Congress Appropriated $4.5B for Regenerative, Why Is USDA Only Giving It $700M?

Does the Trump Administration Even Know What Regenerative Agriculture Is?

The title of Trump's Executive Order is very misleading. The order actually downplays regenerative agriculture and instead gives top-billing to "precision agriculture." Just like "precision fermentation" means genetically modified microbes spitting out GMO proteins, "precision agriculture" means the same old GMOs, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers, only with big tech's artificial intelligence making the decisions instead of farmers. The order talks about the need to "improve chemical efficiency to reduce overall use," but companies like Bayer-Monsanto are careful not to allow anyone to hold them to actual reductions. The House version of the 2026 Farm Bill would open EQIP up to "precision agriculture," defined as "managing, tracking, or reducing crop or livestock production inputs." Notice the way that's worded. Big tech pitches farmers with the promise that investing in their tools will mean spending less money on pesticides and fertilizers, but the bill says "precision agriculture" is about "managing, tracking, OR reducing ... inputs." 

The USDA got right to work implementing Trump's "regenerative agriculture" Executive Order by setting standards for Regenerative Agricultural Biofuel Feedstocks made from corn, soy, sorghum, and canola. That is a contradiction in terms. As many people have pointed out, growing food on prime farmland only to burn it in car engines is a morally reprehensible waste of resources that should obviously go to feeding hungry people while protecting the ability of the land to produce food into the future.

In the Executive Order, appealing language is used to describe "regenerative agriculture," including practices that "strengthen soil health, lower input costs, [and] improve chemical efficiency to reduce overall use." The language in the Regenerative Agricultural Biofuel Feedstocks rule is very different. As Christian Westbrook pointed out in his Unshadowed blog, the Trump Administration is adopting the World Economic Forum's definition of "regenerative agriculture," which limits regenerative to minimizing the ploughing of soil to reduce CO2 reducing emissions.

One-hundred percent of EQIP and CSP money should be going to regenerative agriculture, but Trump's USDA is only giving it $400 million of EQIP's $3.155 billion annual budget and $300 million of CSP's $1.36 billion. The money for regenerative hardly amounts to a rounding error, but the new spin is, instead of being angry about how little support there is to transition to regenerative, farmers are supposed to celebrate it!

Trump's USDA is continuing the terrible tradition of giving the lion's share of EQIP money to factory farms to manage manure lagoons and allocating a most of CSP's to pesticide-drenched genetically modified row crop producers for what Bayer and the other agrochemical companies have dubbed "precision agriculture." What it amounts to is adjusting the nozzles on their sprayers to make sure they use the “right” amount of toxins—with no promise they’ll use any less! CSP money is also diverted to "no-till" systems that use pesticides instead of tillage to clear fields.

 More than 800 million pounds of pesticides are used to grow our food in the U.S. every year, and most of these pesticides are toxic to human health. Decades of data links the pesticides widely used in conventional agriculture to cancer, reproductive toxicity, birth defects, asthma, endocrine disruption, and more. Children and infants in utero are the most vulnerable, and this early exposure has life-long impacts.

Organic farming is an important alternative -- more than 900 synthetic pesticides allowed in conventional agriculture are banned in organic. Research shows that an organic diet rapidly and dramatically reduces our exposure to toxic pesticides. One study found that just one week on a fully organic diet can reduce pesticide levels in your body by up to 95 percent! Organic farming also helps protect the people who grow our food and their rural communities from toxic exposure.

Those of us who eat organic to reduce our pesticide exposure depend on the federal USDA National Organic Program (NOP) to enforce the organic standard. Citizen enforcement through lawsuits has been tried, but has almost always failed because the courts say the federal government has the exclusive authority to say what the organic standard is and how to enforce it. The USDA NOP is all we've got, and its ability to do its essential work has been hugely impacted by the USDA staffing cuts and departures triggered by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. More than 18,000 USDA employees are gone since January, including roughly a third of the NOP team.

This comes after Congress left organic farmers without funding for more than a year, from when the Farm Bill expired in September 2024 until the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" was passed in July 2025, funding that won't become available until 2026. The OBBB was a fatal blow struck at the heart of the Farm Bill. It gutted Food Stamps, not only to give money to rich landowners renting their land to industrial tenant farmers as past Farm Bills shamelessly had, but to cover other federal agencies, the War Department being the most expensive. The OBBB allocated $8 million a year for the National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program and $10 million for the Organic Production and Market Data Initiative. We'll see if farmers ever get the money.

USDA Took $6 Billion From Regenerative, Now It's Giving $700 Million?

The Trump Administration's attacks on regenerative agriculture and family farmers serving local markets began right away when the USDA refused to release a huge chunk of the $19.5 billion Congress appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act for programs administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Agricultural Marketing Service. That looks like a very big number, and is for programs that help family farms adopt regenerative agriculture practices, but this money simply offset cuts made to these programs in the 2018 Farm Bill.

Trump's USDA hasn't been transparent about the total amount it's withholding, but the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition estimates it's at least $6 billion.

One of the programs it canceled is the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. Organic Consumers Association's partner organization, Regeneration International, was among the organizations affected. RI managed a grant on behalf of a wide network of sub-awardees including the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, Tree-Range Farms, Freshwater Society, and new partnerships with organizations like A Greener World, the Nature Conservancy, Savanna Institute, Other Half Processing, and Marbleseed—just to name a few. This five-year, $5 million grant was to help farmers planting oats and other small grains to transition to regenerative systems. In its first year, the project enrolled 29 producers in the Midwest managing 2,500 acres. RI distributed $175,780.50 in incentive payments to these farmers, helping them offset the upfront costs of adopting conservation practices for regenerative systems.

Meanwhile, the USDA gave the biggest grain and oilseed farmers—who grow for factory farms, junk food processors, and exporters—$40 billion in bailouts!

If Fully Funded, and Used Just for Regenerative, the Conservation Stewardship Program Could Save Family Farms, the Soil, and Our Health

The Conservation Stewardship Program was launched in the 2008 Farm Bill. If Congress fully funded it, which it never has, it could help every farmer adopt the regenerative practices that decrease pesticides and protect against erosion, while increasing yields and making food more nutritious—all by improving soil health.

At its height, the Conservation Stewardship Program enrolled 72 million acres—about 7 percent of all working lands in the U.S., including crop, forest, pasture and range land, but the program never reached its full potential. More than three out of four farmers who want to participate in the Conservation Stewardship Program have been closed out every year. Things got worse when the 2018 Farm Bill severely reduced its funding.

Congress got back on the right track with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, making “climate-smart” investments in the Conservation Stewardship Program that were projected to increase the amount of carbon stored in working lands (a key measure of soil health) by 70 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent per year by 2030. Agriculture is responsible for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with emissions in the range of 700 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent per year. So, we’re talking 10 percent of 10 percent or 1 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It seems small, but that offsets the emissions of 6 million cars. If that figure were quadrupled, which it easily could be given that 4 times as many farmers have tried to enroll in the Conservation Stewardship Program, it would reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent—offsetting the emissions of 64 million cars.

That's all just a pipe dream now. It's clear that Trump's USDA isn't much interested in regenerative agriculture for the sake of soil health, human health, the climate, or anything else.

  

TAKE ACTION! Remind Congress: It Appropriated $4.5B for Regenerative, It Can't Let USDA Only Give It $700M!