Organic farmers expose RFK Jr.'s delusion
Turns out you can't "Make America Healthy Again" when the fossil fuel industry calls the shots.
Last October, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood in front of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and promised that Donald Trump would reform America’s corporate-controlled, synthetic chemical-laden agricultural system.
“When Donald Trump gets me in the building I’m standing outside of right now, it won’t be this way anymore,” Kennedy said. In a bid for campaign donations, he pledged to rid the current food system of “chemicals, herbicides, and insecticides,” and replace it with one that favored small, regenerative, organic farms.
I’m as crunchy and health-conscious as the next lefty millennial, so the content of the promise never bothered me much. What bothered me was that Kennedy was asking people to believe something delusional: that Donald Trump would do something bad for the fossil fuel industry. Industrial agriculture is one of Big Oil’s largest and most lucrative markets. Most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are made from fossil fuels. During the campaign, Trump promised to give the fossil fuel industry anything it wanted in exchange for massive campaign donations—which it gave. So how could Trump possibly “Make America Healthy Again” while committed to a “Drill Baby, Drill” agenda? How does that make any sense?
Obviously it doesn’t. But Kennedy convinced millions it did. And now organic farmers are paying the price.
Last week, one of New York’s largest organic farming organizations sued the USDA, claiming the Trump administration is illegally putting their operations at risk at the critical beginning of the growing season.
The lawsuit stems from an incident that occurred 10 days after Trump’s inauguration. On January 30, USDA digital communications director Peter Rhee ordered staff to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” and complete the task within one business day.
The order resulted in a widespread, unprecedented information purge from USDA’s websites—not just of general climate change information, but of interactive data tools and funding resources related to soil conservation, sustainable agricultural practices, and extreme weather resilience, the lawsuit claimed.
It’s unclear exactly how many USDA sites and resources were affected by the purge, but according to the lawsuit, one of the most consequential erasures has been of information regarding federal loans and technical assistance for “climate-smart agriculture.” These “climate-smart” loans and assistance programs cover heaps of different sustainable practices: things like cover cropping, reduced tilling, establishing pollinator habitats, mulching to improve soil health, and restoring native plants.
These funding resources are especially important to organic and small farmers, said Wes Gillingham, the board president of The Northeastern Organic Farming Association of New York, which brought the lawsuit alongside two national environmental non-profits. “To do this at the beginning of the growing season when everyone’s trying to figure out and make their plans, it’s crazy,” Gillingham told HEATED.
New York has the second-most organic farmland in the country, and NOFA-NY is the the state’s largest certifier of organic farms. It also operates a hotline for farmers seeking help with sustainable, organic, and regenerative practices. Its lawsuit claims USDA’s “climate” purge is ”denying farmers access to resources they need to advocate for funds they are owed and for the continued survival of programs on which they rely.”
“It’s horrible to remove that information because of an infantile political agenda,” Gillingham said.
To be sure, the Trump administration never actually stated a reason for purging USDA websites of climate-related information and funding resources. That’s one reason why attorneys representing the farmers say the erasures are illegal.
”Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, an agency cannot remove significant public information from their website without reason and notice, and they have provided neither,” said Peter Lerner, the director of Earthjustice’s sustainable food and farming program. The Trump memo that ordered USDA staff to delete all climate references also “did not suggest they considered the impacts on farmers or the food supply,” Lehner said. “We would argue that constitutes a paradigmatic arbitrary and capricious action.”
But it’s not just Trump’s climate information purge that’s hurting small farmers, Lehner added. At the same information is disappearing, so are USDA staffers and scientists that farmers used to call for help. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has frozen thousands of grants for conservation programs and technical assistance, among many other things. “You have this triple whammy of no information, no money, and no staff to help you,” he said.
Still, Lehner said he feels confident in Earthjustice’s case against USDA, and is hopeful they can get the web pages restored. While the Trump administration’s climate website purges are “more aggressive and wider-scale” than they were during Trump’s first term, he said, "legally they seem to be making a lot of mistakes still.”
If they are successful, Lehner said, the case may become a model to restore other climate-related web purges. After all, information on how fossil fuels harm the climate has been scrubbed or downgraded from nearly every agency, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Transportation to NASA.
But for now, Lehner says the group’s focus is the farmers. “Just saving this USDA data would have a tremendous impact on millions of farmers and our food system,” he said. “Even it it weren’t a model, it would be a critically important case.”
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Other stories I’m following:
‘Full on Fight Club’: How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy. The New York Times has published a comprehensive deep dive into everything Trump is doing to to dismantle environmental and climate policy in America. It’s worth reading.
What are Democrats doing about Trump’s push to expand fossil fuel infrastructure? Honestly, I haven’t seen much—other than this Associated Press story about how Democrats tried to pass a resolution terminating Trump’s “energy emergency” executive order, which obviously failed, since they don’t have a majority.
The Energy Secretary is still spouting climate denial everywhere he goes. Chris Wright visited the Oak Ridge National Laboratory last week and downplayed the threat of climate change, saying it’s not a “crisis.”
Fast Company published a deep dive into the environmental devastation in Gaza. Israel’s bombings have harmed air quality, damaged approximately 57 percent of Gaza’s water infrastructure, and claims of “ecocide” have been made against the Israeli government by international rights groups.
Surprise! BP is ditching its promise to transition away from fossil fuels. Who could have guessed that?
Catch of the Day: Wisconsinite Batsy’s favorite place to hang out is under a nice, shady, balcony solar panel.
She’s significantly less pleased when she needs to take shelter for a tornado warning, no matter how nice the pillows are.
Thanks to reader Heather for the submission.
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I like how Peter Lehner characterized the Trump administration's information purge and overall anti-climate-conscious policymaking as essentially more aggressive, but less competent. It seems emblematic of this second presidency as a whole.
Earth Justice is the best in the business of litigation. If anyone can, they’re the ones to be with. Im speaking as a plaintiff of a successful Earth Justice case with the federal gov. A commercial striped bass fisherman, recreational boat operator and the Ocean River Institute successfully sued NOAA to take an ecological mangement approach for setting Herring catch limits to leave enough forage fish for others including whales and striped bass.