I have spent two decades asking a simple question: why is it so hard, in this country, to find out what’s actually in our food and what it’s doing to our health? Every time I think we’ve made progress, I get a reminder that the fight was never really about information. It’s about power. It's about who holds the power to decide what we're allowed to know. Last week, in the Senate Agriculture Committee, that power closed ranks again.

Senator Cory Booker brought forward a modest amendment to the farm bill. It didn’t ban a single pesticide. It didn’t regulate a single chemical company out of business. It simply said that when a pesticide company fails to warn people about the health risks of its products, that company should not be shielded from being sued for it. It would have let manufacturers add cancer warnings to their own labels if they chose to. It was, in Booker’s words, about restoring “the fundamental right of cancer victims to have their day in court.”

Every Democrat on the committee voted for it. Every Republican voted against it. It failed on a straight party-line vote.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I think a lot of people in the Make America Healthy Again movement are going to want to look away from it, and we can’t afford to.

This amendment existed because the Supreme Court handed pesticide manufacturers a gift this year, ruling that federal labeling law pre-empts the kind of failure-to-warn lawsuits that families have used for years to hold companies like Monsanto accountable for glyphosate exposure. That ruling didn’t come out of nowhere. It came after years of quiet, patient work by chemical industry lobbyists to build exactly this kind of liability shield, brick by brick, bill by bill. Farm bills. Appropriations riders. State legislatures. It’s the same playbook every time: bury the language, funnel industry insiders into an administration, call it “regulatory certainty,” and count on nobody outside the industry reading page 400 of a 900-page bill.

The MAHA coalition, to its credit, did address this playbook before. Back in the spring, GOP members of the House joined Democrats to strip nearly identical liability-shield language out of their version of the farm bill, in a 280-142 vote that even surprised some of the people who organized it.

When RFK Jr. joined with Republicans, he promised his followers that they would no longer be reflexively loyal to Big Ag and Big Chemical the way they’ve been loyal to Big Pharma’s critics. That was the deal. That was the pitch. Farmers, mothers, MAHA activists rallying outside the Supreme Court, all told they finally had a seat at the table.

So where was that coalition last week, when the fight moved to the Senate?

Not one Republican vote. Not one. And Kennedy?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man who built his entire political identity on beating Monsanto in a courtroom, who once stood in front of a jury and argued that glyphosate gave his client cancer, who is now the sitting Secretary of Health and Human Services, said nothing. Not a statement. Not a post. Nothing.

This is the same man who, back in February, broke with his own movement to defend Trump's executive order boosting glyphosate production, telling farmers and skeptical Republican senators not to worry, that nothing in his own MAHA report would threaten their business model.

So maybe his silence on Booker's amendment shouldn't surprise anyone. But it should make people angry.

I don’t say this to score partisan points, because this was never supposed to be a partisan issue. Cancer doesn’t check a party registration before it shows up in a farmworker’s bloodwork or a five-year-old’s leukemia diagnosis. The parents I’ve spent my career talking to, the ones digging through ingredient labels at ten o’clock at night trying to figure out why their kid’s allergies won’t quit, are Republicans and Democrats and everything in between. That’s exactly why MAHA had real potential: it wasn’t supposed to be red or blue, it was supposed to be about whose side you’re actually on when a chemical company and a cancer patient show up in the same courtroom.

But MAHA made this partisan itself. MAHA PAC doesn't hide it, its own website says it exists "for one reason: to elect Republicans." Not a healthier food system. Not accountability for chemical companies. Republicans.

At least four MAHA-branded political committees are registered with the FEC, and together they've spent nearly $2 million opposing Democrats and zero dollars opposing a single Republican.

That's not a health movement. That's a party operation wearing a wellness label.

So here is the test. Not the press conferences. Not the executive orders on ultra-processed food dyes that photograph well and cost the industry almost nothing. This. Whether the people who marched under the MAHA banner are willing to spend real political capital on the boring, unglamorous, absolutely essential work of protecting a family’s right to sue when a company hides what its product does to them.

And if they are willing to get behind the party and the Democrats consistently voting to protect cancer patients during the midterm elections.

