Can RFK Kneecap American Agriculture?

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) resulted in a collective exhalation from the agricultural community. Everyone had been holding their breath, concerned that newly re-elected Trump would prioritize the nascent Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement in determining who would run the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

While pharmaceutical firms, conventional medical providers, and people who (rightfully) believe in vaccine effectiveness have legitimate concerns about RFK’s role at HHS, anxieties about the mess he could make for American agricultural producers have been, at least partially, muted. RFK’s vision for a future of U.S. agriculture chalk full of grass-fed livestock, raw milk production, and limited to no pesticide use will have to wait, in part, for another day. From HHS, there is little risk that the environmental lawyer-turned-influence could enact his vision wholesale, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. food and farming is out of the woods.

RFK’s potential role at HHS still holds some power over how America farms and what America eats. RFK could alter how the Food and Drug Administration regulates biotechnology products or trace amounts of agricultural input chemicals like pesticides, and shape nutrition guidelines in ways that alter the economics of farming, potentially harming farmers or incentivizing less-productive and more environmentally destructive farming practices that will increase prices for consumers.

Altogether, an RFK-led HHS has the capacity to make life harder for agricultural producers, decrease food production, and increase food prices for the American consumer, all in the name of conspiratorial thinking and a poor understanding of both agronomy and economics. It will be important for Senators from agricultural states to oppose RFK’s nomination to head HHS.

Not Out of the Woods Yet

At HHS, RFK would mainly wield power over U.S. agriculture through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

With the exception of some meat, poultry, and egg products regulated by USDA, FDA regulates the foods that American consumers purchase and eat, with implications on how that food is grown. It also regulates products derived from new varieties of plants and animals, like GM or gene edited products. And finally, FDA regulates pesticide residues on produce.

Through these mechanisms, an RFK-led HHS has the capacity to alter pesticide use, curb biotechnology innovation, and potentially challenge GM products already on the market. Altogether, these will have a smaller impact than his stated overarching goals for U.S. agriculture, but he could still bring significant negative consequences for U.S. farmers and consumers.

An overhaul of pesticide residue regulations that either bans residues of certain pesticides or severely lowers the allowable levels below what is already deemed healthy would change what producers could use and how much they could use, opening up their products to increasing threats from a variety of pests. Pesticides have become a significant source of criticism for U.S. farmers since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring led to the ban of DDT, but contemporary pushback against products like glyphosate go far beyond the scientific evidence.

Pesticide residues, as currently allowed, pose little threat to human health, and have not been linked to the litany of complaints made by anti-pesticide groups, which claim contemporary pesticides like glyphosate cause cancer, celiac disease, and far more. At the same time, modern pesticides are an integral part of maintaining agricultural yields in the face of growing pest concerns. They are tailored to specific crops, regions, and pests, and when used alongside precision agriculture, have targeted delivery systems that reduce overall use and secondary consequences for farmers and local ecosystems.

Threatening to either slow-roll biotechnology innovation or curb the use of existing GM products has significant downside risks as well.

The vast majority of U.S. corn, soybeans, and cotton are GM—more than 90 percent for each. The global adoption of GM seeds has allowed for an increased output of 330 million tonnes of soybeans and 550 million tonnes of corn since 1996. In the absence of GM seeds, the world would have otherwise needed to convert more than 23 million hectares of extra land to farmland—a land area equivalent to roughly the size of Ecuador. In the United States, increased yields combined with cost savings meant farmers saved more than $100 per hectare of crop production compared to conventional seeding. On a global scale, GM seed use increased global agricultural yields by 22 percent and increased farmer profit by 68 percent between 1996 and 2014.

Backtracking on this progress threatens both producers and consumers.

Turning back the biotechnology clock on agriculture would lower yields, increase crop prices, and increase global land-use for agriculture. All in, that would threaten biodiversity and likely have significant impacts on global hunger. In the United States, it would assuredly raise food prices while also making farms less profitable by increasing labor costs and use of pesticides and other inputs.

