So, corporate control of our food system has outsized impact over our lives.

The Big Ag you know, and the Big Ag you don’t

“Big Ag” and “Big Food” are shorthand for a sprawling collection of giant, often multinational corporations that wield enormous market power throughout our food system. Some of these companies are household names—for example, Tyson Foods, John Deere, and General Mills—while others are virtually unknown to consumers. Those lesser-known companies tend to operate up the supply chain, and include Bayer and Syngenta, which sell the seeds farmers need and the pesticides they’ve come to rely on, and Nutrien and CF Industries Holdings, which manufacture synthetic fertilizers.

Testimony to Congress by the nonprofit Open Markets Institute in 2022 described some of the consequences of extreme agriculture and food industry concentration. These include supply chain instability, unsafe working conditions and downward pressure on wages, and higher food prices for consumers. Does any of that sound familiar?

This topic should be getting much more public attention. So I was glad to see the new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, from Yale agriculture and antitrust researcher Austin Frerick. Publishers Weekly called the book “a disquieting critique of private monopolization of public necessities,” and I would add that it illuminates some dark and shady corners of our food system, where companies you’ve heard of and others you surely haven’t operate in ways that ruthlessly seek profit at everyone else’s expense. For example, Frerick recounts how the ubiquitous strawberry brand Driscoll’s doesn’t actually grow any strawberries, but rather outsources farming, and with it, accountability for labor and environmental issues. And he tells the story of a pork empire you’ve surely never heard of: Iowa Select Farms, which brings 5 million hogs to market every year and has captured that state’s politics to evade meaningful regulation of the industry’s pollution and other excesses.

In the foreword to Barons, Eric Schlosser (author of the 2001 bestseller, Fast Food Nation) calls unchecked market power “the central driving force of inequality.” Indeed, leading food system experts have warned of “hunger profiteering” by the giant companies that control the world’s food supply. The term “food cartel,” used by Schlosser in this recent commentary, seems apt to describe a situation he calls “inefficient, barely regulated, unfair, and even dangerous.”

Tracing Big Ag control from seed to supermarket

We can trace corporate power through every stage of food production and distribution, identifying some of the largest and most problematic corporate actors—think of them as the Monsantos of today—along the way.

Seed industry

Extreme corporate consolidation at the beginning of our food chain in the seed industry has raised alarm bells. A recent study from the USDA’s Economic Research Service found that just two giant seed companies—Bayer and Corteva—accounted for nearly three-quarters of planted corn acres and two-thirds of planted soybean acres in the United States between 2018 and 2020. No wonder that another USDA report described farmers’, plant breeders’, and seed retailers’ increasing sense of dependence on a few large companies that hold most of the intellectual property rights for seeds. In 2023, the Biden administration formed an interagency working group to examine consolidation in the seed industry, but that’s a long way from action to curb the seed giants’ control of this most basic of resources.

Pesticides and fertilizers

In today’s heavily industrialized agriculture, the industries that make and sell chemical inputs to farmers are also highly consolidated; in fact, the largest seed companies are also in the pesticide business, or vice versa. A “tsunami” of mega-mergers starting in 2016 (including the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer) accelerated a trend already underway. By 2018, just four firms—Syngenta Group, Bayer, Corteva, and BASF—controlled around 70% of the global pesticide market. Meanwhile, fertilizer production has become similarly dominated by bigs, ringing alarm bells as little-known companies like Illinois-based CF Industries and Canada-based Nutrien keep farmers over-applying their products, with serious implications for food inflation, water pollution, and climate change. One other big fertilizer name that might surprise you is Koch Industries, which sparked an uproar in Iowa earlier this year when the fossil fuel giant (and well-known disinformation purveyor) proposed to buy a nitrogen fertilizer plant that had been taxpayer-subsidized specifically to help alleviate consolidation-driven price increases.

Farmland

Prime farmland is also susceptible to corporate takeover and accumulation of too many acres in too few hands. While the latest USDA Census of Agriculture indicates that family-owned and operated farms accounted for 95% of all U.S. farms in 2022, that belies several important facts: Some 40% of farmland nationally is owned, in ever-larger tracts, by absentee landlords who don’t farm but rent to others (in the Corn Belt bullseye of Iowa, it’s more than half). Billionaires, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are among the largest private owners of US farmland. And corporations and investment funds like Nuveen and Manulife are buying up farmland at a rate that should alarm you. While some in Congress have made a lot of noise about Chinese ownership of US farmland, consolidation of that land is a bigger problem, as it has helped drive land prices to record-setting levels, undermine rural economies, depopulate farming communities, and create additional barriers for Black farmers and new potential farmers looking to enter the industry.

Food processing

Tyson is the poster child for industry domination by a single too-big food company. Over the past several years, my team has analyzed this company —we’ve dubbed them Big Chicken—revealing how it has squeezed chicken farmers, endangered workers and communities, greenwashed its sustainability efforts, and dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of polluted wastewater into rivers and streams. In addition to chicken, Tyson is also a giant in beef processing, where it and three other corporations, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef, control 85% of the market. Beyond meat and poultry, the larger food processing sector is similarly dominated by corporate giants. For example, just three companies sell 73% of all breakfast cereal, and giants like PepsiCo and Kraft-Heinz control large swaths of the processed food market.

Supermarkets

In the last leg of the food chain, the supermarkets where most of us buy our food, there is also extreme consolidation and too-bigness. An astonishing 75% of US consumers buy groceries from Walmart, according to a 2021 poll, and a small number of supermarket chains collectively have a stranglehold on groceries. A March 2024 report from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) called out the effects of this monopoly situation during the COVID-19 pandemic describing price gouging and pressuring of suppliers. And the situation would only be made worse by the proposed $24 billion merger of Albertsons—which already owns Safeway and 21(!) other grocery chains nationwide—and Kroger. If the merger goes through, just five retailers will control an estimated 55% of US grocery sales. The FTC has sued to block the merger, which has been described as “ruinous” for consumers and communities.

Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Big Pharma have paved the way for Big Ag

We’ve seen this movie before: as corporations consolidate control over a market, either through monopoly (Big Pharma) or addiction (Big Oil, Big Tobacco) they will do anything to keep it. Now, we’re seeing this with Big Ag and Big Food as well. Their tactics include lobbying and campaign contributions to influence policy; employing a revolving door of former and future government regulators; and colluding with each other to fix prices, suppress wages, and keep profits as high as possible.

What we’ve also seen with those other “Bigs” are aggressive tactics around denying science and sowing disinformation to avoid regulation or other governmental action. Big Oil has been particularly egregious when it comes to climate disinformation. But as industrialized agriculture is increasingly implicated for its own climate contribution—agriculture accounted for 9.4% of US heat-trapping emissions in 2022, methane from industrial livestock production represents more than a quarter of agriculture’s heat-trapping emissions, and a 2020 review of nitrous oxide sources and sinks found that emissions rose 30% in the last four decades, with heavy use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and poor soil management largely to blame—you can bet that Big Ag disinformation will be coming your way.

Food and farming was on the menu at COP28

The surprising final agreement that emerged from all-night overtime negotiations is extraordinary for its long-overdue focus on transitioning away from fossil fuels. To see that through will require changes in every sector of the global economy, including agriculture, where fossil fuels power farm equipment and the global transport of farm commodities and food. But otherwise, the final COP28 agreement didn’t include any binding commitments on food or farming.

Still, throughout the two-week meeting, those topics took a higher profile than usual. The organizers touted so-called 1.5°C-aligned menus served at COP28—centered around plant-based foods, and referencing the Paris Agreement commitment to limit warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels—as evidence of a new commitment to climate-friendly food and farming. Funders pledged $7 billion in new money to help agriculture curb its emissions and cope with the effects of climate change. And December 10 was designated Food, Agriculture and Water Day to showcase commitments in this sector.

The COP28 Food Systems Lead, H.E Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri of the host country UAE, put a fine point on it:

“To achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, to keep 1.5C within reach, we must address the connection between global food systems, agriculture, and the climate. At COP28, we have built the foundations for action, which commit 152 countries to transform their food systems, and embedding those commitments in their climate strategies, all the while ensuring they are protecting the livelihoods of those who depend on those sectors. Together, we must build a global food system that is fit for the future. Today marks an important moment in achieving this.”