If MAHA wants to be taken seriously as something other than a branding exercise, its leaders in Congress, and the officials at HHS and EPA who claim to share its values, need to say plainly that this vote was a betrayal of the movement’s own founding promise, and they need to say it to the Republican colleagues who cast it, not just to a sympathetic press. Silence here isn’t neutrality. It’s a choice, and it’s the same choice the chemical industry has been counting on from both parties for thirty years.

Senator Booker says he’ll bring this amendment back when the farm bill returns in September. That’s the moment that matters, not the outrage cycle this week, but who actually shows up and votes when a cancer patient’s day in court is on the line again.

And maybe that’s the real answer to why MAHA went quiet.

It’s easier to sell a supplement or a protein powder than to fight a pesticide company. Easier to build a wellness brand off of distrust of “Big Pharma” than to spend real political capital going after Big Ag’s actual lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

A lot of the loudest voices in this movement have their own products to sell, their own sponsorships to protect, their own seats at the table to keep. Their focus on expanding what health savings accounts can buy fattens their revenue lines.

Suing a pesticide company doesn't.

Fighting for a family’s right to sue Monsanto has no up-sell. No revenue line. No sponsorship. No product roll out. It simply protects people, and this month, once again, that turned out to be something MAHA's allies in Washington aren’t willing to fight for.

Booker says the amendment is coming back. So does the question:

Is MAHA a movement, or is it a market?

I’ve spent years following the money in our food and health systems, and there’s a rule I keep coming back to: if you want to know what a society values, don’t listen to what it says. Look at what it funds.

By that measure, we don’t value women’s health. Not even close.

Start with the number, and you’ll see exactly why.

One percent. That’s the share of global health research funding, outside of cancer, that goes toward conditions specific to women’s health. Not a rare disease. Not a niche specialty. Half the planet, funded like an afterthought.

Sit with that for a second, because it should stop every family, every policymaker, and every physician in their tracks.

The consequences aren’t abstract. The average woman will spend nine years of her life in poor health, 25% more than the average man. She’ll live longer than he does, but too much of that extra time arrives loaded with disease, disability, and pain that medicine still doesn’t fully understand. Not despite medical progress. Alongside it.

Ask why, and you won’t find a scientific dead end. You’ll find a choice, made year after year, budget after budget, to look past half the population.

It’s a budget line that was never written.

The Data Gap Is Real, and It’s Measurable

For over a decade, the National Institutes of Health, the single largest funder of biomedical research on the planet, has spent less than 9% of its research grant spending on women’s health. Not 9% of a shrinking pie, either. The NIH budget grew substantially over that decade. Women’s health funding, as a share of that growth, actually shrank. By 2023, the most recent year with clean data, out of an NIH budget of roughly $48 billion, that share had fallen to under 8%.

And it’s not just government funding. Follow the philanthropic dollars and the picture is, if anything, worse.

Private giving is supposed to be the flexible capital that fills the gaps public funding leaves behind. On women’s health, it has largely left the same gap untouched.

Think about what that means in practice. Conditions that affect tens of millions of women, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, autoimmune disease, the long-term health effects of pregnancy and menopause, remain underexplained, undertreated, and under-researched, not because the science is impossible, but because nobody funded the questions.

I was recruited by Enron out of business school. At the time, their tagline was “Ask why?” So let’s ask why.

Consider that 99% of studies on the biology of aging don’t even account for menopause, a transition that affects roughly half the world’s population and reshapes a woman’s health for the rest of her life. Autoimmune disease alone affects a population that is nearly 80% female, and it wasn’t until 2023, under a congressional directive, that NIH stood up a dedicated office to coordinate research on it.

This isn’t a women’s issue in the narrow sense. It’s a family issue. It’s a maternal-mortality issue. It’s a “why does my daughter’s doctor not have an answer for her” issue.

When the evidence base is thin, every mother sitting in an exam room pays the price in longer diagnostic odysseys, more misattributed symptoms, and treatments built on data drawn largely from male physiology.

This Is a Familiar Pattern

If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same dynamic that we are trying to reform in the food system. Capital in the food system flows toward whatever the old metrics reward, not toward what would actually keep people healthy.

I’ve said it countless times. “You can’t fix a broken food system with a broken financial system,” and point to a telling gap: roughly 80% of U.S. households buy some sort of organic food, yet only about 1% of U.S. farmland is actually farmed organically. Farmers who want to convert to regenerative, organic. chemical-free growing often can’t, not because the demand isn’t there, but because the system underneath them won’t let them change.

