While the Make America Health Again movement supports alternative farming, few of Trump’s policies promote healthy agricultural landscapes. A leaked version of the second MAHA Commission Report underscores these concerns.
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While the Make America Health Again movement supports alternative farming, few of Trump’s policies promote healthy agricultural landscapes. A leaked version of the second MAHA Commission Report underscores these concerns.
August 19, 2025
In North Carolina, TendWell Farm produces organic vegetables on several hundred acres. The USDA recently cut funding to programs that were helping the farm earn thousands of dollars per month. (Photo courtesy of TendWell Farm)
This is the second in a series of articles examining the promises and policies of the MAHA movement. Read the first story here.
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Over the past two decades, Will Harris has become a thought leader and superstar among farmers intent on transforming American agriculture. At White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, he moved his cattle, chickens, and hogs back outside onto pastures, certified his vegetables organic, invested in practices that build healthy soil, built processing infrastructure, and created his own distribution networks.
In the process, his operation became a model for treating animals and the land well while building financial, community, and environmental resilience across America’s rural landscape. Along the way, he hasn’t shied away from positioning his approach as a means to take back power from global meatpackers and end harms caused by industrial food production.
It’s the kind of farming—and thinking—that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has long celebrated as a health and environmental advocate.
So while Harris, who wears a tan cowboy hat and speaks with a soothing Southern drawl, says he’s generally “apolitical,” lately, he’s been engaging in D.C. discourse. That’s because he is “shocked and pleased at how much attention my kind of farming is getting.”
While Kennedy was still running his own campaign for president last year, his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, visited White Oak Pastures. A year later, with Kennedy a member of President Trump’s cabinet, Harris received an invitation to the White House for the release of the administration’s first Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report.
“I’m not saying I was the only farmer there, but I was the only one there that looked like a farmer,” he said. On Instagram, White Oak Pastures posted a photo of Harris in his cowboy hat with his two daughters at the event, plus a photo of Trump and Kennedy. Comments on the photos were heated.
As everyone awaits the official release of the second MAHA Commission report, expected in early September, those remarks point to a divide that exists among farmers who typically agree on things like increasing organic matter, reducing pesticide use, and diversifying crops.
“I’m really delighted to see more conversation around helping people get access to more healthy food. We need that. And we also need to help farmers with the infrastructure to make it happen.”
Like Harris, some farmers are thrilled to hear Kennedy using the word “regenerative” in the halls of power and calling out corporate influence on the food system, and are optimistic that real change is coming. Others question whether Kennedy will walk the walk, given his place in the Trump administration, which has been rolling back environmental protections, supporting increased taxpayer funding for chemical-dependent, commodity agriculture, and cutting support for the small, regenerative farms that the MAHA movement claims to support.
They also say the administration’s aggressive pushback on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives is hurting the young farmers who disproportionately run regenerative farms. The now-delayed (and recently leaked) second report from RFK’s MAHA Commission seems to confirm those concerns.
“We have had a major setback,” said Kate Mendenhall, an Iowa farmer who is also the director of the Organic Farmers Association, describing what organic and regenerative farmers have experienced since the Trump administration took over.
Mendenhall said many farmers fell behind this season because of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) funding freezes and are now reluctant to expand or invest in new practices. Many have also lost technical support due to program cancellations and staff reductions.
“I don’t think we can see the full impact now, but maybe next season we’ll see what comes forward or what we’re lacking this fall and winter,” she said. “I’m really delighted to see more conversation around helping people get access to more healthy food. We need that. And we also need to help farmers with the infrastructure steps they need to make it happen.”
Will Harris of White Oak Pastures.
When Harris started shifting to regenerative practices at White Oak, he said, he thought of himself as an early innovator. But after 25 years that saw little change in the overall farm landscape, he began to think that maybe he’d be a lifelong niche marketer.
“Now all this MAHA talk makes me think that maybe, again, I might be an early innovator,” he said. “And I like that better.”
In other words, Kennedy’s attention feels like overdue recognition for some farmers who have been on the agricultural fringe for a long time.
While the Biden administration made some of the largest investments in history in paying farmers to implement conservation practices, rebuilding regional meat processing infrastructure, and shoring up the local supply chains that small, regenerative farms sell into, it also maintained the overall status quo and didn’t talk about transformation as loudly or as often as Kennedy does.
Harris said he heard talk of those investments but never saw impacts on the ground. What he remembers about the Climate-Smart Commodities Program, a signature initiative of Biden’s USDA, is not that it sent millions of dollars to small, regenerative farms through organizations like Pasa and Working Landscapes North Carolina, but that it directed huge sums of money to Tyson and other commodity ag giants.
Now, the thing that stands out to him about the current USDA is not that its actions seem to place the administration firmly on the side of Big Ag, but that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has repeatedly showcased her working relationship with Kennedy.
“I haven’t seen many programs implemented so far, but it’s still very early on,” Harris said. “I might get disappointed again, but the promise is better than it’s ever been in my lifetime.”
Steve Groff is similarly optimistic.