Almheiri was referring to commitments made in another official document that came out of COP28 on December 1. The UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action was also a welcome surprise, stating the intention of countries including the United States to pursue five key objectives: (1) to scale up adaptation and resilience for farmers and food producers, (2) to support nutrition and food security for vulnerable people, (3) to protect and support food and farm workers threatened by the climate crisis, (4) to better manage water in agriculture, and (5) to simultaneously reduce the harmful environmental impacts of agriculture and maximize the sector’s climate benefits.

The declaration isn’t legally binding, and it avoids any mention of the outsize contribution of heat-trapping emissions from the meat industry. Still, it’s an important first step, outlining a number of actions that signatory nations say they intend to take. As such, it should give the US Congress a lot to think about in the food and farm bill that it must write and pass by the extended deadline it gave itself, September 30, 2024.

I’ll get back to this in a minute.

Agribusiness was in Dubai in force

But first, I have to note what stands in the way of all this potential progress, and that is the agribusiness lobby. A lot was written during COP28 (including by a UCS colleague) about the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists in record numbers. But big agribusiness interests—including the chemical fertilizer industry—were also there. The watchdogs at DeSmog published a revealing report mapping the various relationships and avenues for food and agriculture industry influence in Dubai.

Big Food names you know, like McDonald’s, Nestle, and Pepsico, were there hobnobbing with country delegations. So was Tyson Foods, aka Big Chicken. And there were other names you probably haven’t heard of, like the International Fertilizer Association, and Nutrien, a Canadian company that is the world’s largest fertilizer producer overall and the third-largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer specifically. That’s important because, as UCS notes in this new explainer, the production and overuse of petrochemical-based nitrogen fertilizer is a major contributor of heat-trapping emissions, most notably the super climate pollutant nitrous oxide (N₂O).

These and other giant agribusiness corporations and industry groups are lobbying against climate action everywhere they can, at global gatherings like COP28 and in the halls of the US Congress.

A first-ever food and farm declaration

To counter this industry lobbying, UCS and partners are pressing Congress to write a new food and farm bill that looks different from the 2018 bill and other previous iterations. Among other things, we have told lawmakers (and President Biden, who will have to sign or veto a food and farm bill next year) that the bill must address the climate crisis head-on for the first time. How to do this is spelled out in the Agriculture Resilience Act (ARA), a bill first introduced in 2020 as a model, or “marker,” for the next food and farm bill. To increase farmers’ resilience to climate impacts, reduce their reliance on fossil gas-based fertilizer, help them store more carbon in their soil, and deliver cleaner water and other environmental benefits, the ARA would ramp up investments in incentives that help farmers change their practices. Congress already adopted some of this, when it included nearly $20 billion in new climate-focused conservation incentives for farmers in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. But the ARA also would dramatically expand investments in agriculture research, including science at the intersection of climate change, food production, and nutrition to make sure the food we produce is good for people and the planet. And it includes provisions to reduce food waste as a climate strategy.

As I read it, the UAE Declaration bolsters the case for incorporating the ARA into the next food and farm bill. Having attended my share of United Nations negotiations (more than two decades ago, I coordinated the advocacy organizations that weighed in on the creation of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants), I know how carefully every word in a negotiated document is chosen. The UAE Declaration specifically says that signatories “intend to strengthen [their] respective and shared efforts” to do five key things. So again, not legally binding, but stating some very clear intentions, among them to:

Revisit or orient policies and public support related to agriculture and food systems to promote activities which increase incomes, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and bolster resilience, productivity, livelihoods, nutrition, water efficiency and human, animal and ecosystem health while reducing food loss and waste, and ecosystem loss and degradation.

That sounds a lot like the Agriculture Resilience Act!

The Biden administration—which signed the UAE Declaration on behalf of the United States—should call on Congress to help implement our national intention by incorporating the ARA into the next food and farm bill.

Yes, we do need to transform the food system and US policy

One other line in the UEA Declaration that is worth noting is this, in the preamble:

We affirm that agriculture and food systems must urgently adapt and transform in order to respond to the imperatives of climate change.

The emphasis on “transform” is mine, because transformation is a word that I and my UCS colleagues and partners have been using a lot over the past year to describe what we want to see in a new food and farm bill. The call for transformation in US farm policy, as in global climate agreements, recognizes that our food systems are working for too few of us, and that the climate crisis is challenging farmers, workers, and eaters as never before. The status quo is no longer tolerable. Transformative change in our food systems, and in the policies that shape them, is imperative.

That was the message from 112 organizations, including UCS, in a letter sent to food and farm bill negotiators in Congress earlier this month. That letter calls on the negotiators to “transform our food and agriculture system into one that our farmers, workers, and communities need and deserve,” and lists nearly three dozen marker bills that, collectively, would begin to do that.

The same day we sent that letter, we got a new bit of evidence that the message of transformation had broken through. At a December 6 hearing, House agriculture committee chairman G.T. Thompson (R-PA), said this in his opening statement:

Our task is to build a responsive framework to meet the needs of American agriculture and its vast value chain; we do not need a transformational farm bill to do better; strategic investment and good policy will make all the difference.

Respectfully, Representative Thompson, 152 countries and 112 US food and farm organizations disagree.

As farmers and farm workers recover from a growing season that NASA named the hottest on record (even as it may be among the coolest we’ll see going forward), we need to talk about what lawmakers can do about it in legislation they’re drafting right now.

The Inflation Reduction Act is directing $20B toward climate-resilient agriculture

Reducing heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions through policies that drive renewable energy and clean transportation has well known benefits. Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) made historic investments to speed the decarbonization of these sectors. My colleagues (including this climate scientist just named to the TIME100 Next list of the world’s rising leaders!) advocated long and hard for the IRA’s investments in renewable energy sources and clean vehicles, and UCS continues to work to maximize the benefits of those investments.

But the IRA also included a lesser known—yet equally historic—investment to boost the potential for US agriculture to be part of the climate solution while simultaneously becoming more resilient in the face of a changing climate. At nearly $20 billion over five years, it’s the largest investment in conservation on farms since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and it’s focused on helping farmers shift the ways they manage their land in order to better adapt to our new climate reality.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has estimated that these dollars will help hundreds of thousands of farmers and ranchers apply conservation to millions of acres of land. This investment is badly needed, as extreme weather fueled by climate change demonstrated during summer 2023. Flooding, excessive heat, and drought wreaked havoc on farms and ranches around the country, from California to Texas to Massachusetts.

Of course, the problem is much bigger than this past summer. Flood- and drought-related damage to crops and livestock have been on the rise for years, and so have the costs of these disasters, which are often borne by taxpayers through the National Crop Insurance Program. That program subsidizes a portion of an eligible farmer’s insurance premium, and then also pays the farmer for claims when losses occur. With the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events—and related increasing interest in the insurance program—the costs of that program from less than $3 billion in 2002 to more than $19 billion in 2022.

The old adage about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is apt here. We can choose, as a nation, to continue with business as usual and watch the cost of disasters pile up—for all of us as consumers and taxpayers—or we can take steps to help farmers adapt and prevent some of the future damage. Just as changes in urban planning and coastal development can build resilience to climate impacts, so too can changes in agriculture.

Back when the IRA passed, I summarized how its investments would help farmers do this by boosting funding for a variety of existing USDA conservation programs that underwrite the costs farmers can incur when they adopt soil-protecting, pollution-reducing, climate-friendly practices. Such practices, which include cover crops, deep-rooted perennial crops and buffer strips, and smart grazing systems, have been shown to buffer farmland from some of the damage caused by both floods and droughts. These practices work by making soil spongier so it soaks up more water during heavy rains and holds more moisture through dry periods.

The USDA’s conservation incentives programs have long been oversubscribed, helping many farmers but often turning away many more for lack of funds. Expansion of these program with IRA funds in the law’s first year is indeed attracting record interest (so much so that demand is again outstripping available dollars).

Voters agree, Congress should invest more in climate-focused conservation on farms

In addition to their popularity with farmers, the incentives in the programs funded by the IRA are popular with voters, as recent polling commissioned by UCS in summer 2023 showed. Large majorities of voters in four states and nationwide see crop failures from extreme weather as a threat to their state. Overwhelming majorities—84% in Georgia, 85% in Colorado, 88% in Pennsylvania, and a whopping 90% in Michigan—say further that they support programs that help farmers proactively adapt and protect their land and crops against flooding and drought.