Federal crop insurance is priced off each farmer’s conventional yield history; switch crops or practices, and that coverage often shrinks along with it. The financing and commodity markets work the same way, built to reward the way farming has always been done, not the way it needs to change.

Swap “financing and commodity markets” for “federal research budgets,” and you’re describing the same failure in women’s health.

In both cases, the infrastructure wasn’t built with families’ long-term health as the organizing principle. It was built around other priorities, and it has proven remarkably resistant to change even after the data made the gap undeniable.

That’s worth sitting with, because it means more money alone won’t fix this. The incentive structure itself has to change, new funding mechanisms, real oversight, real accountability, so research dollars start following the evidence of where people are actually getting sick, instead of just following where they’ve always gone.

A Disease That Affects 190 Million Women Gets Funded Like an Afterthought

Take endometriosis. It’s a chronic, often debilitating disease in which tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, causing severe pelvic pain, infertility, and, for many patients, years of being told the pain is normal. It affects an estimated 190 million women and girls worldwide, roughly 6.5 million of them in the U.S., or about one in ten women of reproductive age. There’s still no blood test for it. The only way to confirm a diagnosis is surgery, so the average patient waits somewhere between seven and ten years, cycling through doctor after doctor, before anyone names what’s actually wrong with her.

And when you go looking for why the science hasn’t caught up, the answer is sitting in the budget.

NIH funded endometriosis research at roughly $28 million in fiscal year 2024, compared to roughly $311 million for prostate cancer that same year.

Prostate cancer affects about 1 in 8 men in their lifetime; endometriosis affects about 1 in 10 women.

Two conditions of comparable scale, one getting more than 11 times the research investment of the other.

This isn’t a story about competing diseases deserving more or less. It’s a story about what happens when a disease that only affects women simply never gets prioritized in the first place, no matter how many millions of people are living with it.

We are still, in 2026, asking women to wait the better part of a decade for a diagnosis that should take months.

A congressionally mandated National Academies report released in late 2024 didn’t mince words: women’s health research at NIH needs transformative change, and the committee recommended Congress appropriate $15.7 billion in new funding over five years, including a new dedicated institute, to begin closing the gap. That’s not activist rhetoric. That’s the nation’s own scientific academy, in its own report, saying the current approach is inadequate.

And the Trend Line Is Moving the Wrong Way

Here’s what worries me most: at the exact moment we finally have the data naming this problem clearly, funding pressure is moving in the opposite direction. Recent analysis of NIH grant terminations found that female early-career researchers lost funding at higher rates than their peers over the past year, a “leaky pipeline” that was already too narrow, getting narrower.

Every researcher who leaves the field because her funding dried up is a body of knowledge about women’s health that never gets built. That’s not an abstraction. That’s fewer answers for your daughter, your mother, your wife, a decade from now.

What Families Actually Need Us to Do

This isn’t a call for a symbolic gesture or a single new office.

It’s a call to treat women’s health research the way we’d treat any other national infrastructure problem: fund it proportionate to the burden of disease, track the spending transparently by condition, and protect the pipeline of researchers, especially early-career women, who are doing this work.

The World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute estimate that closing the global women’s health gap could add more than $1 trillion to the world economy annually by 2040, and that every $1 invested in women’s health returns roughly $3 in economic growth.

This isn’t a cost center. It’s one of the highest-return investments sitting on the table, and we’re leaving it there.

Families don’t experience “the NIH budget” as a line item. They experience it as whether the OB-GYN has good answers about postpartum depression, whether the rheumatologist actually knows how lupus behaves differently in women, whether a teenage girl with debilitating periods gets taken seriously or told it’s normal.

Trace any one of those moments back far enough, and you land on a funding decision made years earlier, by people who will never once sit in that exam room.

We can’t keep building the health of half the population on half the evidence and call it a strategy, any more than we can keep growing food on depleted soil and calling it food security.

This was never a niche cause, and it was never only a women’s issue, it belongs in the same category as clean water, fertile soil, and a working power grid: infrastructure a country either invests in, or ignores, season after season, year after year.

For decades, we’ve left it largely ignored. That choice was made by budgets, not by biology, and it can be unmade the same way.