Slowing down the pace of innovation by making biotechnology regulation at FDA more burdensome would have similar effects on the future of U.S. agriculture. By leaving new technologies to fester in regulatory purgatory sacrifices yield improvements, cost reductions for consumers and producers, and threatens U.S. farmer’s ability to respond to novel pests and a changing climate. Given the Trump administration’s interest in gutting the civil service, attempts to gum up the regulatory process by RFK would likely have lasting impacts on the speed by which new technologies can come to market, limiting agribusinesses and producers from responding to constantly changing factors in agriculture.

The Kennedy Starvation Plan

To some, RFK’s potential impact on the FDA might seem insignificant. We shouldn’t be feeding children produce with pesticide residues, or foods that contain genetically modified organisms, they’d argue. And while many of those who either nod along to RFK’s ramblings about food, or have equally extreme positions have come to those conclusions based on truly caring for their own consumption and that of their family, the harsh reality of RFK’s position is a world without enough food. And to understand the real harm that RFK and his MAHA coalition can do, it’s important to understand the context of his ideas about food and farming.

The core of RFK’s vision for the future of food is a conspiracy: big agriculture and chemical companies, unhappy with their profits, have decided to poison the world through the green revolution and high productivity agriculture. They do so through genetically modified (GM) products, through pesticides that linger on fruits and vegetables as they make their way to your kitchen, and through grotesque hormones, antibiotics, and feed additives that get pigs, cows, and chickens unnaturally fat and ready to slaughter. This story is false, but longstanding and enduringly popular on both sides of the political spectrum. And that popularity is frightening.

If taken to its logical conclusion, RFK’s thinking on food—similar to that of the Rodale Institute, Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, the Liver King, Vandana Shiva, and the plethora of others peddling food quackery—is fundamentally dangerous to the health and livelihood of American farmers, the American consumer, and the rest of the world. That’s because the core of modern agriculture— high-productivity row crop and livestock production—is the source of the majority of calories in the United States, and a key contributor to affordable food for the rest of the global population. And while so-called alternative production practices, like organic and regenerative farming, have grown in popularity alongside an overarching critique of modern, large-scale agriculture, farms using those practices make up a small proportion of agricultural production.

In the United States, very large farms make up only 6% of the total number of farms, but account for more than 60% of total agricultural production. And this is a good thing. Large farms are able to take advantage of economies of scale, leverage larger amounts of capital, and improve productivity compared to smaller farmers who do not have the resources to employ the latest technologies that improve yields with fewer inputs.

Those large farms can utilize the latest developments in seeds—faster growing, higher yielding, and more resilient varieties that reduce the need for fertilizer, pesticides, or other physical interventions. They can purchase machinery that cuts labor needs, reducing costs for the consumer and allowing rural communities to diversify away from farming—or, relocate, as has been the case historically. Labor saving technologies can also reduce the drudgery of work that is part and parcel of food production, in some cases saving life and limb.

The process of agglomeration in agriculture has also made U.S. agriculture crucial to global food security. Despite growing competition from Brazil, China, Russia, and others, the United States is the world's largest food exporter, and is a top producer across a number of key agricultural commodities, making the American farmer a crucial lynchpin in global food prices.

Despite all this, RFK and his cohort of MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) influencers and alternative foodies want to kneecap American agriculture by breaking up big farms, getting rid of factory farmed meat, and banning GMOs and modern pesticides. High productivity agriculture, in this imagination, can be replaced with a more “wholesome” organic and regenerative production system that would provide products for local farmers markets. This would, according to RFK, be healthier, better for farmers, and the environment.

But, their imaginings are fundamentally wrong. Like most broad-scale critiques of industrial agricultural production, RFK’s fails to understand both the necessity of the system at hand, and the sheer scale of disruption that would quickly ensue if that system were to be sacrificed.