Farmers and their communities, and even people living far from farming, agree on the value of these investments because they deliver multiple benefits. As above, they offer a way to bring down the costs of weather disasters on farms and protect our food supply. This, in turn, can help lessen the price shocks that can result when crop and livestock losses occur.

In addition, the same practices that turn farm soils into sponges also pull more carbon from the atmosphere into the soil, making farmers part of the solution to worsening climate change. This is good for all of us, of course. But it is specifically good for farmers and the people they employ, who as outdoor workers are already at risk from dangerous heat, wildfire smoke, and other climate hazards, and whose working conditions will be untenable without economy-wide action to limit warming.

It is agriculture’s responsibility to be part of that action. Today, as changes in energy and transportation sector bring down those sectors’ emissions, agriculture could soon become the nation’s leading source of heat-trapping gases.

Agribusiness lobby and climate-denying lawmakers are working to reverse climate progress

Back to what Congress must do now:

Funding from the IRA is already working to build climate resilience and store more carbon on more farm acres, but we can’t just celebrate, because some in Congress are looking to reverse that progress. These are lawmakers with a history of climate denial and strong ties to the big agribusiness corporations that have hijacked our food and farm system and that lobby hard to maintain their grip on the system. They aren’t interested in conceding the climate crisis and changing the status quo.

Having sought ways to repeal and undo other parts of the IRA earlier this year, now some of these members of Congress are looking for ways to use the next food and farm bill to claw back climate-focused IRA funding and direct it to other priorities.

One proposal has been to use the money to raise what are known as “reference prices,” which guarantee that commodity farmers will bring in minimum prices for their products and trigger government payments if market prices drop lower. Experts at the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have spent decades examining the flow of taxpayer money into these payments for big agricultural commodities, and the resulting detrimental effects. An EWG analysis in July showed that raising these price guarantees would be good for just a small minority of the nation’s farmers.

Senate Republicans have also proposed to use IRA funds for what they call “traditional conservation”…which, ironically, could include projects that prop up some of the largest industrial-scale meat and dairy operations that actually make climate change worse.

In the face of these attempts to effectively roll back the IRA’s progress, Senate agriculture committee chairwoman Sen. Debbie Stabenow has vowed to maintain the climate-focused $20 billion for its intended purpose (paywall), and that’s good. Maintaining a climate focus is critical to tackling the existential crisis of our time.

We must protect our investments in climate action and resilience

Follow me on a little tangent here to explore a case study in targeted public policies from another area of the US food system: child nutrition.

In 2010, Congress passed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, on a bipartisan basis, to overhaul federally subsidized school lunch programs and improve children’s health and educational outcomes. Among the requirements was that school meals needed to incorporate increasing amounts of whole grains, a dietary shift associated with improved health outcomes. Food companies and their allies and advocates objected, of course, but then-President Obama’s USDA issued regulations, and the whole grain content of school meals gradually rose.

And guess what has happened since then? Children in this country have become the only age group in which consumption of whole grain have increased, according to a new USDA study.

Smart public policies work. You get what you invest in.

Over at President Biden’s USDA, the agriculture secretary is calling on stakeholders to demand that Congress protect and maintain the IRA’s investments for climate action and resilience. A few weeks ago, Secretary Vilsack told progressive farmers from the National Farmers Union, “it’s up to you” to lobby Congress to preserve the IRA’s gains.

Scientists and the rest of us must also weigh in. Earlier this year, UCS was among more than 600 conservation, farming, and agriculture organizations, farms, food companies, and businesses that sent a letter urging congressional leaders to ensure that the upcoming food and farm bill safeguards the IRA’s investments in climate-smart agriculture and conservation.

Make your own voice heard here. Do it today.

The five-year federal legislation commonly known as the farm bill is about to expire with no new bill in sight. As congressional leaders contend with the more immediate problem of averting a government shutdown over annual spending legislation, it’s worth looking back at the farm bill passed back in 2018, and what’s at stake as it lapses.

First though, as I’ve argued before, this important legislation really should be called the food and farm bill, because it shapes nearly everything about the food on our tables. A package of nearly $1 trillion in investments, it funds food assistance programs to prevent hunger in low-income households, a massive insurance program to help farmers and ranchers recover from disasters, research to better understand and meet food and farming challenges, conservation programs to fight soil erosion and air and water pollution from agriculture, and more.

Expiration is the new normal

It’s a wide-ranging and contentious package for a divided Congress to negotiate—so much so that every food and farm bill since 2002 has missed its deadline. This one is all but certain to follow suit, expiring on September 30 without a replacement.

Chalk that up, at least in part, to a dysfunctional House majority that can’t manage to meet the most basic responsibility of Congress: appropriating funds to keep the government running. Another shutdown looks increasingly likely at the end of the month (and that’s not even the only bit of pointless theatrics House Republicans have planned). There’s also other real business for Congress to attend to this fall, from passing the National Defense Authorization Act and reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration to figuring out what to do about artificial intelligence. Moreover, as one Congress watcher points out, high prices for agricultural commodities that pushed farm incomes to record highs in 2022 have meant the largest, richest growers haven’t been clamoring for policy updates.

But they will. And as congressional leaders attempt to shape a new food and farm bill behind closed doors, the House agriculture committee chair is reduced to seeking assurances that if his committee passes a bill, a floor vote will actually follow. Again, the most basic of congressional norms, no longer normal.

Highlights (and lowlights) of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018

But let’s get back to the last go-around for the food and farm bill. Negotiated during the last presidential administration, it contained some good things, and some not-so-good things.

• Hunger and food security. The Republican majorities in Congress back in 2018 (and their leader in the White House) tried and failed to cut critical nutrition assistance in the last food and farm bill. It wasn’t for lack of effort: Never mind that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a highly cost-effective way to ensure that people in this country don’t go hungry (while boosting local economies); opponents in 2018 used every trick they could think of to cut it. They tried loading up the SNAP provisions in the bill with work and documentation requirements, and when that didn’t work, the Trump administration tried sidestepping Congress with sneaky eligibility rule changes and even forcing families to choose between keeping the heat on and putting food on the table. Fast forward to 2023, and many of the same folks are up to the same tricks. To maintain critical food assistance for the next five years, heading off another showdown and protecting SNAP in the next food and farm bill (as voters told us they want) will need to be a priority.

• Healthy food access. On the plus side, the 2018 food and farm bill took a step forward in making healthy, locally grown food more affordable and accessible. In the bill, Congress created the Local Agriculture Marketing Program, a collection of effective programs that develop, coordinate, and expand local and regional food systems by funding farmers markets and other direct-to-consumer channels. These programs were subsequently boosted with additional funding during the COVID-19 pandemic through the American Rescue Plan. The 2018 food and farm bill also expanded a program known as GusNIP, which funds local projects that help low-income consumers purchase fresh fruits and vegetables through “cash” incentives and produce prescription programs that work. These programs can and should see even greater investment in the next bill, because as a wise former colleague pointed out, many people won’t be able to eat healthier unless we make it possible.

• Conservation and pollution prevention. The practices that farmers use in the field have a major impact on their soil and the ecosystem services it can provide, including cleaner water, carbon sequestration, and resilience to flooding and drought. The food and farm bill funds multiple USDA programs, popular with farmers, to help them adopt and optimize climate-friendly healthy-soil practices and systems. But in 2018, House Republicans took a hatchet to the crown jewel of these programs, the tiny but mighty Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), which UCS showed that same year delivers four dollars in benefits for every dollar spent. At the end of the day, the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Opponents failed in their bid to eliminate CSP entirely, and on-farm conservation investments in the final bill across all programs stayed basically steady. Still, the already oversubscribed CSP took a cut—a bad move for many reasons. Agricultural runoff is the leading cause of poor water quality in rivers and streams today, the third leading source for lakes, and the second-largest source of impairments to wetlands. Water quality impacts from fertilizer pollution are getting worse with warmer winters and warmer waters. And agriculture’s contribution to climate change is growing even as farmers desperately need the climate resilience benefits that healthy-soil practices provide. As a colleague noted in 2018, maintaining the status quo in conservation feels like a step back, and we can’t afford to take another step back this year.