It's time we treated women's health like what it actually is: the foundation everything else in a family's health grows from.

This summer, a cyclospora outbreak tied to shredded iceberg lettuce has sickened at least 1,644 people and hospitalized 94 across five states, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia, all traced to Taco Bell locations, per the CDC. The recalled lettuce itself reached restaurants and retailers in 27 states, including Walmart’s Marketside brand. Cyclospora is notoriously underdiagnosed, so CDC says the real toll is almost certainly higher, and it’s not the only cyclosporiasis cluster the FDA is investigating this season, which makes clean numbers hard to pin down.

The supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, isn’t new to this parasite. In 2013, its salad mix was traced to a cyclospora outbreak that sickened 631 people across 25 states, many at Olive Garden and Red Lobster. In 2024, its sliced onions were named the source of an E. coli outbreak tied to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders, 104 illnesses, 34 hospitalizations, one death, across 14 states.

Now, thirteen years after the first outbreak bearing its name, Taylor Farms is back in the middle of another one. Same parasite. Same company. No meaningful regulatory reckoning in between.

A Word on the Evidence

What we actually know at this moment: the one lab sample that tested positive for cyclospora was walked back by the FDA as a false positive within about a day, and the agency said it had zero confirmed positive product samples. Taylor Farms says no branded product is involved and it’s no longer sourcing lettuce from central Mexico this season.

But the false positive doesn’t clear the company.

Acting food chief Donald Prater told reporters the agency’s findings “continue to converge on” Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg lettuce from central Mexico as the source, and another FDA official called the epidemiological evidence “very strong.”

The agency also disputed Taylor Farms’ apology claim: “We did not offer an official apology, but did explain factually the issues.” So the case rests on traceback and patient interviews, not a lab result, not unusual for this parasite, and why the recall and CDC’s advisory remain in effect.

Investors Knew Five Months Ago

This wasn’t unforeseeable. In its 10-K filed with the SEC on February 20, 2026, five months before this outbreak began, Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent, told its own investors that food-borne pathogens, cyclospora among them, were among its top disclosed risks, alongside E. coli, listeria, salmonella, and trichinosis.

Forbes’ review of the filing describes it as the No. 1 threat on the list, ranked ahead of every other business risk Yum disclosed, and reports the filing specifically named growing reliance on third-party suppliers as the reason that risk was moving outside the company’s control, a fairly exact description of what happened here.

A Money Trail Worth Sitting With

FEC (Federal Election Commission) filings show Taylor Farms’ parent company donated $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in March 2025, about a week after the FDA delayed the Food Traceability Rule by 30 months.

What is the Food Traceability Rule? The exact rule meant to help trace contaminated food through the supply chain faster.

The company and its affiliated entities have also donated to Trump, Ron DeSantis, and other Republican and Democratic campaigns and committees, according to a review of FEC filings. CEO Bruce Taylor has given separately and personally: FEC records show $400,000 to Republican-aligned PACs in 2025 and 2026 alone, on top of more than $1 million to GOP-aligned PACs over the past two decades, per Newsweek and Fox40.

More recently, the company hired Trent Morse, who had served as deputy director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, to represent it in Washington. On July 16, the day before the recall, Taylor Farms executives met with the White House and the FDA to discuss what a company spokesperson told the New York Times were “shortfalls” in the FDA’s and CDC’s outbreak response. The recall came the next day, the positive test followed, and the reversal to “false positive” came the day after that.

HHS itself has forcefully denied any connection between the donation, the meeting, and the reversal, writing in response to the allegations that this is how “the FAKE NEWS works: imply collusion, ignore the facts,” and insisting nothing but science guides its decisions.

There’s no public evidence the donation bought the rule delay or that the meeting changed the government’s response, the FDA’s underlying findings haven’t budged. A company can be politically connected and still be right about a lab error.

Nobody’s Home

This is unfolding inside a health department with the lights half off.

The Surgeon General’s office has sat vacant since January 2025, one MAHA-aligned nominee withdrawn, a second, Dr. Nicole Saphier, still awaiting confirmation. There’s no confirmed CDC Director: Susan Monarez was confirmed and fired within weeks, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has run CDC as acting head since February, and nominee Erica Schwartz is still awaiting a Senate vote after a hearing where senators from both parties questioned whether she, or anyone, could stand up to Kennedy’s interference. The FDA has no confirmed Commissioner since Marty Makary’s resignation, no permanent vaccine chief, and no NIAID director either.

