The same bone or another bone?
Background:
The Executive Order (14212) establishing the MAHA Commission directed the involved agencies to work with farmers to ensure that United States food is the healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world. American farmers are critical partners in the success of the Make America Healthy Again agenda. President Trump’s recent executive order regarding elemental phosphorus and glyphosate is focused on ensuring national and food supply security by guaranteeing an adequate domestic supply of these materials on which our agricultural industry currently relies. This plan and these investments show that the federal government also recognizes the need to accelerate farm modernization and long-term food supply security.
Three-Pillar Plan to Accelerate Progress:
Better understand risks of chemicals to individual and population health
Increase federal government investment in regenerative agriculture practices and education
Spur private sector innovation in farming modernization by reducing red tape and matching private funding
Research Focus:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and National Institutes for Health (NIH) will develop a research and evaluation framework for cumulative exposure across chemical classes in the food supply. This research will focus on using and developing New Approach Methodologies to overcome prior barriers to fully understanding human health and environmental risks of chemical contaminants, and addressing these risks for even greater food security and safety.
Investment Highlights:
$840 million from USDA
The Regenerative Pilot Program focuses on whole-farm planning that addresses major resource concerns—soil, water, and natural vitality—under a single conservation framework.
USDA is dedicating $400 million through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and $300 million through the Conservation Stewardship Program to fund regenerative agriculture projects and practices in FY26.
The Strengthening Agricultural Systems Program aims to help transform the U.S. food and agricultural system to increase agricultural production while enhancing farmer prosperity. The Program does so through funding large-scale projects that seek to solve key problems that USDA identifies as of local, regional, or national importance. Projects under this $140 million program will support new uses and markets of agricultural products, innovative solutions to pests and diseases of plants or animals, and combatting food and diet-related chronic diseases.
USDA is leveraging existing authorities to create public-private partnerships within Natural Resources Conservation Service conservation programs. These partnerships will allow USDA to match private funding, thereby stretching taxpayer dollars further and bringing new capacity to producers interested in adopting regenerative practices while ensuring that private land rights are maintained.
$200 million from the Department of Health and Human Services
$100 million grand prize challenge from NIH for researchers to identify creative solutions for evaluating the exposure, diagnosis, and treatments of cumulative chemical exposures on individual health.
$100 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to identify new and innovative and cost-effective technologies that reduce reliance on chemical crop protection tools in order to improve human health, including the health of farmers, such as electrothermal and electrical weeding technologies, robotic weeding systems, precision mechanical weed control, thermal weed control, biological and non-toxic herbicides, mulching systems, and integrated systems.
$30 million from EPA
Grand prize challenge for cost-effective alternatives to pre-harvest desiccation use of pesticides, which is a potential contributor to human exposure. This challenge will lead to reduced usage of pesticides while providing new innovative tools for farmers to use.
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Kicking the solutions down the road to keep the Big Agra and Chemical boys happy!
Farms feed people. Because of the vastness of our nation’s food production, it’s tough reforming Big Ag’s system of toxic chemicals, government subsidies to the huge corporate farmers, and Big Junk Food making unethical profits from selling empty (but highly addictive) calories. (And don’t forget Big Pharma, which loves selling prescriptions to sick people.)
It shouldn’t be a surprise that 45% of kids between 3 and 17 have a chronic condition. That’s nearly half, and far worse than any other developed nation.
Reformers are finally being heard. We Americans care about our children, so improving school breakfast and lunch can become a top priority.
Afterall, our public school system serves one of the largest sectors of our nation’s population, K-12, comprised of 15% of the population. That’s about 50 million youngsters!
Besides the stark necessity of change, there shouldn’t be any partisan objections to slow us down because kids rely on us adults, they cannot fend for themselves yet.
No matter what people think of our HHS Secretary, he and the USDA upgraded the Food Pyramid, which will force the improvement of food served in school cafeterias.
The old Standard American Diet (SAD) type of food served in most cafeterias must go. Otherwise, today’s children will have shorter, sicker lives than their parents.
The old saying is, “Sweep the stairs from the top down,” which Secretary Kennedy and his team have already begun. We also have good energy from the bottom of the stairs— both parents and teachers are already active (parent-teacher organizations and unions, respectively).
The New Deal was welcomed by a discouraged nation almost a hundred years ago. Today, “Make America Healthy Again” resonates across party lines. MAHA could be today’s New Deal.
Check out the illustrations in this proposal from our agricultural county in California:
https://laurenayers.substack.com/p/good-school-food-in-yolo-county