• Agriculture and food systems research. Agricultural research is critical to helping farmers meet the many challenges they face, and to ensuring a healthy, sustainable food supply for the future. Research fared well in the 2018 food and farm bill, with organic research in particular receiving increased investment—see this helpful rundown from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). But the bigger picture is that publicly funded ag research has declined by a third since 2002 and is woefully insufficient to meet the needs of the future. Just this week, we submitted a letter from nearly 1,000 US scientists to the congressional leaders who will write the next food and farm bill, urging them to dramatically increase this critical investment.

• Crop insurance and commodity subsidies. This isn’t a comprehensive listing of everything that was in the 2018 food and farm bill, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention farm subsidies. As our friends at NSAC noted at the time, there were no major reforms nor any major funding increases for the subsidies that generally flow to large-scale growers of commodity crops and livestock. The final bill did unfortunately include a new payment limit loophole—extending eligibility to a farm owner’s extended family—that effectively gives the largest commodity farms a way to rake in more subsidy dollars. (In fact, farm subsidies ballooned in 2020, as the previous administration showered money on farmers to compensate for the effects of its trade policies.) The last food and farm bill also continued to subsidize crop insurance premiums for industrial-style agriculture without in turn requiring conservation practices that would buffer farms against crop-destroying weather disasters. This has perpetuated a perverse feedback loop, as farms remain vulnerable to escalating climate change, driving crop insurance payouts ever higher at taxpayers’ expense. It’s a policy that must change.

Failure is not an option—Congress must pass a new bill, and it must do more

So what happens when the food and farm bill expires, assuming it does? Well, it’s complicated. Essentially, some programs have what’s called “mandatory” funding, and will continue even without a new authorizing bill—SNAP is one of these, so people will still get their monthly benefits. Some programs have different expiration dates that don’t match the overall food and farm bill deadline—for example, CSP and other conservation programs had their expirations extended alongside the infusion of new climate-focused farm conservation dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act—so those programs will continue as well.

There are some programs for farmers, including commodity subsidies and dairy support programs, that would begin to expire in January if there isn’t a new law in place. Some members of Congress are seeking to extend those “orphan” programs as part of an appropriations deal. The Congressional Research Service put out a report over the summer detailing the implications of expiration—which gives you some idea of which way those experts believed the wind was blowing even then.

So Congress may patch up the holes for now and take until later this year, or even early 2024, to pass a new food and farm bill. Eventually they will pass one. But it won’t be enough for that bill to simply continue the priorities and investment levels of the last one.

Instead, the next bill needs to be smarter and more forward-looking. If climate change is the existential crisis of our time (and it is), then a status quo food and farm bill simply won’t cut it. The next bill must do more—as I discussed on C-SPAN recently—to ensure that agriculture is part of the solution, to buffer farmland and our food supply from climate-related disruption, and to make a healthy food supply more sustainable for the long term. It must also do something the 2018 bill didn’t do: advance justice and safety for the workers who make our food system run, and who are increasingly endangered by climate catastrophes.

Our elected members of Congress are supposed to be in the business of making life better for the people of this country. The next food and farm bill offers a major opportunity to do just that.

I hope enough of them decide to take it.

Now, as Congress writes the next five-year food and farm bill, workers and their advocates are demanding that the bill do more to help protect and support the people whose labors ensure we can all eat. And new polling commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) this summer shows that voters—nationally and in a handful of important states—have workers’ backs.

Survey says: don’t let workers continue to struggle

In mid-June and early July, we surveyed nearly 3,000 registered voters nationally and in four key states: Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all represented by members of the House and Senate committees that are drafting what is usually called the “farm bill.” As I’ve suggested previously, this legislation is more aptly called the food and farm bill because it shapes nearly everything about the system that produces and distributes food in the United States. And yet, although this system is driven by the labor of more than 21 million people, or 10.5 percent of the US workforce, recent farm bills have had little or nothing to say about their working conditions.

So what did our polls show? We asked about a variety of issues relevant to the next food and farm bill, ranging from how to help farmers build climate resilience to how to help people of color, women, and young people succeed in farming (see the full national and state results). Here I’ll focus on the findings related to workers.

• People recognize the hazards faced by food system workers, and they understand that worker health and safety matters for all of us. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that when food workers are in danger, we are all in trouble. In our polls, majorities of respondents in the four states—as many as 64% in Georgia and 70% of households that include a farmer—said the risk of illness and injury to essential food and farm industry workers is a threat to communities.

• Overwhelming majorities want a food and farm bill that protects workers. Majorities as large as 87% in Michigan and Pennsylvania and 80% nationally expressed support for more and better workplace protections for essential workers in the farming and food industries. That support held regardless of whether respondents were Republicans (83%) or Democrats (91%), rural (87%), urban (85%), or suburban (85%).

• People want Congress to do more to combat hunger. Respondents were also asked about one of the most contentious issues in food and farm bill negotiations: expanding work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, previously known as food stamps). How is this relevant in a post about working people? Because, perversely, workers in the food and farm sectors have some of the highest rates of food insecurity and SNAP usage, given that these are some of the nation’s worst-paying jobs. Although the program already has work requirements, and evidence shows that most SNAP recipients who can work already do—it’s low wages and unstable hours, not the lack of a job, that make many households food insecure—some House Republicans have called for further expanding work requirements and bogging down recipients with red tape to prove they are employed. In our poll, people across the four states largely reject such action: 41% said Congress should focus more or all of its energy on making sure people have enough to eat, while fewer than a quarter (23%) said Congress should focus more or all of its energy on making sure people receiving food assistance are working.

How legislation can help

During this week smack in the middle of what UCS calls Danger Season (the summer months when multiple impacts of climate change such as flooding, extreme heat, and wildfires overlap), workers from the front lines of our food system will be on Capitol Hill to tell members of Congress and their staffs what the next food and farm bill can do to help. These workers have stories from farm fields where they’ve seen coworkers collapse from heat exhaustion after long days harvesting fruits and vegetables in the hot sun—farmworkers are up to 35 times more likely to die from heat-related illness than workers in general. And they have stories from poultry plants where knife-wielding workers have some of the highest occupational injury rates because of the speed at which they are expected to butcher and pack millions of chickens.  

The workers’ stories back up a letter sent to Congress last month by 100+ organizations including UCS detailing 10 things the food and farm bill can do to protect and support food and farm workers. These include funding to help farmworkers prepare for, and recover from, disruptions to the food and farm economy such as pandemics and extreme weather; increased federal investment in public research programs to better understand and reduce risks to farmworker health and safety; and increased protections for meatpacking workers, whose jobs were among the nation’s most dangerous even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit meat and poultry plants hard.

These and other recommendations are all well within the purview of the food and farm bill, and they must be included in the final bill.

Congress should heed the will of the people

With the climate crisis driving dangerous weather across the country this summer, it’s no wonder why people see the need for Congress to take action that protects farmworkers. They can clearly see how big corporations like Tyson Foods and others have hijacked our food system, endangering workers and leaving too many hungry. The answer is a food and farm bill that works for workers—and for all of us.

Is Congress listening?

A new Dust Bowl? When soil erosion and climate change collide

We’ve all seen grainy historical photos of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s—a nearly decade-long confluence of recurring severe droughts, poor farming practices, and plummeting grain prices that devastated much of the Great Plains and drove the largest migration in US history. That time now feels remote, and a repeat catastrophe of that magnitude seems unthinkable. But the loss of life on an Illinois highway last week wasn’t just shocking and tragic, it was also a warning.

Because like the Dust Bowl of so many decades ago, this tragedy stemmed from a collision of multiple systemic problems—in this case, unchecked climate change layered atop the excesses of industrial agriculture. Atmospheric conditions produced unusually strong winds in the area that day, but the wind alone couldn’t have caused the catastrophe without the combined effects of exceptional dryness and newly disturbed bare soil. A US Department of Agriculture (USDA) official noted that farm fields in the area had been tilled for planting or had just been planted, leaving soil exposed, and that topsoil “was primed to be lofted into the air by short-term dryness.” That part of central Illinois had received roughly half the normal rainfall for April.

A devastating dust storm is just one of many bad outcomes that are possible when increasingly severe weather interacts with an agriculture system that doesn’t value and protect the soil that is its literal foundation.