The losses run deeper than the executive suite. In February 2025, the FDA fired 89 staff from its Human Foods Program, the unit most directly responsible for food safety, in what Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones called an “indiscriminate” purge on his way out, naming staff with expertise in nutrition, infant formula, food safety response, and ingredient safety. Agency-wide, OPM data shows the FDA has lost roughly 3,879 employees in 2025 and 705 more so far in 2026, over 4,000 since January 2025, while CDC has lost thousands more. Those totals span the whole agency, not just food safety, but the pattern is the same: experienced staff leaving faster than they can be replaced, in the middle of exactly the kind of outbreak they existed to catch.

Even His Own Allies Are Leaving

It’s not just career scientists walking out, Kennedy is losing people he handpicked. Marty Makary, a Trump appointee who championed MAHA priorities from inside the FDA, resigned this year, and loyal staff followed him. Dr. Robert Malone, installed on a federal vaccine panel during Kennedy’s overhaul of it, quit too, citing months of thankless work, public hostility, and internal sabotage, despite Kennedy personally calling to ask him to stay.

“Streamlining” Isn’t the Same as Safer

Secretary Kennedy calls this streamlining, trimming bureaucracy to “make America healthy again.”

This isn’t partisan; it’s operational. Cut the workforce that walks cold-storage floors, runs samples, and traces a cluster back to a lot number, and you don’t get leaner, you get slower. Outbreaks take longer to trace, recalls land after more people are sick, and companies learn the cost of getting caught is smaller than the cost of doing it right.

The people who pay for that gap aren’t Taylor Farms executives or Yum shareholders. It’s the parent scrolling a recall notice at midnight. The family without paid sick leave, down a week of work. The rural communities with the thinnest margin of protection to begin with.

Gutting the agencies built to protect them doesn’t make things fairer, it makes them worse, faster, for the people with the least room to absorb it.

Here’s what I’d ask Secretary Kennedy directly: show me the staffing at the Human Foods Program and at the health departments doing the case-tracing right now. Show me how a company appears in three outbreaks in thirteen years without real consequence, and tell me how fewer inspectors fixes that. I don’t think it can.

I wrote a book called The Unhealthy Truth with the subtitle “How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.”

We can’t shop our way around a food-safety system that’s being hollowed out from the inside.

Three outbreaks in thirteen years and one company. That isn’t a mystery, it is a company nobody made accountable, inside an agency that’s been gutted and hasn’t been adequately staffed.

That’s not bad luck. That’s a choice, made in Washington, by an administration promising to make us healthy.

So where to look next?

Perhaps the answers were never going to come from the FDA or HHS.

Perhaps they have been sitting in the food industry's SEC filings the whole time.

Note on sourcing: figures on illnesses, hospitalizations, and staffing reflect CDC and OPM data current as of publication and may shift as the investigation continues. Claims about the Taylor Farms/White House meeting, the MAGA Inc. donation, and the Trent Morse hire are drawn from FEC filings and reporting by Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Daily Beast. The administration disputes any connection between these events, and no evidence has been shown that either the donation or the meeting altered the government’s response.

There’s a word doing a lot of heavy lifting in the food industry right now, and it’s being stretched past the point of meaning anything at all. That word is “regenerative.”

Walk down any grocery aisle and you’ll see it on cereal boxes, chip bags, and dairy cartons, a promise that the soil behind that product is being healed, not harmed. It’s a beautiful and critically important idea. Soil that retains water instead of losing it. Soil that pulls carbon down instead of releasing it. Soil alive with the microbial life that chemical farming spent seventy years killing off. That vision is real, and it’s worth fighting for.

But today, the companies selling us the word are, in many cases, the same companies that spent decades selling us the chemicals that damaged soil health in the first place.

Follow the money, not the marketing

Bayer and Syngenta, two of the largest pesticide and seed manufacturers on the planet, have become some of the loudest voices in the regenerative movement. They fund pilot programs. They sponsor conferences. They publish glossy sustainability reports full of soil-health language. And they keep selling exactly what they’ve always sold: synthetic herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, and the seeds engineered to withstand them.