“The MAHA movement is a dream come true for me, because before I even heard the term, I was doing it,” said Groff, a third-generation farmer in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he farms 200 acres with his son. “We need to eat less junk food and more healthy food, and I think every American agrees that there’s just too much chronic disease. Something’s going on here. We have an opportunity here that is just unbelievable.”
“The MAHA movement is a dream come true for me, because before I even heard the term, I was doing it.”
Groff plants hemp on most of his land; he used to process the crop into CBD oil but is now getting into fiber production for textiles and building materials. He also grows heirloom tomatoes, squash, and pumpkins that he sells to Whole Foods. His farm is certified regenerative by Regenified, which requires farmers to implement certain soil health practices but is not organic, since it does allow the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.
To that end, his fields have been 100 percent no-till since 1996, and he regularly plants cover crops. Because of his attention to soil health and ecosystems, he said, he’s been able to reduce the amount of chemical herbicides and fertilizers he uses over time.
“It’s mimicking nature as much as we can to grow food,” he said. (No-till farming and using cover crops also often rely heavily on pesticides, especially glyphosate, which many in the MAHA movement are opposed to and Kennedy has been critical of in the past.)
Groff said he’s always been a conservative but that he didn’t always fully trust Trump. When Trump joined forces with Kennedy, however, that started to change.
As an example of how farmers might begin to shift to more regenerative practices, he offers the example of how farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1980s were initially resistant to no-till farming and planting cover crops, but increasingly adopted both as awareness grew about how the practices could reduce pollution into the Chesapeake Bay.
“In my area right here, 70 percent of the land is no-till and cover crops. Now, they don’t do it for the Chesapeake Bay, they do it because it’s a better way to farm,” he said. “And the same practices that we started to do for the sake of the Bay now are the same practices to grow healthier food.”
TendWell Farm, in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. (Photo courtesy of TendWell Farm)
The trouble is, that shift largely happened because the federal government and state partners paid farmers to do it. Trump’s budget proposal called for eliminating funding for Chesapeake Bay programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lawmakers in Congress have so far resisted that cut, but the administration has slashed funding and support for farmers trying to shift toward better practices on many other fronts.
At TendWell Farm in western North Carolina, farmer Steven Beltram grows leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables across several hundred acres to sell to grocery stores and other commercial distributors. Not only is the farm certified organic, it’s Real Organic Project certified, adding an extra layer of regenerative cred.
“We really focus on trying to build and restore and make the soil better year over year,” Beltram said.
Hit hard by Hurricane Helene last year, TendWell was grateful to be participating in a USDA initiative called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Program that offered funding to move fresh produce from small farms directly into food banks.
The contract was for about $5,000 a week, a significant amount for a business of their size. It was especially beneficial, he said, because unlike with grocers who demand a certain amount of kale or lettuce regardless of how the crops turn out, TendWell could send the food banks surplus produce, thereby reducing waste.
“That was a good thing for us, and that was a good thing for our neighbors,” he said. “Giving out local produce to the community—I can’t see how anyone could be opposed to that.”
“Giving out local produce to the community—I can’t see how anyone could be opposed to that.”
But in March, the USDA canceled $1 billion that had been allocated to the program and another similar program that connected small farms to schools, ending that source of income for TendWell. At the time, Rollins said repeatedly that she was ending it because it was a COVID-era program and states still had plenty of money left to spend.
At the same time, Rollins’ USDA has also cancelled 2025 funding for the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program, ended the Regional Food Business Centers program, and revised the Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that meant many small, regenerative farms and the organizations that support them have borne the brunt of the impacts.
“It’s interesting to see that the USDA is cutting funding for programs like [Local Food Purchase Assistance] while they’re increasing payments for commodity crop production, and of course all that commodity crop production is based on the use of glyphosate,” Beltram said, referencing the $67 billion bump that commodity growers got in the recent One Big Beautiful Bill. “It really feels like a divided administration. The USDA is for the most part implementing practices that are the exact opposite of the goals of the MAHA movement.”
At the Organic Farmers Association, Mendenhall said she also sees staffing cuts at the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) as potentially undermining MAHA agricultural goals, since NRCS employees in local offices can act as guides for farmers looking to improve their grazing practices to produce grass-fed beef or to get the help they need to reduce chemical use.
“They’ve lost a lot of local technical expertise at NRCS in particular,” she said.
At the same time, cuts to other programs mean agriculture support organizations that provide similar help have also let staff go. “That type of technical assistance that farmers rely on when they’re scaling up or expanding markets has also been lost,” she said.
What Mendenhall would like to see in the MAHA policy recommendations is a reinvestment in helping farmers scale up organic production and enter new markets like school food, hospitals, and the institutional markets that open new doors to wholesale.
“That is the avenue forward, and that’s a great way to increase consumption of organic food, but farmers can’t just do it,” she said. “They need support in order to scale up, and then they’ll be able to continue to do it, but we have to invest in the supply chain issues that are creating a barrier for them to doing that on their own.”
