trump throws maha under the bus

memo to brook rollins

Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in and he’s already reneged on his promise to let RFK Jr. Make America Healthy Again. As I mentioned several weeks ago, the choice of Secretary of Agriculture was going to be crucial to the success of RFK Jr and others who are seeking to reform the toxic, soil destroying farming systems employed by most farmers today, as well as reforming the overly processed food system. Without those reforms, we’ll continue to be a sick nation.

Because most of the health issues we face here in the US have to do with chronic illness, because most chronic illness is the result of nutritionally deprived food coming from badly managed farms, because much of that deprived food is then turned into processed food which our bodies don’t recognize as being deeply nourishing, the health of this nation will not improve without big changes at the USDA.

But the mother of all reasons is because - unfortunately - the USDA determines agricultural and food policy for the entire country. Don’t get me started on why having a one-size-fits-all agricultural policy for a country as big as the US is such a bad idea.

Here are just a few more mindless things the USDA does; it determines what crops get subsidized and which ones do not, it determines what’s on food labels, what goes in school lunches, what people can or cannot buy with food stamps/WICK, and it also runs those programs. Perhaps most importantly, it determines what nutritional recommendations are made for all Americans - which, thanks to big food lobbyists, has been an abysmal failure.

In short, like the NIH, the FDA and the CDC, the USDA is a captured agency. It’s the private playground for Big Food and Big Ag.

Yes, I know, I’ve been harping on all of this for decades. That’s why it was so heartening to hear RFK Jr. begin harping about all of this when he began his run for the White House. When RFK threw-in with Trump, he did so with the promise from Trump that he would give RFK free rein to make America Healthy Again (MAHA). To accomplish that, he needs someone in the USDA who understands all of this, someone he can work with to make the changes to agricultural and food policies that are required to turn around our chronic disease epidemic.

A few weeks back I wrote about the Nominees For The People site. This was a project the MAHA organization created that allowed anyone to nominate people for cabinet and sub cabinet positions. I nominated Dr. Tom Cowan for HHS. I was going to nominate Joel Salatin for the USDA, but someone beat me to it. Joel Salatin was pushing Congressman Thomas Massie for that position. RFK Jr and many others were also talking favorably about Massie for the USDA.

Instead of choosing Massie, Joel Salatin or any of the others who accumulated large numbers of votes on the Nominees For The People site, Trump ignored all of those Americans who cast votes, ignored the chronic disease epidemic, ignored his promise to RFK and made a “political appointment” to head-up the USDA, one that would appease the Big Ag and Big Food lobbies in red states. His appointment also happens to be a long-time Trump insider who has zero credentials for the job; she has no experience working with nutrition, she knows noting about soil or regenerative agriculture, and she knows nothing about the connections between those things and health.

Her name is Brook Rollins.

It’s no secret Big Food and Big Ag have been fearful of who Trump would tap for the USDA. It’s also no secret that Trump and RFK have been duking it out over who would run the USDA. According to this Wall Street Journal report, both industries are relatively happy with the Rollins appointment.

Folks, if Big Ag and Big Food are ok with Rollins, that means Trump just dashed any hopes of meaningful reform at the USDA. We can count on chronic illness continuing as a profitable epidemic for the powers that should not be.

it get worse

Considering the shaky times in which we live, anything that jeopardizes our access to food should be scrutinized. Right now, our food supply is in more peril than at any time in the history of the US. At no point has the US ever been more dependent on imported food than it is today.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that market traders long ago began to classify many crops as commodities, products that can be bought and sold on world markets like stocks or silver. This fact alone is largely responsible for the decline in the fertility of soil in the US and the corresponding decline in the health of Americans. Mining the soil to produce commodity crops to sell to China or Europe is like flushing the fertility of our soil and the health of a nation down the toilet for 30 pieces of silver.

Here’s the dilemma in a nutshell.

A number of years ago a couple (Casey and Natosha) with 6 kids bought a property just down the road from my farm. After a chance meting, I was invited over for dinner. Over dinner we learned that we share a lot of interests, including one that’s been bringing a lot of people together over the past four years - the fact that none of us took the covid jabs.

Another common interest we shared was raising and slaughtering our own livestock. Because of the restrictions and regulations that big food lobbies have successfully imposed (via the USDA) on small producers here in the US, there are now only two slaughter houses in the region where I live that will handle a single animal for private parties. Both are so swamped that they’ve developed reputations for not following slaughtering instructions, not returning all parts of the animal or returning meat from someone else’s livestock. All of that comes on top of wait times that sometimes extend to a year.

