There’s a dirty side to the Trump administration’s campaign to make American soil healthy again: sometimes the plan sounds like it was written by Democrats.
Groups that cheered the Biden administration’s efforts on climate-smart agriculture hear a familiar ring in the Agriculture Department’s new pilot program in regenerative agriculture, which will pay farmers to pick from a list of Washington-approved conservation practices.
Republicans might have cringed at the concept just a few years ago, squeamish about telling farmers how to farm. Now it’s a pillar of the Republican administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which asserts that healthier soil and less pesticide use translate to more nutritious food and hopefully a decline in diet-related illnesses.
Agriculture officials held a webinar last week to update interested parties on the program, though many questions remain, participants said.
“Doesn’t sound like there was much coordination between the administration and the Hill,” said Michael Happ, program associate for climate and rural communities at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which has criticized the program for overlooking some beneficial conservation practices and favoring bigger farms.
The Trump program is far from a carbon copy of Democratic priorities. Among other differences, officials said the regenerative agriculture program steers funding straight to farmers rather than some of the corporations and big agribusinesses that were enlisted in the Biden administration’s climate-smart agriculture efforts.
The administration has also dropped the language of climate change, asserting that farmers should be rewarded simply for the measurable on-farm benefits of reduced plowing, managed livestock grazing and other conservation practices.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highlighted the conservation programs’ recent shortcomings in an op-ed in Newsweek on Dec. 17.
“Like so much in government, they have become entangled in political agendas and layers of bureaucracy that hinder access to critical resources, leaving well-meaning producers in the lurch,” they said. “Unlike previous administrations, President Trump listens to farmers and gives them what they need to thrive.”
Still, the approach is close enough to the Democratic administration’s that organizations previously aligned with Biden-era priorities say the Trump team has the right idea — as long as a pared-down USDA can summon enough field staff to support the effort.
Even the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which criticizes many of the Republican administration’s policies, found something to applaud in the new program: a requirement for soil testing.
“That is so positive,” said Jesse Womack, a policy analyst at the NSAC, although he added that the NSAC has other concerns, including around USDA staffing.
Here’s how the program works: Farmers will be paid to take on specific conservation practices that build the “soil microbiome” — a network of microorganisms that make soil more productive — and the USDA will verify benefits like carbon sequestration and water retention through soil testing that’s mandatory for farmers who enroll.
As long as farmers engage in at least one practice from the list, such as planting cover crops, they can sign up for the experiment and receive incentive payments. The $700 million pilot is an offshoot of already-established conservation programs such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, meaning the basics of applying and working with the USDA are already familiar to most farmers.
Better yet, according to Kennedy, the program’s principles offer improved nutrition. The initiative encourages “a model that emphasizes soil health, and with soil health comes nutrient density,” Kennedy declared at a December news conference with Rollins and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
‘Regenerative’ or ‘climate-smart’?
That’s where some of the cracks begin to show.
Major commodity groups like the Western Sugar Cooperative, representing sugar producers, have been fighting Kennedy’s reasoning for years. Often, the groups have been aligned with Republicans on the Agriculture committees in Congress.
Western Sugar took issue with the idea during the most recent House Agriculture Committee hearing on regenerative agriculture, four years ago. Invited by the then-minority Republicans to testify, the co-op’s vice president and chief scientist, Rebecca Larson, told lawmakers there’s “copious amounts of scientific research from peer-reviewed journals that shows that there’s no correlation between soil health and nutrition within a plant.”
Merely suggesting a correlation, Larson warned the committee, could discourage people from eating nonorganic produce that’s just as healthy. Larson didn’t return an email message seeking comment.
One of the majority Democrats’ witnesses, from the organic Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, countered he could produce studies demonstrating the opposite is true.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine comes down in the middle, saying the linkages between farm practices and crops’ nutritional values aren’t entirely clear, though greater yields make more nutritious food available.
What’s not in dispute is the need to rescue the nation’s soil, which has degraded through decades of intensive agriculture and erosion. Farmers worry about soil conditions on about half of the country’s acreage in soybeans, wheat, cotton and oats, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.
While last week’s webinar by the Natural Resources Conservation Service clarified some of the specifics, key questions remain, including how the USDA will implement the pilot with a staff reduced by several thousand employees last year and how urban agriculture programs previously targeted for cuts will be included as Rollins promised, according to participants.
Asked for an update about urban agriculture, a USDA spokesperson told POLITICO’S E&E News, “NRCS will have more to share in the future.”
When the program is in full swing this growing season, farmers will be able to choose from 17 conservation practices. That’s a fraction of the more than 50 practices the NRCS listed as eligible for “climate smart” conservation funding in 2024 — a list congressional Republicans called too restrictive.
Groups like the Environmental Working Group say the USDA should expand the list of eligible practices to more closely resemble the climate-smart list the NRCS adopted during the Biden administration. “We definitely think there are too few,” said Anne Schechinger, the organization’s Midwest director.
Robert Bonnie, who helped craft conservation programs as an agriculture undersecretary during the Biden administration, said disputes about terms like “climate-smart” mask what’s really a wide consensus about practices that are good for the environment and boost crop production.
“You could easily scratch off ‘regenerative’ and put in ‘climate smart,’” Bonnie said.
Disagreements around pesticides cloud the conversation, too, Bonnie said, because MAHA advocates overlook the reality that farmers usually have to kill cover crops before planting corn or whatever else they’re planning to grow. That usually means the use of chemical weed killers, especially if they don’t till the soil — another “regenerative” practice.
The loaded vocabulary soured Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), the top Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, who pledged in 2022 to fight to keep such terms out of the five-year farm bill — a promise he’s kept as chair.
“I have been leaning into the climate discussion,” Thompson said at the time. “But I will not have us suddenly incorporate buzzwords like regenerative agriculture into the farm bill or overemphasize climate within the conservation or research title, while undermining the other, long-standing environmental benefits that these programs provide.”
Thompson may yet have a say in how the new program works. Rollins said the lawmaker’s “SUSTAINS Act,” which encourages companies to contribute money to conservation, will supplement the funds the USDA is contributing.
That would be a win for Thompson, whose bill became law in a fiscal 2023 spending bill but languished at the Agriculture Department during the Biden administration. The details on that part of the plan also haven’t been fully revealed, and a spokesperson for the USDA, Allie Herring, said Thursday the committee didn’t have any new information to share.
Contact this reporter on Signal at hellmarcman.49
