The Trump administration’s campaign to make America’s soil healthy again has a dirty side. At times, the plan sounds like it was written by Democrats.
Groups that cheered the Biden administration’s climate-smart agriculture efforts are hearing familiar echoes in the USDA’s new regenerative agriculture pilot program that pays farmers to choose from a list of Washington-approved conservation practices.
Just a few years ago, Republicans might have balked at the concept and resisted teaching farmers how to farm. It’s now a pillar of the Republican administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” policy, which argues that healthier soils and less pesticide use will lead to more nutritious food and, hopefully, fewer diet-related illnesses.
Agriculture officials held a webinar last week to update stakeholders on the program, but many questions remain, participants said.
“It doesn’t seem like there was a lot of coordination between the administration and Hill,” said Michael Hupp, program associate for climate and rural communities at the Agricultural Trade Policy Institute, criticizing the program for ignoring some beneficial conservation efforts and favoring larger farms.
The Trump plan is far from a carbon copy of Democratic priorities. Officials said, among other things, the regenerative agriculture program directs funds directly to farmers, rather than to some of the companies and big agribusinesses that have joined the Biden administration’s climate-smart agriculture efforts.
The administration also removed the word climate change and argued that farmers should be compensated only for tangible on-farm benefits from reduced tillage, managed livestock grazing and other conservation practices.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highlighted recent shortcomings in conservation programs in a Dec. 17 Newsweek editorial.
“Like many other government enterprises, the government is caught up in political agendas and bureaucracy that block access to critical resources, leaving well-intentioned producers in the lurch,” they said. “Unlike previous administrations, President Trump will listen to farmers and give them what they need to thrive.”
Still, the approach is close enough to the Democratic administration’s approach that organizations previously aligned with Biden-era priorities argue that the Trump team’s idea is sound, as long as the cut-down USDA can muster enough field staff to support the effort.
Even the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which has criticized many of the Republican administration’s policies, found praise in the new program. It is mandatory for soil testing.
“This is a very positive thing,” said Jesse Womack, a policy analyst at NSAC, but added that NSAC has other concerns, including staffing at the Department of Agriculture.
Here’s how this program works: Farmers are rewarded for engaging in specific conservation practices that build the “soil microbiome” (a network of microorganisms that make soil more productive), and the USDA verifies benefits such as carbon sequestration and water retention through mandatory soil testing for registered farmers.
Farmers can sign up for the experiment and receive incentives as long as they engage in at least one practice on the list, such as planting cover crops. The $700 million pilot is an outgrowth of already established conservation programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, meaning the basics of USDA application and cooperation are already familiar to most farmers.
Even better, according to Kennedy, the program’s principles provide improved nutrition. The initiative “encourages a model that emphasizes soil health, and soil health involves nutrient density,” President Kennedy declared at a December press conference with Rollins and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
“Regenerative” or “climate change”?
That’s where some cracks start to show.
Major commodity groups such as the Western Sugar Cooperative, which represents sugar producers, have long opposed President Kennedy’s claims. In many cases, these groups are aligned with Republicans on the Congressional Agriculture Committee.
Western Sugar challenged the idea during the most recent House Agriculture Committee hearing on regenerative agriculture four years ago. Rebecca Larson, the co-op’s vice president and chief scientist, who was invited to testify by then-minority Republicans, told lawmakers there was “a large body of scientific research from peer-reviewed journals that shows there is no correlation between soil health and nutrients in the plant.”
Larson warned the committee that simply suggesting a correlation could deter people from eating non-organic produce that is just as healthy. Larson did not respond to an email seeking comment.
One of the Democratic majority witnesses, from the Organic Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, countered that he could present research proving the opposite is true.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is in the middle, saying that while higher yields make more nutritious food available, the link between farm practices and the nutritional value of crops is not entirely clear.
What is undisputed is the need to save the country’s soils, which have been degraded by decades of intensive farming and erosion. Farmers are concerned about soil conditions on about half of the country’s soybean, wheat, cotton and oat acreage, according to the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
Last week’s Natural Resources Conservation Service webinar revealed some details, but key questions remain, including how the USDA will conduct the pilot with a workforce it cut by thousands last year and how it will incorporate urban agriculture programs that have previously been subject to cuts, as Rollins promised.
Asked for an update on urban agriculture, a USDA spokesperson told Politico’s E&E News, “NRCS will share more in the future.”
Once the program is in full swing this growing season, farmers will be able to choose from 17 conservation practices. This is part of more than 50 practices that NRCS has listed for “climate-smart” conservation funding in 2024, a list that Republicans in Congress have criticized as too restrictive.
Groups such as the Environmental Working Group have argued that the USDA should expand the list of eligible practices to more closely match the climate-smart list adopted by NRCS during the Biden administration. “We definitely think that number is too low,” said Anne Shechinger, the group’s Midwest director.
Robert Bonney, who helped develop the conservation program as undersecretary of agriculture under the Biden administration, said controversy over terms like “climate-smart” masks actual broad agreement about efforts to increase crop production in ways that are good for the environment.
“It’s easy to take out the word ‘regenerative’ and put in the word ‘climate-smart,'” Bonnie says.
Disagreements over pesticides are also clouding the conversation, Bonney said. MAHA proponents overlook the reality that farmers typically have to kill cover crops before planting corn or whatever else they plan to grow. This usually means the use of chemical herbicides, especially if the soil is not tilled. This is also an act of “regeneration.”
Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania), the top Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, is fed up with the vocabulary and has vowed to fight to remove such terms from the five-year farm bill in 2022 — a promise he has kept as committee chairman.
“I’ve been leaning towards the climate change debate,” Thompson said at the time. “But we will not suddenly incorporate buzzwords like regenerative agriculture into the Farm Bill or overemphasize climate in conservation and research titles while undermining the other long-standing environmental benefits these programs provide.”
Thompson may still have a say in how the new program works. Rollins said his SUSTAINS Act, which encourages businesses to fund conservation efforts, would supplement the USDA funding.
That would be a victory for Thompson, who passed the bill in the 2023 spending bill but stalled at the Agriculture Department under the Biden administration. Details of that part of the plan also haven’t been fully disclosed, and Agriculture Department spokeswoman Allie Herring said Thursday the committee had no new information to share.
Contact this reporter for Signal at hellmarcman.49.