I never had any interest in participating in any of that, so I’ve always slaughtered my own livestock.

Then, several years ago I had 4 pigs I needed to slaughter over the course of several months. Between doing everything else on the farm and writing this ‘stack, dealing with those four pigs was going to be more than I could pull-off by myself. By then I knew my new neighbors were capable of slaughtering, so I enlisted their help. Over the next few months while we processed those pigs, I explained to them the dearth of options in this region for processing livestock. That must have planted a seed. Shortly thereafter Natosha began an apprentice livestock processing program while Casey began drawing up plans for a small slaughter house operation. It wasn’t long before they broke ground on that facility, got it built and operational.

I’ll not go into some of the barriers they had to jump over to make that happen, but they were formidable. Thanks to regulations pushed by big food lobbies, barriers remain, severely restricting what they can do.

This is a far cry from the days when my dad would bring a steer into the yard of our farmhouse, shoot it, hoist it up with a big tripod, gut it, and cut it up right there in the yard. He was legally able to sell that meat to anyone - a neighbor, a local restaurant, the local grocery store.

As I mentioned in this earlier post, if Trump had picked either Joel Salatin or Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie to head up the USDA, we would likely see the PRIME Act get passed in short order. That Act, co-sponsored by Massie, would essentially enable small, local producers to once again, legally do some of what my dad was once able to do. It would remove the barriers big food has put in place that protect them and hamper local ma and pa operations, like my neighbors.

Big food hates competition from real farmers.

The following information shows how we have gone from what my dad was able to do 60 years ago to the current corporate concentration of beef production here in the US.

Tyson controls 20 to 25%.

JBS USA controls 20 to 25%.

Cargil controls 15 to 20%.

National Beef Packing controls 14 to 15%.

Together, those four corporations control 85% of the beef sold in the US.

JBS and National Beef are Brazilian companies that between them account for 30% to 40% of the beef consumed in the US. Folks, being at the mercy of a foreign country for our food supply, especially one that isn’t overly friendly to the US, is a really bad position to be in. If things go south in Brazil, the meat supply in the US will go south along with it.

Smithfield Foods, JBS, Tyson and Hormel control 70% of the pork sold in the US.

Here we see that Tyson and foreign owned JBS, the two largest beef producers, also control the lions share of the pork sold in the US.

2.5% of dairies in the US produce nearly 45% of the milk consumed in the US.

Tyson Foods produces 25% of the poultry consumed in the US.

JBS (Pilgrims Pride) produces 20% of the poultry consumed in the US.

Wayne Sanderson Farms produces 8% of the poultry in the US.

Perdue Farms produces 7% of the poultry consume in the US.

Again, Tyson and JBS control the largest portion of the poultry market. Long story short, much of our beef, pork and poultry comes from a single, foreign owned company… JBS.

Not good.

Maybe that’s part of the globalist depopulation agenda - make the US dependent on imported meat products while making life difficult for local producers, then pull the plug on the foreign meat source. Voilà! - the price of all meat goes through the roof and starvation ensues.

Sadly, this type of globalist concentration exists in just about every major sector of agriculture.

tariffs

All of this will become even more of an issue if Trump follows through with his plans to impose tariffs on imported goods. I’m not necessarily opposed to this, but as it pertains to food, this needs to be done with alternatives in place before the tariffs go into effect. If there are no plans to provide local agricultural products to replace imported foods that will become increasingly expensive due to tariffs, then chaos will ensue. But if deregulation and tax breaks are put in place that stimulate local farmers to fill in the gaps, then tariffs on imported food will be less impactful for consumers.

Tariff preparations would also apply to farmers who will likely face retaliatory tariffs on their exported commodity crops that go to countries like China and Mexico. But if we provide incentives for farmers to move away from commodity crops and diversify into value added crops, this problem will become moot. In the ideal scenario, a tariff war would lead to a collapse of the misguided concept of commodity crops and take us back to something more akin to the locally focused agricultural markets that existed when I was a kid.

As you long time readers know, for many years I’ve touted the economic and food quality advantages of shopping at local farms markets. The voice of experience here… I’ve sold farm products at farmers markets off and on since the late 1970’s. Because writing this blog consumes an ever increasing amount of my time, I no longer have the time to spend prepping for, and attending farmer markets. Now I mostly focus on several specialty crops that I wholesale to local vendors who market produce for a number of farmers in the area.