Consider “no-till” farming, one of regenerative agriculture’s signature practices. Done right, it’s a genuine soil-health tool: you stop destroying the fungal networks and microbial life underneath the ground.

In the industrial system, “no-till” too often means something else: instead of a plow killing the cover crop, a chemical does.

A recent analysis found that the overwhelming majority of no-till corn and soybean acreage in this country still depends on the very pesticides regenerative agriculture is supposed to be moving us away from.

A movement with no locks on the door

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: “regenerative” has no federal definition, no enforced standard, no consequence for misuse. Any company can put the word on a label. That’s precisely why we need certifications with teeth, frameworks built by farmers, soil scientists, and food-system advocates, not by the marketing departments of the companies whose core business model depends on chemical inputs.

I serve on the board of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, and I’ve watched up close what it actually takes to build a standard that means something: third-party verification, real soil-health metrics, protections for farmworkers, requirements for animal welfare, not a checkbox, but a floor beneath which a product cannot fall and still wear the label.

That’s the difference between a certification and a slogan.

Watching the walk-back

What worries me most isn’t just the greenwashing, it’s the quiet retreat happening behind it. Some of the biggest food companies in America have spent the last few years touting regenerative agriculture as a cornerstone of their sustainability strategy, only to strip pesticide-reduction language out of those very plans once shareholders started asking for the data behind the claims. When a company calls regenerative farming its “number one pesticide reduction strategy” but won’t disclose whether pesticide use actually went down, that’s not a communications problem. That’s an admission.

Washington’s version of the word isn’t much better

Then there’s the government’s own retreat. Under the Biden administration, USDA put roughly $3 billion into the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, a real, if imperfect, attempt to pay farmers for practices that build soil carbon and cut emissions. In April 2025, the new administration canceled it outright, branding it a “Biden era climate slush fund,” and USDA staffing has been gutted by roughly a fifth since. What survived was repackaged into a new program stripped of its climate, equity, and sustainability benchmarks, same acres, same farmers in some cases, but with the accountability metrics quietly deleted.

Money that used to come with a requirement to prove climate benefit now doesn’t have to prove anything except that a farmer signed up.

Then, in June 2026, the same administration turned around and signed an executive order called “Advancing Regenerative Agriculture and Strengthening American Farm Resilience.”

On paper, that sounds like a course correction. In practice, farm-policy groups who read the fine print called it what it is: a repackaging of prior announcements with no new money attached.

That’s Washington’s way of saying: don’t hold us to this.

Here’s the part that should stop you cold.

The same order that talks about soil health and farm resilience also directs the EPA to prioritize registration of new crop-protection chemicals and speed up review of pre-harvest desiccation, the practice of spraying a crop with herbicide right before harvest to dry it out faster.

Building the infrastructure is hard work and requires farmer input. Drafting the press release doesn’t.

So we’ve now watched a real program with real accountability get killed and replaced, a year later, by a press release with no funding behind it. That’s not evolution. That’s a downgrade, dressed up in the same vocabulary the killed program used to earn trust.

A biofuel rule wearing a soil-health costume

The same day the executive order was signed, USDA rolled out something with actual teeth attached to it: a final Regenerative Feedstock Rule, built to route corn, soybeans, sorghum, and spring canola into the biofuel supply chain and reward growers with better pricing under the federal Clean Fuel Production Credit if they can document lower-carbon farming practices. Compared to the executive order’s empty promises, this rule at least does something, it sets real standards for measuring carbon intensity field by field and tracking that data through the supply chain.

But look closely at what it’s actually rewarding. It’s not paying farmers to build soil biology or cut chemical inputs for their own sake. It’s paying them to produce cheaper feedstock for fuel refineries. The rule started life under the Biden administration as an interim standard for “climate-smart” biofuel crops; the new version simply swapped that language for “low-carbon” and “reduced carbon-intensity,” part of a broader pattern of this administration scrubbing the word “climate” from federal programs while keeping the underlying mechanics intact.

Regenerative practices here aren’t the goal. They’re an input-cost calculation for the ethanol and biodiesel industry, dressed in soil-health language because that language tests well.

When a farming practice only gets institutional support once someone figures out how to monetize it through a tax credit, ask yourself who the actual beneficiary is. It’s rarely the soil.

