On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed a new executive order aimed at accelerating regenerative agriculture and strengthening farm resilience. Simultaneously, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the final Regenerative Feedstock Rule.
The regenerative agriculture announcements follow a request made Wednesday for an additional $11.1 billion in emergency economic and disaster aid for U.S. farmers.
What the Executive Order Directs
According to the White House, the order directs USDA to:
- expand the reach of USDA’s Regenerative Agriculture Pilot Program
- share program results broadly with stakeholders
- use public-private partnerships to build additional capacity for producers interested in regenerative farming
Daren Coppock, CEO and president of the Agricultural Retailers Association, gave an example of one such public-private partnership.
“There’s a lot of interest in regenerative agriculture at the moment,” he says. “We’ve been involved in a project with Nature Conservancy and many other organizations to see what are the barriers to greater adoption of these practices. We put together a roadmap document that can help solve those problems along the way. The group that convened sees retail agronomists as the pathway to get to growers because it’s a trusted relationship that already exists.”
A White House fact sheet framed regenerative farming as a bundle of practices that:
- strengthen soil health
- lower input costs
- improve chemical efficiency
- help improve profitability and access to new markets—without relying on “burdensome mandates”
The Influence of MAHA and Industry Concerns: Redundancy vs. Opportunity
The administration also said the order directs EPA to prioritize registration of alternative crop protection tools (“substances that can be used as alternatives to older active ingredients”) and review data connected to pre-harvest desiccation uses to ensure alignment with safety and labeling standards for chemical residue concerns.
To his knowledge, Coppock says there was no interaction between the writers of the Executive Order released Thursday with any agricultural group.
“They just did it on their own. There are some things that, had we written it, we would have written it differently,” he says. “The things that give us concern are things that were pretty obviously cut and pasted from the MAHA report, and MAHA is mentioned several times in the executive order. These are things like studying cumulative effects, which is already covered under FIFRA, and desiccation, which is an extremely minor use in some parts of the country and is also covered by FIFRA. There’s some stuff in there that doesn’t need to be there to make a successful regenerative ag strategy, but there is an opportunity to partner, and that’s what we’re going to be looking at.”
Coppock adds the Executive Order language mentions expediting parts of the approval process, which he hopes will translate to additional final approvals soon.
“There have been at least six new uses or new [active ingredients] that have made their way through regulatory approval at EPA. They’ve completed all of the scientific assessments, they’re sitting on the administrator’s desk, just awaiting a signature, and they’re not moving,” Coppock says. We suspect it’s because MAHA has leaned on the administration so hard to not do any pesticide registrations that the system is stuck.”
