With the Biden administration’s goals the agency could be change making, but will it?
On Earth Day 2021, the state of the United States food production and safety, and the agency that oversees it, the United States Department of Agriculture, stands poised to make great changes. Once again headed by Tom Vilsack, also the secretary of agriculture during Barack Obama’s administration, the agency is tasked with helping President Joe Biden meet the goal of net zero emissions in the U.S. by 2050.
During the Senate committee hearing on his nomination, Feb. 2, Vilsack said in his opening remarks, “… It’s not lost on me it’s Groundhog’s Day and that I’m back again. But I also realize that this is a fundamentally different time and I am a different person and it is a different department … We have to recognize that going into this process.”
Farms make up 10% of carbon emissions in the U.S. When forestry and other land uses are calculated, agriculture is responsible for almost 25% of all human-created carbon emissions. Vilsack must convince farmers and ranchers to buy into this goal and encourage them to use techniques that absorb and sequester carbon. But progressive activists, environmental leaders and others point to Vilsack’s failure to enact substantive regulation during his prior term as agriculture secretary.
Local agriculture impacts resilience, sustainability, community and individuals, just as agriculture does across America. Through this lens we’ll also hear from local University of California master gardener and horticulture teacher Rachel Bruhnke who is making just such an impact and passing it forward to her students.
The USDA’s jurisdiction is one of the most far reaching in the federal government. It oversees farms, forestry, fishing, food for schools, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC and it impacts food, water and air. The food system impacts everyone, through workers, suppliers, individuals and farmers and it includes justice for all of these people. Historically the agency hasn’t been on justice’s side and the overarching fear with Vilsack is that the USDA will continue to put lives at risk through subsidizing the harm of our land, water and air.
History First
Before he became agriculture secretary, Vilsack was Iowa’s governor from 1999 to 2007. After leaving the USDA in 2017, Visack became president and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, an industry trade group, earning almost $1 million a year from Dairy Management Inc. To be clear, Vilsack’s industry ties are typical of any Iowa governor. Still, many people worry that under his watch the USDA will continue the same policies — including subsidizing factory farm monocrops, producing Genetically Modified Organisms and degrading soil and ultimately health due to these industrial practices — rather than play a role in mitigating environmental harm. This coupled with the agency’s past racial history provides no indication that it will meet the country’s enormous needs in hunger, food distribution and racial and economic equity laid bare from the pandemic, but which had begun decades earlier.
In recent years former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue earned a reputation as one of the most aggressive enforcers of the Donald Trump administration’s pro business, deregulatory agenda. He reorganized the USDA to increase official power to staffers who promote production and trade versus food safety or rural development. Perdue, a vocal skeptic of human-induced climate change, relocated and defunded Economic Research Service — a USDA subagency and vital research office that would need to be revived to develop research-based climate policy.
Under Trump, U.S. trade aid mainly benefited large farms. Many farmers who struggled remained ineligible for assistance and unable to get access to those funds. Vilsack’s nomination also came with great disappointment to small rural farmers — typically a stronghold for Republicans, even while these farmers were battered by Trump’s trade war.
Black farmers have also complained that the USDA has shut them out of loans, driving racial wealth disparities by systemically delaying or denying loan approvals or access to other farm subsidies. These actions contributed to a 98% decrease in the number of Black farmers through the last century. The Department of Agriculture’s policies also affect broader worker safety issues and racial inequity through slaughter deregulation, as one example, as the majority of meatpacking workers are immigrants and people of color.
Different Department
During his hearing, Vilsack displayed an explicit understanding of the urgent equity issues the USDA faces as America tries to emerge from the pandemic. He noted the Department of Agriculture:
- Has a responsibility to aggressively promote the nutrition assistance program that Congress provided.
- Must review the additional relief that’s been ordered by Congress and deliver it to farmers, ranchers, producers and those in rural America as quickly, efficiently and effectively as possible.
- Must make sure that our workers on the line, in the farm fields, in processing facilities and the like, are protected and recognized as the essential workers they are.
- The USDA needs to work collaboratively with Congress and others to build back the rural economy in better shape than it was before the COVID crisis.
Vilsack prefaced his goals by quoting Robert Kennedy, who he said often challenged us to think about why not.
“Some people look at things as they are and say why and others dream of things that never were and say why not,” — Robert Kennedy.
Vilsack posited the USDA can tackle problems using a “why not” approach, addressing four such “moments.”
“We’re in a why not moment with reference to climate change,” Vilsack said. “There’s an opportunity for us to create new market incentives for soil health, for carbon sequestration, for methane capture and reuse. By building a rural economy based on biomanufacturing, protecting our forests, turning waste material into new chemicals and materials and fabrics and fibers, creating more jobs in rural America, creating greater farm income stability and also reducing emissions.”
Vilsack referenced food insecurity that plagues millions of financially distressed children, seniors and families; and nutrition insecurity — causing millions of Americans, especially people of color, to cope with obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases.
“We can create a food system that makes healthy and nutritious food more available, more convenient, more affordable to all Americans,” he said.
We are in a why not moment, he said, with openness and competitiveness of our markets. Yet, Vilsack noted, in reality, America lacks openness, fairness, competitiveness and resiliency — as the COVID-19 crisis has shown in many U.S. agricultural markets. He said the USDA can strengthen the laws designed to promote openness and fairness. It can support more marketing and processing opportunities and facilities throughout the country that will help to create jobs, greater resilience and more competitiveness in our food system.
Finally, Vilsack confessed, “The agency needs to fully, deeply and completely address the long standing inequities, unfairness and descrimination that’s been the history of USDA programs for far too long. To a future where all are treated equitably, fairly, where there is zero tolerance for descrimination, where programs actually open up opportunity for all who need help and lift the burden of persistent poverty for those who are most in need.”
Regeneration
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has said leveraging the mitigation potential in the agriculture, forestry and other land use sectors is extremely important in meeting emission reduction targets. In this light, Bruhnke spoke to the abundance of regenerative agriculture, a method of farming that improves the resources it uses, versus destroying or depleting them. Bruhnke founded Harbor Farms in San Pedro for the purpose of advocating for localized agriculture in Council District 15.
“My motto is trust the sun. Grow food,” she said. “We go mining for coal, digging for oil and gas everywhere [that] there’s a pocket of it in our country. And yet, the sun is everywhere and we can grow food with it and we don’t take advantage of it.”
As someone working for many years in sustainable agriculture, Bruhnke said Vilsack wouldn’t have been her choice.
“I believe in political redemption,” Bruhnke said. “If people are changing … great but we cannot allow … greenwashing. If he’s truly turning over a new regenerative agriculture leaf and understands the need for localized agriculture both in rural and urban areas, great. But it still needs [to be] the people who have known this for decades to be in the lead.”
Bruhnke echoed Vilsack’s transparency on creating jobs, greater resilience and more competitiveness in our food system.
“We need to harness the sun everywhere we can and build wealth, resilience, sustainability and community everywhere we can,” she said. “The sun is a renewable resource waiting to be valued. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps that helped reforest this country in the 1930s, we need something similar to generalize agriculture everywhere.
“It’s a very American idea. It’s a very Jeffersonian idea,” Bruhnke said. “Our economic base needs to transition back-to-the-future, to an agro-industrial model locally … with the jobs being in all-things ‘regenerative.’”