One of the most profound changes that could take place my farm - one that would benefit both producers and consumers across the country - would be if the PRIME Act were to pass. Anyone with livestock could become a producer. Yup, we’re talking about millions of small farmers and homesteaders across the US. Not only would that decentralize a globalist meat production system that currently has our food supply in peril, it would also provide many hard pressed small farmers and homesteaders - like myself - an additional source of income. Local economies would benefit greatly. I can think of few things that would benefit small farmers while providing food security for this nation as much as the PRIME Act.

This is what Buckminster Fuller was talking about when he said “To change something don’t try to change the existing reality. Instead, create a new reality that makes the old one obsolete.” This is what the PRIME Act will begin to do do. It will turn us from a nation dependent on perilous, foreign meat to a nation self sufficient with fresh, locally produced meat.

memo to brook rollins

Because the person who appointed you is fat and thinks a big mac is real food, and because you have no experience with farming or making connections between the health of a nations soil and the health of its people, I’m going to offer you some free advice. To correct the chronic illness that currently plagues Americans, we need to correct the misguided policies in the food and farming sectors - your new domain.

Before I get into this, allow me to clarify some definitions.

In his classic book Coming Home to Eat, Gary Nabhan defined “food regions” as anything within 200 miles of any given location. I think that net is too wide. 150 miles provides more consideration to regional climate zones and ecosystems.

I have some trouble with the term “regenerative agriculture”. As I recently pointed out, Howard Lutnik, who, as you know, Trump appointed as Secretary of Commerce, has a company called Cantor Fitzgerald that buys and sells carbon credits. As I’ve explained in the past, Mrs Rollins, this is a scam as big as covidcon. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you know Mrs. Rollins, much of Trumps team, including RFK Jr. have bought into this ponzi scheme. Even more sadly, this scam also pervades the regenerative agriculture movement. The fact that regenerative farming happens to sequester carbon has become a false battle cry for promoting regenerative agriculture. There are some good things about regenerative agriculture, but carbon sequestration is just a side effect. Touting it as the ultimate goal obscures its best features.

Mrs. Rollins, I would hope that you might ask me if I think there are more effective forms of agriculture? My answer would be, you bet. But for now we need a well established and understood model as a way to transition to those more effective systems. Starting out by moving into regenerative agricultural practices will put us light years ahead of where we are now.

Here are the five principles of regenerative agriculture.

As I alluded Mrs. Rollins, this is, at best, a stop gap approach to tackling the food and agriculture problems we face, but regenerative agriculture can provide a decent transition to some that are far better.

One simple way to greatly improve the regenerative approach would be to stack organic practices on top. I’ll show you how to leverage that shortly.

Ok, Mrs, Rollins, with those terms defined, here’s what you need to do.

First, help get the PRIME Act passed and signed into law.

Second, offer tax incentives for farmers to diversify into non-commodity crops that can only be marketed regionally, not overseas. States that border Mexico and Canada should be allowed to market products within thier region. Here’s THE LEVER - only those farmers that shift their entire farm to non-toxic, regenerative/organic farming practices get the tax benefits.

Third, offer further incentives to those farmers who want to generate value added products, like milling their own grains, or packaging their grains and beans in 50lb bags to sell directly to regional stores. THE LEVER applies to this as well.

Fourth, offer tax incentives to food stores to buy regionally produced crops - but they only get the incentive if they buy 100% of their produce from farmers that have converted their entire farm to regenerative/organic farming practices.

Fifth, offer incentives for farmers markets to expand everywhere. Offer additional incentives to markets where 60% of the vendors are regenerative/organic farmers.

Sixth, provide incentives for independent, local, ma and pa farmers to also grant regenerative/organic certifications to regional farms. This was once the standard for organic certification before the USDA took over organic certification. To make this work you need to do away with the national USDA organic certification process. It’s become corrupted by the Big Ag/ Big Food lobbies and is now a mere shadow of its former self. In its place, allow farmers to chose from a free market place of regenerative/organic certificates. The cream will rise to the top.

If you do all of that Mrs. Rollins, I guarantee your name will go down in history as one of the most effective Secretary’s of the USDA in it’s long and… shall we say, colorful history.

Be free.