Although most people don’t notice it, erosion and soil degradation caused by industrial agriculture are already a problem in farming regions across the country. According to a 2020 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report, every year, US croplands lose at least twice as much soil to erosion as the Great Plains are estimated to have lost annually during the peak of the Dust Bowl. Using recent estimates from the USDA, we projected that croplands would lose an additional 28 billion tons of soil by 2035 and 148 billion tons by 2100—about 300 years’ worth at the rate at which soil naturally forms.

As climate change continues and farming areas get hotter and drier—as expected in the Southern Great Plains and Southwest—erosion could increasingly take the form of dust storms when bone-dry fields are plowed. In Illinois and the rest of the Corn Belt, weather patterns may ping-pong between wet and dry, but the overall Midwest prediction calls for an increase in extreme precipitation and heavy flooding. And very wet conditions bring their own soil loss problems, because . . .

Soil doesn’t just blow away—it also washes away and pollutes our water

Extreme precipitation and flooding carry large quantities of soil off bare farm fields. Coupled with excessive use of fertilizer, which has increased dramatically over the last four decades, this creates major water-quality problems, as the fertilizer runs off into waterways and leaches into groundwater. The results range from localized drinking water contamination to ecological and economic damage in water bodies far from the source of the pollution.

A 2021 UCS study quantified the impact of nitrates—a by-product of nitrogen-based fertilizers—in drinking water in Iowa, a state heavily impacted by farm runoff. It found that in 2020, 58 of Iowa’s public water systems treated 82 billion gallons of drinking water for nitrates, which can cause serious health problems such as neural tube defects in utero and “blue baby syndrome” in infants. Chronic exposure to nitrates at lower levels is also associated with increased risk for some cancers. In Iowa, it’s estimated that up to 300 cases of cancer each year are caused by exposure to nitrates in drinking water. And treating water to remove nitrates is expensive: UCS estimated that it will cost Iowans between $41 million and $333 million over the next five years—much of which will be borne by small rural communities.

Fertilizer runoff can also affect urban communities downstream. Toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie are now an annual event that is predicted and tracked and has forced residents of Toledo, Ohio, to resort to bottled water. For three full days in 2014, nearly half a million people were told their tap water was unsafe to drink, bathe in, or even touch. Last year’s bloom was more toxic than predicted, lasted longer than previous years, and covered 416 square miles of the lake at its peak. A 2022 report that assessed data from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency showed that monitoring and treating algae-contaminated water from Lake Erie costs Toledo roughly $100 per family per year, a cost passed on in residents’ water bills.

Pollution from unsustainable farming and soil management practices is also a major problem in rivers in Illinois and other farming states. Climate change is making the problem worse, with a 2022 study finding that warming winters put water quality at greater risk in more than 40 states, as “rain-on-snow” flooding events wash large amounts of fertilizer into lakes, rivers, and streams.

Ultimately, a huge amount of soil and fertilizers from the Midwest washes down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, where every summer it triggers a large “dead zone”—an area of coastal water so low in oxygen that nothing can live there. It’s a recurring ecological disaster that causes hardship for people who make their living from fishing, shrimping, and tourism. This problem will likely worsen with climate change, as heavier spring rains unleash more soil runoff and warmer Gulf waters make the effects of the pollution worse.

The answer? Smart practices and policies that protect farm soils

The Illinois dust storm disaster received extensive media attention, but little of the coverage examined the potential for solutions. Preventing soil loss from farms and its damaging consequences is possible, and it starts with keeping farm soils covered. All the time. Farmers can adopt science-based practices such as planting cover crops in the off season, reducing or avoiding tillage (plowing), diversifying crops to incorporate more deep-rooted perennial plants that hold soil in place, and preventing livestock from overgrazing. These practices build up soil health so less of it blows away or runs off. It’s a win-win for farmers and communities.

These practices have other benefits as well. Studies have overwhelmingly found that soils kept covered and unplowed absorb more water during heavy rains and hold onto more of it longer during dry periods. Scientists call that improved water infiltration, and it helps farmers get through weather extremes with less damage to their fields and crops. If less flood and drought damage leads to fewer and smaller claims filed against the federal crop insurance program, that also saves taxpayers money. And when farmers protect their soil, they also store more carbon (that would otherwise heat the atmosphere) and safeguard the foundation of our food supply.

Enter the Agriculture Resilience Act, or ARA. As my colleague recently wrote on this blog, this science-based bill would go a long way to helping farmers overcome barriers to widespread adoption of soil-saving practices. It would expand funding to underwrite and incentivize investments in new seed and equipment and expand training and technical assistance. And it would fund more research to help farmers optimize soil-improving practices for the specific crops, soils, and weather conditions they must work with. 

This legislation is gaining support from farmers and farm groups—its sponsor, Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, is an organic farmer herself. And many of the bill’s provisions align with a February 2023 report from the US Government Accountability Office that recommended ways the USDA could enhance farmers’ resilience to climate change and limit climate-related costs that taxpayers are forced to bear.

The ARA can be an important part of a larger food and farm bill that improves soil and water quality (helping to prevent tragedies like the one in Illinois), is better for consumers and workers, puts US agriculture on a path to net-zero climate emissions, and much more.

You can lend your voice to the call for Congress to incorporate the ARA into the next food and farm bill here.

1. Because you like to eat

The first thing to know about the farm bill is that its name is misleading—measured in dollars, today’s farm bill is far more about food: more than three-quarters of the $867.2 billion in federal spending authorized by the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 goes to nutrition programs operated by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which help low-income households put food on the table.

More about that in a minute. Because even apart from the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in food aid and poverty reduction, the so-called farm bill shapes the US food supply in a variety of ways. It governs, for example, the taxpayer-subsidized Federal Crop Insurance Program and its rules about which crops are insured against losses, and that has a huge impact on what farmers choose to grow—today, that’s mostly corn and soybeans eaten by livestock rather than people. On the other hand, the farm bill funds much smaller initiatives like the Farmers Market Promotion Program, which invests in building local and regional food systems so more people can have access to fresh, local fruits and vegetables.

Shifting what the next farm bill invests in can re-shape the future of our food supply. Better to call it the “Food and Farm Bill.”

2. Because too many of your neighbors are (still) hungry

As noted above, the vast majority of the Food and Farm Bill’s dollars are used to fund food aid programs, most notably the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, once known as food stamps. The nation’s most important anti-hunger program, SNAP helped an average of 41 million people in this country get enough to eat every month in 2021. In addition to helping put food on the table in millions of low-income households, SNAP acts as an effective economic development program in communities with high usage rates, because people tend to spend food assistance dollars near where they live—a former colleague wrote about that economic multiplier effect on this blog in 2018. The need for, and positive benefits from, SNAP were clear then (when Congress and the previous administration were trying every way they could think of to cut SNAP benefits), they were clear during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic (when usage rates spiked and a different Congress increased benefits), and they are clear today.

But this month, the USDA will end the pandemic SNAP expansion, which could push many households over a so-called hunger cliff, even as some in Congress are reviving old plans to slash SNAP’s budget. But it doesn’t have to be this way. A new Food and Farm Bill could ensure that every person in every community in this country has enough to eat.

3. Because you want urgent climate action (and clean water isn’t bad either)

Despite this winter’s frigid temperatures, the world is on fire. You know it, I know it, and even some of the last skeptical holdouts—farmers—know it. Climate change is an emergency for a million reasons, and the long-term viability of farming and our food supply is one of them. Last year was yet another year of devastating weather events linked to climate change, and many of them hit farmers and farmland hard. California’s drought alone cost agriculture $1.7 billion in 2022. And remember that federally subsidized crop insurance program I mentioned earlier? An analysis of the program’s data nationwide from 1995 to 2020 showed that payouts for losses due to drought rose four-fold, while payouts for excess rain and flooding rose three-fold. In all, nearly two-thirds of claims paid during that period were for those two climate change–driven weather events and, without action, we can expect the costs to keep rising.

How can a new Food and Farm Bill help? By dramatically increasing funding that will help farmers fight back, by adopting practices that build healthier, more sponge-like soils. A 2017 Union of Concerned Scientists report showed how diversifying croplands with deep-rooted perennial crops and off-season cover crops and improving livestock grazing systems would make farmland more resilient to the effects of climate change. We found that building healthier soils could reduce runoff in flood years by nearly one-fifth, cut flood frequency by the same amount, and make as much as 16 percent more water available for crops to use during dry periods. And the same practices can deliver other benefits: Bringing down fertilizer and pesticide use. Improving crop yields. Reducing runoff that pollutes rivers and lakes, drinking water, and coastal waters like the Gulf of Mexico. And increasing carbon storage in the soil, making farms part of the climate solution. When Congress invested $40 billion in these practices last summer in the Inflation Reduction Act, I wrote that it gave me renewed hope. Now I hope a new Food and Farm Bill will do even more to protect our soil and water and safeguard the future of farming and our food system.

