The food and farm system is vast, complex and global. The United States occupies an important role in the global food system, both as a nation of consumers and one of vast food and fiber production. The Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) plays an important role in what is grown in the United States, how it’s grown, who grows it and what the final product is.
The Secretary of Agriculture shapes the direction of a department with nearly 100,000 employees. In the past, secretaries have overseen massive changes to the ag sector — during the Biden Administration, Secretary Tom Vilsack oversaw billions of dollars invested in what USDA called Climate Smart Agriculture. During the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Secretary Earl Butz shepherded in a new era of industrialized farming at the expense of small family farms, abolished buffer stocks and delivered the now-famous message to farmers: “Get big or get out.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first Agriculture Secretary, Henry Wallace, helped craft the architecture of what USDA is today, including the precursor to today’s Farm Service Administration (FSA) and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Wallace’s USDA also implemented reserve programs meant to raise prices for farmers while managing supply of crops during the Great Depression. During Trump’s first term, USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue moved two important USDA agencies out of Washington, D.C., resulting in the loss of many experienced scientists, economists and researchers, just in time for the coronavirus pandemic to hit, roiling agriculture supply chains and creating uncertainty for farmers.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, does not have an extensive history with agriculture policy, though she did grow up on a farm in Texas, was involved with FFA and 4-H, and graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in agricultural development. Rollins’s policy experience includes heading conservative think-tanks such as the America First Policy Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, as well as leading the Domestic Policy Council during Trump’s first term. In these roles, Rollins has been critical of Democratic climate policies and has advocated against farmland ownership by Chinese citizens.
If Rollins is confirmed as Secretary of Agriculture (chances are high that she will be), she and U.S. farmers will be faced with the effects of climate change, a landscape dominated by a handful of large multinational agriculture companies, and one where debt, unreliable crop prices, high input costs, global conflicts and trade instability keep farmers from feeling secure. Ahead of Rollins’s confirmation process beginning this week in the U.S. Senate, we have compiled three questions that we believe are important for Rollins to address in the next administration.
Question 1: What is your plan for staffing up county USDA offices to meet farmer demand for programs?
Across USDA programs, one of the biggest barriers to connecting farmers with resources is staffing levels and work burden. Agri-Pulse wrote an informative five-part series on the issues facing staffing for conservation programs at USDA in late 2024. In this series, Agri-Pulse identifies a number of factors that lead to high turnover at local offices, such as low pay, high cost of living, high work burden, and jobs that are advertised as field work that end up being mostly paperwork.
The lack of adequate staffing is also an issue that the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) has raised in its Closed Out series, an issue that impedes USDA from doing the outreach needed to fully serve small and midscale farms in programs such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), where nearly two-thirds of farmer applicants to the programs are rejected. As farm programs are currently set up, there is a high need for farmers to work directly with USDA staff in applying for programs and receiving technical assistance. When there is reduced staff capacity, fewer farmers are able to access the programs.
There is also a strong need for specialized technical expertise in local USDA offices. One example is support for well-managed grazing. Until funding dried up in the 2010s, USDA offices were home to designated grazing experts who could provide assistance to those wishing to improve their grazing operations. As designated funding for grazing-specific technical service providers dried up, pastures were converted to row crop fields or abandoned altogether. In recent years there has been an uptick in funding for the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative (GLCI), which has brought back some of this expertise to local offices, as well as connecting grazers to technical support from experts at places like Texas A&M and the Maine Farmland Trust.
Programs as varied as EQIP, the Whole Farm Revenue Protection Program (WFRP), farm loans, and market access programs all require well-trained, consistent staffing in county offices. Trust is crucial, and any farmer will tell you they want to trust the person sitting across the table from them. Trust takes time, and USDA should do everything in its power to retain talent at local USDA offices for the benefit of farmers and rural communities.
Question 2: What should USDA’s role in climate mitigation and adaptation be?
In what seems like a yearly trend, 2024 was the hottest year on record. Farmers have found themselves dealing with historic droughts, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, increased pest pressure and non-native plant species that are all made worse by a changing climate.
Many farmers have adapted to these conditions in many ways, including planting more drought-resistant crop varieties, diversifying what they grow and implementing conservation practices. Despite these efforts, there are still many policy barriers that farmers face in building climate resilience. Crop insurance, as it currently exists, prevents farmers from diversifying the crops they grow. Even something as simple as adding wheat to a corn-soy rotation to provide a potential dry weather crop can lead to a loss of crop insurance. Highly diversified farms (growing different types of crops or integrating animals) are encouraged to use the Whole Farm Revenue Protection Program, yet struggle to find insurance providers who understand the program or their farming methods. As a result, the program has struggled.
In the west and elsewhere, farmers and ranchers find that the water that helped build their operations is running dry, while, until recently, there was little institutional support for adapting farms to growing dry weather crops and forage. Even now, in places like southwest Kansas, farmers and local water districts are forced to find solutions on their own while the Ogallala Aquifer gets lower.
In many cases, farmers know what they need to do in order to adapt to a changing climate. Assistance from USDA will be needed so that these farmers can achieve their goals, stay on the land, and keep us from seeing another Farm Crisis, this one caused by climate change.
Question 3: How can USDA promote better competition in the food system?
The agricultural marketplace is one of the most concentrated sectors in the American economy. In each node of the food system, we find just a handful of companies controlling the market. This issue is especially prevalent in beef, seeds, poultry, equipment, and grocery stores, as well as other areas of the food system. Such a concentrated marketplace disadvantages farmers and consumers alike, leading to low prices and high costs for farmers and high prices for consumers, enriching those companies in the middle. The National Farmers Union has highlighted how this negatively impacts farmers through its analysis of farmers’ share of Thanksgiving food, earning in some cases just 6 cents per pound of turkey that costs the consumer $2.42 per pound.
USDA has the opportunity, through strengthening rules such as the Packers and Stockyards Act and increasing resources for enforcement, to support commonsense market protections for farmers, allow local and regional supply chains to compete on a level playing field, and support rural jobs rather than stacking the deck for multinational companies. Stronger rules have been finalized to improve market fairness for poultry growers, but more needs to be done to require more transparency in livestock markets and to protect farmers’ legal rights when facing unfair practices by industry.
USDA should expand its work with the Department of Justice to ensure that all antitrust rules and regulations are being followed and that farmers and others in the food system are given a fair shake.
Conclusion
The food and farm system is necessarily a vast and complex one. USDA plays a huge role in what we grow, what we eat, how much farmers are paid and how much consumers pay at the grocery store. The next Secretary of Agriculture will face many issues including the climate crisis, staffing shortages across USDA and an economic landscape that is stacked against farmers and in favor of large corporations. We encourage the next Agriculture Secretary to take these issues seriously and actively work to improve farmers’ livelihoods at all scales, production methods and areas of the United States.