To RFK and his acolytes, modern agriculture signifies something like a fall from grace. We use to eat real food, they say, and not rely on unnatural interventions like biotechnology and pesticides. Their solution is a return to the promised land before technology went too far. But what they are unwilling to admit is that we are currently the best fed generation in history. American agricultural abundance, made possible by the technologies at which RFK sneers, has allowed for population and economic growth at levels unimaginable to our forebears, who drank raw milk and ate seasonal produce from their backyard gardens—and at times starved to death in the winter.

Between 1910 and 2020, the U.S. population grew from just over 90 million to over 330 million. Over that time, American agriculture has been able to more than quadruple its output, while drastically reducing the amount of labor needed. In 1900, 41 percent of Americans labored in agriculture, today less than 2 percent do.

Returning to the kind of agriculture that RFK finds healthy would mean massive productivity losses, a broad reorientation of American labor back to food production, and a massive increase in the price of food for everyone. It’s infeasible to imagine the sheer scale of change, mostly because it’s abjectly preposterous.

The recent example of Sri Lanka banning agricultural chemicals in April 2021 represents a microcosm of what a full scale shift to low-productivity agriculture might look like in the United States. Within months of Sri Lanka’s chemical input ban, agricultural yields fell, food prices skyrocketed, and social tensions erupted. By November 2021, Sri Lanka’s government removed the ban, but the damage had already been done, as food price inflation in Sri Lanka outpaced much of the world in 2021 and 2022.

The Sri Lanka chemical ban was influenced by Vandana Shiva, whom RFK called a hero when she joined his podcast in 2022. Shiva appeared on RFK’s podcast twice in recent years. During both interviews, Shiva and RFK expounded upon numerous conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, the Green Revolution, and industrial agriculture more broadly. At no point did either reference the harm that Sri Lanka’s ban wrought on its economy or population. Both would rather restore “harmony” to human-nature interactions, even if it means hunger and poverty for the masses, than to use the safe technologies we have to grow enough food for everyone.

If the United States were to follow the path advocated for by Shiva and RFK, American consumers would be unable to feed themselves and their families and the entire global agricultural commodity market would suffer. Prices would boom, and without a clear path in sight for the United States to return to higher productivity, those price increases would sustain. The United States would completely cede its role as food exporter to competitors such as Brazil, China, and Russia, foreclosing more than $170 billion in revenue from the farm sector.

RFK’s dream to see a return to nutritious food is really a nightmare for the rest of us. But for the ultra privileged observers of the food system like Shiva or Kennedy, high prices are just the “true” cost of improvement and health. For many around the world, prolonged high food prices are a recipe for hunger and starvation.

A Shaky Alliance

MAGA and MAHA are a shaky alliance at best. But their shared search for an alternative to mainstream frameworks for how to govern—the polity or the body—connects them. They both stand in opposition to their perceived technocratic, corrupted, and perverted enemies. While Trump’s electoral base may share a mental framework with the RFK-inspired and sometimes-led alternative food and health base, Trump’s institutional partners—namely, the pharmaceutical, insurance, and agribusiness communities—are firmly opposed to their vision for a radically altered medical, agricultural, or food system.

And the Trump administration clearly aims to work within these contradictions, as exemplified by its pick of Brooke Rollins, a relatively unknown quantity but one supported by agricultural industry groups, for USDA secretary. Rollins, a policy aide in Trump’s first term, has led the America First Policy Institute since Trump’s re-election loss in 2020. The majority of the institute’s agricultural work has focused on the threat of Chinese ownership of American farmland. Farm groups’ vocal support of Rollins and relative silence on RFK (to date) signals an inherent tension at the core of Trump’s cabinet picks.

Most are expecting Rollins to moderate RFK’s influence on the Trump administration’s decision making when it comes to agriculture. But, if the Senate confirms RFK’s appointment, there is little stopping him from hamstringing technological advances and proven farm practices key to the maintenance of U.S. agricultural abundance and global competitiveness. While Rollins will have the reins over USDA, RFK could still wreak havoc.