4. Because you support science-based solutions

With all the challenges facing our food system, we need new research to answer important questions and point to new and better solutions. Investment in public agricultural R&D has been shown to generate average returns to the US economy of $20 for every dollar spent, yet, over the past two decades, federal funding for agriculture and food research has fallen by a third. And the USDA is still dealing with the anti-science damage done by the previous administration.

A new Food and Farm Bill should prioritize systems research that approaches farming, climate and the environment, and nutrition and health equity as interconnected issues and works across disciplines to identify common solutions. This intersection, known as sustainable nutrition science, could hold the key to solving some of our most pressing public health challenges—but, until recently, there has been little federal funding to support it: just $15.7 million each year, less than 25 cents out of every thousand dollars in federal research funding. We also need more funding for research to advance agroecological farming systems and practices that support long-term climate change mitigation and adaptation, including the accurate measurement and modeling of soil carbon sequestration. And Congress should prioritize funding for minority-serving institutions and those engaging in collaborative partnerships and community-based partnerships and participatory research; we recently sent the USDA some ideas about that.

5. Because you value fairness

Though inflation is slowing, we’ve all seen higher prices at the grocery store over the last two years. You know who isn’t seeing that money? The people that grow, harvest, and package our food. Corporate consolidation—in which a handful of giant companies control too much of our food system—has allowed those companies to rake in record profits at the expense of farmers, workers, and consumers. Essentially, big industrial agriculture corporations have hijacked our food system for their own benefit.

A 2021 White House report put the meat and poultry industry under the microscope and showed how “significant consolidation” in the beef, pork, and poultry industries had enabled big processors including Tyson Foods to gouge both farmers and consumers. In his State of the Union speech, President Biden called on Congress to take on corporate consolidation and its excesses across our economy, and his secretary of agriculture has called for farm policies that can help “the many” rather than the few.

At the same time, fairness also means stamping out discrimination and inequitable outcomes throughout our food system, including on farms. Agriculture and the family farm hold a special place in our collective memory, but for some families, the memories are tinged with grief and loss: the powerhouse US agriculture system was built on the labor of millions of enslaved Black men and women. In the years after emancipation, Black farmers struggled to succeed in a system of sharecropping. Still, in 1920, Black farmers accounted for 14 percent of all US farmers, collectively owning approximately 15 million acres of farmland. But institutional racism and antiquated property laws drove massive Black land loss and, by 1982, Black farmers represented less than 2 percent of the nation’s 2.2 million farmers. By 2017, that number was down to 1.6 percent. Consolidation of US farmland into ever-fewer hands has proven especially bad for Black farmers, and an entrenched culture of discrimination at the US Department of Agriculture has denied Black farmers loans and other assistance for decades.

Two bills in Congress—the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, introduced last year, and the Justice for Black Farmers Act, reintroduced last month—would take steps to make our food system more fair. The first bill would curb corporate excesses and promote competition in the food and agriculture sectors, while the second would enact policies and provide funding to end discrimination at the USDA, restore land lost due to past discrimination, and help a new generation of Black farmers get started. A new Food and Farm Bill should incorporate these fixes, reining in corporate power and remedying centuries of injustice.

6. Because better food = better jobs

My colleagues and I have documented the indignities and harm borne by many who work in our food system—particularly farmworkers and meatpacking workers—and almost exactly a year ago on this blog, we wondered whether 2022 could be “the year of the food worker.” It wasn’t. But 2023 could be the year that a farm bill finally addresses the needs of the people who actually make our food system run. The Protecting America’s Meatpacking Workers Act is a start, recognizing how meat and poultry workers have been treated as expendable—during the early days of the pandemic, when thousands were sickened and hundreds died, but even before then, when workers in the industry suffered injury rates among the nation’s highest. The bill would take much-needed steps to ensure that these workers have safe, healthy workplaces where they are treated with dignity and respect.

The new Food and Farm Bill should incorporate these efforts and do much more: invest in the people who plant, harvest, process, transport, sell, and serve our food and ensure safety and a living wage, along with access to health care, clean housing, and the right to organize and join a union. It should protect food and farm workers from pesticides, extreme heat, and exploitative labor practices, and strengthen the consequences for employers that endanger their workers. And it should support the aspirations of farmworkers who wish to become farmers, and access to citizenship for food workers.

A Food and Farm Bill for (and by) everyone!

You can see from the length and breadth of this post just how sweeping the Food and Farm Bill is. There are so many ways (not just six) that this legislation could make our food system stronger, more resilient, more just, and more sustainable. We are all stakeholders in the Food and Farm bill, and as the new Congress begins to write it, they need to hear from all of us about it. You can start TODAY by urging your members of Congress to cosponsor the Justice for Black Farmers Act and help build support for racial equity in the Food and Farm Bill. Click here.

Nuts are thirsty crops

Much has been written about the water demand of almonds. But nuts are big water users in general. One reason is that nuts like almonds, pecans, pistachios, and walnuts grow on trees that take years to mature. A young almond tree doesn’t begin to produce nuts until its third or fourth year, and other varieties typically take even longer. Many nut trees, particularly pistachios, are also alternate bearing, meaning a large harvest one year is followed by a lighter harvest the next. But whether a tree is producing nuts or not, it needs water to live and grow.

This is a problem because US tree nut production today is concentrated in California—the state grows 80 percent of the world’s almonds—and a few other western states that are facing a growing water crisis. The region is in the middle of the worst drought in 1,200 years, and though the rainy season has begun and there is hope that the current weather pattern will ease this spring, continuing climate change will likely bring repeated severe drought to the West, raising questions about the future of nut production in the region.

While some California growers are pulling up nut trees in the face of drought, data show that the state’s almond and pistachio industries have actually expanded in recent years, using critical water supplies to turn big profits at the expense of local communities.

So as someone who adds nuts to my morning yogurt parfait and believes walnuts are mandatory in banana bread and chocolate chip cookies (fight me!), I’ve been looking for more sustainable alternatives.

Pe-can we fight drought with better nuts?

Pecans present an interesting alternative nut. While grown today in some arid western states, the pecan tree is native to the southern United States and thrives in more humid climates. (Read this fascinating account of the tree’s domestication, which involves work by a 19th century enslaved gardener on a Louisiana plantation.)

Pecans are thirsty and grown commercially in states that see substantially more rainfall than the West. In 2020 (the last year the USDA released detailed information on US pecan production), Georgia ranked first in pecan acres, followed by Texas. For my holiday pie, I sought out Georgia pecans. There may also be other good replacements for the California-grown almonds, pistachios, and walnuts I used to stock in my pantry.

Scientists at New Mexico State University are working to breed pecan trees adapted to the changing climate, and other researchers are looking for ways to grow nuts more sustainably, as in agroforestry systems that incorporate fruit, nut, or other trees and shrubs into crop and livestock systems. Such systems mimic natural ecosystems and can provide a range of benefits, including pollinator habitat, improved soil health, and economic diversification for farmers. Hazelnuts may be another good candidate for expansion in sustainable agriculture systems in various regions. They grow on shrubs rather than trees and are drought-tolerant, and scientists are working to breed fungus-resistant varieties that can grow in New Jersey. Other research teams see hazelnuts as a way to diversify Upper Midwest farming systems and create new opportunities for farmers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Back to my pie, and all that corn

If you’re thinking, “Wait, what does corn have to do with pecan pie?,” I’ve got news for you: there’s a lot of corn in most pecan pies. My friend Nancy makes a delicious one, and she was nice enough to send me the recipe. But as soon as I read it, I knew I’d try to adapt it. Its gooey filling is based on corn syrup, and corn—by far the largest US agricultural crop—has myriad environmental problems, including drawing down critical groundwater supplies.

