“The interaction between MAHA and climate change, it’s an awkward dance,” Ela said. As a dedicated environmentalist, he’s worried about the changing climate. But he also sees the value in the MAHA movement’s message, because “I think we could eat a lot healthier,” he said.
Heirloom tomatoes grown at Ela Family Farms. (Photo credit: Regan Choi)
“Farmers are definitely responding to more extreme weather, and that makes it difficult to plan,” said Kate Mendenhall, an Iowa farmer who also serves as the executive director of the Organic Farmers Association. “We have so much knowledge about climate change and what type of practices help or hurt the planet and make for a more stable growing environment. I think they see and are experiencing the effects of climate change and want to be able to keep farming and have a little bit more stability.”
In fact, a 2022 survey by the Organic Farming Research Foundation found that 80 percent of farmers transitioning to organic practices cited “greater resilience to climate change” as a motivating factor.
“We’ve found that crops grown at CO2 concentrations we expect to see by the middle of the century have reduced levels of things like iron and zinc and protein, which are super important from a health standpoint.”
Kennedy is a longtime critic of pesticide use and promoter of organic practices, and his MAHA movement includes many farmers and consumers who are pushing for more support for organic and regenerative agriculture. These two approaches to agriculture, which intersect and overlap in different ways depending on how they’re practiced, can build healthy soil and biodiversity on farms, creating systems that are both better for the climate and improve the nutrition of the food produced.
But so far, the administration’s actions have done more to hurt organic and regenerative farmers than help them. The USDA retooled the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that led to thousands of farms around the country losing funding allocated to implement regenerative practices. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has also canceled more than a billion dollars in funding for local food programs that primarily benefit regenerative and organic farms.
Instead, Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill will send more dollars to conventional, commodity farms that rely on large-scale, chemical-intensive farming practices.
Some farmers are optimistic that the upcoming MAHA report will include policy recommendations related to soil health and regenerative agriculture. However, powerful agricultural lobby groups have been pushing back on that front, especially on any provisions regulating pesticide use, and ultimately Kennedy is not in charge of farm policy. Still, he hinted at his desire to push things in that direction.
As a result of his water challenges, Steve Ela has started taking acres of trees out of production. It’s the only obvious solution he can see at the moment, he said: If there’s going to be less water available, he’s going to grow less fruit.
“We need to give off-ramps to farmers so that they can transition to biodynamic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and do it in a way that is going to maintain the vibrancy of their farms,” he said at the July roundtable. “We have a president now who is not only absolutely committed to the survival and prosperity of American farmers but is also looking around the corners, who is looking to the future.”
The trouble is, even if farm policy bucks the Big Ag headwinds and takes up the IPPC recommendations to shift to more regenerative, diversified systems, it won’t be enough to guarantee a future filled with healthy food if the administration continues to roll the clock back on overall emissions, Kerr said.
“I think it’s very hard to adapt if we are going over 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming], and if we are ramping up our greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “The adaptation strategies that we’ve identified are not adequate in the face of that kind of global warming.”
Elisa Lane, owner of Two Boots Farm, with the solar array that sits behind her fields on the edge of forested acres. Installation of the system was delayed to the USDA funding freeze. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)
At Two Boots Farm, Lane is doing her part on all fronts. In addition to building healthy soil and keeping a biodiverse forest intact on most of her acreage, she recently installed a solar array to shift the farm to renewable energy. The project was delayed significantly when the grant funding she had received from the USDA through a program that helps farmers install solar was frozen. It has since been unfrozen, and she’s now close to getting it up and running.
The system will save her around $500 per month in energy costs, she estimates, but she’s not sure if tax credits she was hoping for were eliminated in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Next on her list is crop insurance, which is difficult for small, diversified farms like hers to qualify and apply for.
In 2022, crop insurance subsidies cost taxpayers a record $19.3 billion, up from an average that stayed under $4 billion in the early aughts.
“The government will hopefully help in one way or another,” Lane said. “They have the ability to help on the front end with resiliency, or they’re going to be helping us on the back end, when everybody’s screwed financially because we’re losing crops.”