Steven Beltram amid his tomatoes at TendWell Farm. (Photo courtesy of TendWell Farm)
In western Pennsylvania, at a vegetable farm just outside Pittsburgh, Adrienne Nelson took a break on a recent Friday afternoon from bunching scallions for a farmers’ market. Nelson, who has been organizing young farmers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia for eight years, also grows, on another parcel of land, her own organic dry beans: black turtle, flageolet, and Good Mother Stallard, among others—a healthy, local protein source that can be hard to come by in the Northeast.
Customers at the farmers’ market have already reported they were losing benefits that allow them to buy more healthy food from local farms using their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, Nelson said. She’s also seen a lot of her farmer friends lose jobs with support organizations, including at Pasa and at the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), where she is an associate field director.
“It’s so powerful to know that you can grow food and preserve a future, so that keeps me going all the time, but I do have worries,” she said. “I really want to have hope that the administration will show how they can support smaller farms. It has been interesting to watch freezes happen and unfreezes happen and nothing feels totally certain or set in stone. Every day is wildly different.”
“I really want to have hope that the administration will show how they can support smaller farms.”
Things have been particularly fraught for young farmers who don’t fit the stereotype of the brawny white male American farmer. In its latest survey, in 2022, NYFC received responses from more than 10,000 young farmers across the country.
“Through that data, we learned that there are way more farmers of color who are young and way more queer farmers that the USDA data doesn’t reflect,” Nelson said. Eighty-six percent of the young farmers surveyed classified their approach as regenerative farming.
Biden’s USDA encouraged organizations and farmers applying for grants to emphasize whether they were a part of or serving underserved groups, such as BIPOC, women, or LGBTQ farmers. Now, as the USDA goes through grant contracts rooting out DEI initiatives, those farmers and organizations are the ones seeing their grant contracts cancelled.
To push back on that issue, NYFC launched a social media campaign last month dubbed #WeAreAmericanFarmers, calling on USDA to honor its contracts, given Rollins’ repeated statements around supporting American farmers.
“This campaign is to underscore farmers who are immigrants, farmers who are not white, farmers who are queer are all American farmers as well,” Nelson said. “It’s a call for representation and to call out that kind of dangerous language around who gets access to USDA resources or not and who feels like they belong.”
Some farmers who lean conservative, like Groff in Pennsylvania, don’t see the Trump Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) aggressive climate rollbacks and environmental deregulation as necessarily out of line with MAHA goals. Others, including most of the young farmers in the NYFC survey, see it as an imminent threat.
“We’re definitely experiencing a change in climate here, and it’s making it more challenging to farm, even aside from just a massive disaster that takes out all the infrastructure,” said TendWell Farm’s Beltram, who still hasn’t received disaster assistance after Hurricane Helene destroyed roads, tractors, box trucks, and more at multiple farm locations and left his team to spend the entire winter cleaning debris out of fields.
“We’re definitely experiencing a change in climate here, and it’s making it more challenging to farm, even aside from a massive disaster that takes out all the infrastructure.”
On the environmental side, the MAHA movement behind Kennedy has been more vocal about its desire to see more regulation of pesticides linked to health and environmental harm, especially glyphosate, atrazine, and neonicotinoids. Prior to his appointment, Kennedy railed against agricultural chemicals.
However, at a press conference during the recent Great American Farmers’ Market, in response to a question about whether the second MAHA report would include recommendations to restrict the use of some chemicals, he deferred to Rollins.
“There is no question that the use of crop protection tools remains one of the most important tools, if not the most important, to our farmers to thrive and to remain prosperous,” Rollins said, adding that Kennedy has met with 130 farmer and rancher groups. “I’ve also heard him say, ‘We can’t compromise our farmers and their ability to feed and fuel and clothe the world.’ I feel very confident that his and our commitment to make sure farmers are at the table remains paramount, and that the report will reflect that.” Asked to weigh in, Kennedy said he had nothing to add.
Recently, a legislative rider has also gained steam among Republicans in Congress that would help shield Bayer and other pesticide companies from lawsuits claiming their products cause health harms.
White Oak Pasture’s Harris has spoken out about this kind of “pesticide immunity” bill, a version of which passed this year in his state of Georgia. While he acknowledges some worry about the impacts of climate change, he’s especially concerned about the ecosystem collapse caused by pesticide use and other factors.
“I think one of the things we got wrong is this thing of killing the pest,” he said. “I believe that every creature—plant, animal, or microbe—that lives in and is indigenous to an ecosystem has a role in that ecosystem,” he said. “I think we’re not smart enough to know what it is [for every creature]. And the fact that we have driven and are driving so many species of plants and animals and microbes into extinction or near extinction is worrying to me.”
Does he think, then, that a successful MAHA policy plan for regenerative agriculture needs to address that fact? “Absolutely,” he said. Like many others, he’s waiting to see what happens next.
Politico just published a draft version of the MAHA Commission’s policy recommendations, which are currently being reviewed by the White House and could change significantly before being finalized.
The last section of the report is titled “Soil Health and Stewardship of the Land.” But not one of the four bullet points in the section includes concrete policy steps or positions.
For now, it seems as though not even the MAHA Commission will provide clarity any time soon about the administration’s plans for regenerative farming.
“We don’t know what the program is yet,” Harris said. “Powerful people have been instructed to come up with a program, so that’s promising.”
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