Then I read this fascinating article about how the makers of Karo Corn Syrup invented the modern, achingly sweet pecan pie. And that sent me on a hunt for the original pecan pie base: sorghum syrup. Because this is a post about nuts, I won’t do a deep dive on sorghum, a grain crop most people in the United States have never heard of, even though it’s an important food crop globally and is having something of a revival in this country. It’s also drought-tolerant and gluten-free, and apparently pops like popcorn.

Presenting a (more) sustainable holiday pie

Armed with all this knowledge, a big bag of Georgia pecans, and a jar of sorghum syrup, I made a pie last weekend and took it to dinner at the home of some dear friends, where I served it up with freshly whipped organic cream. It was different from the pie we were all used to, the flavor of the sorghum more like molasses than Karo. But it was good, and this whole exercise taught me a lot.

So without further ado, the recipe:

Sorghum-Bourbon Pecan Pie

Adapted from the Washington Post’s sorghum pecan pie (2006).

Ingredients:

• A single-crust batch of your favorite pie dough, refrigerated at least 2 hours or overnight (I like Smitten Kitchen’s all-butter, really flaky pie dough)
• 1/3 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 3/4 cup sorghum syrup (may substitute molasses)
• 1 tablespoon bourbon
• 1/4 teaspoon orange zest
• 1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

Directions:

Using a rolling pin, roll out the dough on a well-floured work surface to a 12-inch round. Transfer to a 9-inch pie pan, folding up any excess dough that hangs below the rim so that you have enough material to crimp the edges. Cover and refrigerate for at least 15 minutes and up to a few hours.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Lightly press a sheet of parchment paper over the pie shell and scatter pie weights or dried beans on the bottom. Bake on the middle oven rack for 13 to 15 minutes. Remove the parchment and pie weights, prick the bottom of the crust with a fork, and return to bake for another 10 minutes. Cool to room temperature before filling.

When ready to fill and bake the pie, preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

In a large bowl, using a hand mixer on low speed, beat the brown sugar and butter for about 1 1/2 minutes or until incorporated. Add the eggs one at a time, beating in between, then add the cornstarch, salt, and sorghum syrup and beat until thoroughly combined. Scatter the pecans across the bottom of the pre-baked pie crust and pour the filling over. Arrange a few pecan halves on top if you like. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until the center has risen and jiggles slightly, then cool on a wire rack for at least 1 hour. Serve warm or at room temperature, with whipped cream if desired.

Happy holidays!

The promotion of John R. Tyson in October has raised eyebrows among corporate governance experts and the business-friendly Wall Street Journal, which pointed out potential conflicts of interest, including whether the company’s board—again, chaired by a guy he calls “Dad”—will hold him accountable for his performance. John R. Tyson is a great-grandson of the company’s founder, and both his father and his aunt sit on the board.

The new title comes with a big pay raise. The Wall Street Journal reports that the younger Tyson will receive an annual base salary of $650,000 and an increase in his target annual incentive payment from 90 percent to 110 percent of his annual base salary. The previous CFO’s total compensation package in 2021 exceeded $5.2 million.

So how exactly did John R. Tyson land such a big job? And what is his track record since joining the family business?

If at first you don’t succeed . . . move up!

According to his official bio and his LinkedIn profile, John R. Tyson joined Tyson Foods in 2019 as executive vice president for strategy and chief sustainability officer. With an MBA degree and previous work experience in investment banking and as a private equity and venture capital investor, it’s not clear he had any particular qualification to head up sustainability. More likely, it was just a good place to begin his climb up the corporate ladder.

As chief sustainability officer, he inherited a public pledge, made a year before he arrived on the scene, to shift 2 million acres of cropland to more sustainable practices by 2020. Even though that acreage is just 20 percent of the company’s total farmland footprint, Tyson (the company and the person) hasn’t followed through. As of 2021, Tyson Foods had enrolled a mere fraction of this acreage into a pilot program, and it is unclear how sustainable the management of that fraction really is. Meanwhile, the company has punted the original 2-million-acre commitment to 2025.

Moreover, at the last Tyson Foods shareholder meeting, the Tyson-family-dominated board beat back a resolution calling on the company to study its use of plastic packaging, another important sustainability issue. Around the same time, a Ceres report showed that big meat processors, including Tyson, lag behind other food companies on sustainable water use. And just this week, another new analysis shows that the livestock in Tyson Foods’ supply chain produce as much methane (a potent heat-trapping gas driving climate change) as the entire country of Russia.

Judging by the company’s sustainability performance under the Tyson heir’s leadership, he didn’t exactly do a bang-up job before moving up to the C-suite. Nowhere else could you fail so hard and get a big juicy promotion. Moreover, as Investopedia notes, the CFO position in a big corporation is generally reserved for “very experienced professionals with established track records in their field.”

But this is Tyson Foods.

What can we expect next?

So now Junior is directly in charge of managing Tyson’s finances—no small task given the company’s $53 billion in sales in fiscal year 2022. But in a startling display of immaturity, just a month into his tenure as CFO, John R. Tyson was arrested for public intoxication and criminal trespassing after being found by a woman he reportedly didn’t know, passed out in a bed of her Fayetteville, Arkansas, home. He has apologized to Tyson employees and says he’s seeking treatment, but the incident has raised concerns about nepotism and its impacts—would anyone in a similar situation not named Tyson still be on the job? One corporate governance expert called this “a critical moment” for Tyson Foods, warning, “This lapse of judgment cannot be tolerated for such a serious job.” And the new CFO’s first quarterly earnings call with financial analysts and journalists this week was a doozy.

Earlier this year, Fortune magazine named Tyson Foods the world’s most admired food company for a sixth year running. The improbable designation is the result of an annual survey of “top executives, directors and financial analysts,” who apparently are not troubled by a business model that exploits and endangers workers, cheats farmers and consumers, influences an amount of farmland twice the size of New Jersey, and makes empty sustainability promises at a time when “sustainability” literally means survival on this planet. Because profits, I guess.

For all its pledges and promises, Tyson Foods is showing us that it doesn’t take sustainability seriously. Instead, it treats it as a pet project for grooming young executives, with no real accountability, transparency, or openness to shareholder concerns. Going forward, John R. Tyson will maintain responsibility for sustainability in addition to his new gig. How much can we expect a new, apparently in-over-his-head CFO to focus on sustainability?

Even if he tries to carve out time for it, sustainability at Tyson will be an add-on, an afterthought, an extracurricular, instead of the priority it must be if a food company wants to remain profitable. And if we all want to continue to eat.

Now, more than 150 organizations representing tens of millions of people across this country are saying: Enough.

In a letter sent to President Biden today, these organizations—spanning expertise in nutrition, farming, rural development, racial equity, labor, and climate change, and including the Union of Concerned Scientists—are asking the president to join our call for Congress to pass a Farm Bill that will transform our food and farming system. We’re asking for a bill that reflects the president’s values by centering equity and racial justice; meeting the climate crisis head on; increasing access to healthy food; ending hunger; ensuring safety and dignity for food and farm workers; protecting farms and consumers; and ensuring the safety of our food supply.

When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last month, it was a historic step towards making the nation’s farmers and farmland part of the climate solution and providing underserved farmers with debt relief. That legislation followed unprecedented administrative action by the Biden administration to reduce economic inequality, address a history of discrimination in farming and landownership, promote competition in agriculture, end hunger, confront the climate crisis, improve nutrition and food safety, and protect and support farmers, workers, and communities.

With the next Farm Bill up for reauthorization in 2023 and hearings in the House and in the Senate well underway, the president can and must take leadership to build on his momentum and success. Our nation’s food and farm systems have been shocked and tested by climate change, a global pandemic, supply chain disruptions, significant inflation, and the ripple effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine. With more disruption sure to come, farmers, food workers, and eaters cannot wait another half decade for transformative change. With the next Farm Bill, the Biden administration and Congress can build a food and farm system that:

• Centers racial justice by confronting past discrimination and allocating resources to communities that have been historically underinvested;
• Ends hunger by protecting and strengthening food assistance programs;
• Meets the climate crisis head on by investing in research, technical assistance, and support to make farmers and ranchers more resilient and part of the climate solution;
• Increases access to nutritious food and nutrition security;
• Ensures safety and dignity for the 20 million food and farm workers that feed our nation through a living wage, access to health care, clean housing, the right to organize and join a union, protections from toxic pesticides and extreme heat, and access to citizenship;
• Protects farmers and consumers by continuing to promote competition in the food and agriculture sectors; and
• Ensures the safety of our food supply by addressing pathogens that originate on factory farms and to make the U.S. food supply safe for everyone.

A Farm Bill that does these things would be one President Biden could be proud to sign. He should make that clear to Congress, starting today.

My colleagues have argued forcefully about what’s at stake and how the Inflation Reduction Act would affect the cars we drive. But the nation’s farmers and farmland are also poised to be part of the solution, if only our government would invest meaningfully in it. Here I’ll expand a bit on the provisions of the bill aimed at agriculture.

$20 billion for farmers and resilient farmland

The Inflation Reduction Act would invest $20 billion to help the nation’s farmers respond to climate change. This is less than the $23 billion investment we advocated for in last year’s House-passed legislation. But $20 billion is still a big investment, the largest since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. It’s $20 billion more than we had two weeks ago. And it’s climate-focused at a time when climate impacts on the nation’s farms and communities—from drought in California and its Central Valley to the horrific flooding in Kentucky—are becoming dire.

If passed, the current Senate proposal would inject many of those new dollars into proven US Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs over the next four years—most notably, $3.25 billion annually for the federal Conservation Stewardship Program and $1.3 billion annually for climate-focused technical assistance. These investments would help more farmers plant perennial and cover crops, diversify crop rotations, and pursue other practices that science has shown to store carbon in the soil and make farmland spongier and therefore more resilient to flood and drought.

The Senate bill also includes $300 million for a USDA “carbon sequestration and GHG emissions quantification program.” This will enable the department to add more hard numbers to what we already know about the benefits of healthy, carbon-rich soil.

The legislation would also give an annual boost of $8.45 billion to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), with language clearly instructing the USDA to “prioritize projects and activities that mitigate or address climate change through the management of agricultural production, including by reducing or avoiding greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s important because EQIP has a history of funding agricultural practices and technologies with dubious environmental benefits—things like manure digesters and wastewater holding ponds at giant CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations).

Ultimately, the US Department of Agriculture would have latitude in how to spend funds authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act. And if this legislation passes, as Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has called for, he should act immediately to direct them toward practices that achieve the greatest possible climate and environmental benefits.

Congress: Pass climate legislation now! And then build on it.

While it is vital that Congress act now to invest in the climate-friendly farming practices in the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s much more to be done. Other critical food and agriculture provisions from last year’s House-passed bill are not on the table today. These include nearly $2 billion for climate-focused agriculture research—to fund, for example, scientific studies that can help refine and optimize practices for different kinds of farms in different places.

Another $1.4 billion in USDA assistance and support for underserved farmers and $200 million in additional COVID-19 assistance for frontline food workers, both in last year’s House bill, are also nowhere to be found in the Inflation Reduction Act. But Congress also needs to pass a new five-year farm bill in 2023, and those additional critical investments will be reconsidered there.

In the meantime, this bill paves the way for the next farm bill to be a climate bill. And we don’t have another moment to lose. Tell Congress to act TODAY!

In 2018, Tyson talked a good game about farmland sustainability, pledging in its annual sustainability report to improve environmental practices on 2 million farm acres by 2020. Yet by June 2021, it had enrolled just 408,000 acres—less than a quarter of that commitment—into a pilot program and pushed the larger goal off to 2025.

That’s corporate greenwashing, and we asked our supporters to join us in calling it out in an open letter to Tyson’s chief sustainability officer. Nearly 11,000 of you responded. See the letter below, as published on page 3C of Tyson’s hometown newspaper, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, last Sunday.

The list of signers was a little too long for a newspaper ad, but you can find that here.

Oh, and Tyson is expected to publish its next annual sustainability report in the coming weeks. We’ll be watching for it, and we’ll let you know what it says.

• The Guardian reported last month that global food systems have become frighteningly undiversified—with fewer and fewer varieties of many common foods—making our food supply more vulnerable to the accelerating pace of disruption that will come with climate change. (On a related note, Science News reported on key foods—from millet to mussels—we may need to eat more of, because scientists believe they will be more resilient to climate change.)

• Avian flu continues to wreak havoc on poultry production around the world. Bloomberg reported last week that the current US outbreak, soon to be the worst this country has seen, had already killed 37 million chickens. Culling of infected egg-laying hens at one giant facility in Iowa in April was particularly gruesome and inhumane, affecting not just birds but also workers.

• Multiple recent reports have documented large-scale problems of polluted farmland and water resources, from farm runoff endangering the Mississippi River to toxic “forever chemicals” contaminating farm soils in Maine and across the nation.

• This month, a Columbia University climatologist and agronomist won the prestigious World Food Prize for her pioneering work in modeling the impact of climate change on food production worldwide, a recognition that raises the profile of this critical area of science.

• And last week, the Biden administration announced that it will host the first White House conference on hunger and nutrition in 50 years. It hopes the gathering of experts will lay the groundwork for a much-needed plan to end US hunger—which has spiked during the pandemic—and reduce the nation’s shockingly high rates of diet-related diseases.  

Just this quick roundup of headlines demonstrates the breadth of issues at play in the complex system that puts food on our tables. And if we know anything about complex systems, it’s that they require a systematic approach to science and problem solving.

Federal food policy must invest in systems science

Enter the federal farm bill. This massive piece of legislation encompasses everything from agricultural conservation and nutrition assistance to rural development and trade, and it is reauthorized by Congress every five years. Because the last farm bill was passed in 2018, it is due for an update in 2023. Legislatively speaking, that is right around the corner.

Research is an often-overlooked piece of the farm bill that desperately needs an update. As our rapidly warming climate makes food production more vulnerable, we need systems research that approaches farming, climate and the environment, and nutrition and health equity as interconnected issues and works across disciplines to identify common solutions.

An emerging scientific field—called sustainable nutrition science—is doing just that. In January 2022, scientists and practitioners briefed congressional staff about the power of systems thinking when it comes to food. Here’s a short clip from that briefing:

How can USDA research programs advance sustainable nutrition science?

The Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) at the US Department of Agriculture is the leading competitive grants program for agricultural sciences, supporting research, education, and extension projects that address a wide range of issues throughout the food system—from farm to fork. Currently, much of this funding is dedicated to six priority research areas:

• Plant health and production and plant products
• Animal health and production and animal products
• Food safety, nutrition, and health
• Bioenergy, natural resources, and environment
• Agricultural systems and technology
• Agriculture economics and rural communities

These priority research areas, established via the farm bill, are undoubtedly important. And again, they’re all related. Research in one of these areas might help the federal government implement effective food safety regulations that will keep people from getting sick, for example, or maximize efficiency in agricultural production systems to reduce resource use.

But here’s the hitch: the most significant threats to public health and systems of agricultural production that are embedded in these priority research areas—such as nutrition insecurity, climate change, and environmental degradation—are all related, and our research programs need to treat them as such. Although recent USDA grants suggest that things are already moving in this direction, leveraging legislative language in the farm bill to bring these interconnected issues to the forefront of stated research priorities is essential for developing lasting solutions to large-scale food systems issues and making the most of federal research dollars.

There are several steps that Congress can take in the next farm bill to advance research programs that will generate effective solutions to some of the most pressing challenges facing agricultural production and public health.

First, AFRI research priorities established in the 2023 farm bill must encourage transdisciplinary research that addresses challenges at the intersection of food production, climate and environment, and nutrition, with an emphasis on health equity. Therefore, we recommend that Congress include language in the next farm bill that would ensure AFRI prioritizes this type of research under its food safety, nutrition, and health priority area.

Second, greater funding is needed to support transdisciplinary research. Though the 2018 farm bill reauthorized AFRI to be funded at $700 million a year, the program received just $445 million through 2022 appropriations legislation. Meanwhile, a 2021 UCS analysis estimated that research at the intersection of food production, climate and environment, and nutrition received just $16 million each year—amounting to less than 25 cents out of every thousand dollars in federal research spending. This should be at least tripled to a minimum of $50 million per year, based on demand and unmet need for grant awards, and will require greater funding still if it is to effectively address such large-scale issues as climate change and diet-related disease. Lastly, we urge Congress to prioritize such funding for minority-serving institutions and those engaging in collaborative partnerships and community-based participatory research.

Calling all scientists! Join UCS in calling for expanded federal investments in sustainable nutrition science. Sign our letter to Congress today.