Soil doesn’t grade on a curve

I’ve spent most of my career following the money behind what ends up on our dinner plates, and I’ve learned that the food industry rarely changes because it wants to. It changes because consumers, farmers, and capital demand it, and because someone keeps asking the follow-up question when a company says “regenerative” and doesn’t say how.

So ask it. Ask what certification backs the claim. Ask whether pesticide use is going up or down, not just whether the word “regenerative” appears on the bag.

Ask who’s transitioning their land to organic systems and who’s simply transitioning their marketing budget.

And consumers deserve a label they can actually trust.

Right now, too many of them can’t.

The word “regenerative” is quickly becoming a marketing tool, not a standard, just like the word “natural,” worn down into whatever a label needs it to mean.

But the truth is coming, because the soil doesn’t lie. And no one understands that more than our nation’s farmers.

Declining yields, rising input costs, and degraded land will tell the truth, whether or not a bag admits it first.

There is a pattern that anyone who questions MAHA quickly learns to recognize: challenge the movement, and within hours you will be accused of being funded by Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, or some combination of all three.

The accusation doesn’t need to be true. It just needs to land fast enough to change the subject.

I have known Marion Nestle for nearly twenty years. Her book Food Politics was instrumental in shaping my first book, The Unhealthy Truth, published by Crown/Random House in 2009. Long before the food movement became divided and politicized by the current administration, Marion’s work was foundational to all of it. She has spent fifty years following the money, documenting with meticulous, peer-reviewed precision how corporate interests corrupt the science, capture the regulators, and rewrite the guidelines that are supposed to protect us. She has done this work without taking a dollar from the food industry. She has a public policy on her website saying exactly that.

Last month, Calley Means stood at a podium at the Great American State Fair and told the crowd that the Sugar Research Council paid Marion to promote carbohydrates in the 1980s, and that she claimed credit for architecting the 1992 food pyramid.

A Washington Post reporter asked her: any of this true?

“Good grief no,” she said. “Not only are these statements false; they are spectacularly false.”

She went through them line by line, setting the record straight.

These accusations, spectacularly false, as Marion puts it, are not new, and they are not unique to her. They have been directed at many of us who have spent years working on food safety and chemical accountability. They are a tactic, not an argument. When you cannot answer the evidence, you manufacture a history for the person presenting it.

What Calley Means did to Marion Nestle’s history has a name. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway named it in their book, and later film, Merchants of Doubt: the deliberate manufacture of scientific uncertainty to protect industry profits. The tobacco industry called it their own product.

A 1969 internal Brown & Williamson document stated it plainly:

Attack the scientist. Manufacture doubt about their funding. Change the subject before the evidence can land. Marion has spent fifty years teaching all of us to recognize it. We owe her the honesty of naming it.

Marion has spent her career documenting exactly how that strategy migrated from tobacco into food, how the same PR firms, the same tactics, and in some cases the same people moved from defending cigarettes to defending sugar to defending pesticides. She didn’t just study the playbook. She mapped it. And now it is being run against her.

What is worth naming clearly is what Marion has been doing lately that makes her a target: she has been documenting Bayer’s lobbying operation in real time, $9.19 million spent on Congress and the executive branch in 2025 alone, 45 registered lobbyists, 13 outside lobbying firms, and writing about the revolving door between the agrichemical industry and the regulators who are supposed to oversee it.

She published a piece specifically titled “How to explain glyphosate hypocrisy? Bayer’s lobbying and revolving door.” She has been writing about the conflicts of interest embedded in the MAHA dietary guidelines advisory process.

She has been calling out, clearly and publicly, that MAHA followers “could also examine the conflicts of interests of their own wellness-industry aligned leaders.”

She has been doing, in other words, exactly what she has always done: following the money. And the money, in this case, leads somewhere the movement does not want examined.

The courage it takes to do this work, to speak publicly against an administration that has demonstrated a clear willingness to bully, discredit, and fabricate, should not be taken for granted.

Marion is 90 years old, and she is still at her desk, still reading the documents, still publishing. I am grateful she is speaking out. I am appalled that she has to. But I am not surprised.

This is what happens when the money gets uncomfortable. And as more people start to shine a light on this, the money is clearly getting very uncomfortable.

Read her response here: https://www.foodpolitics.com/2026/07/setting-the-record-straight-calley-means/

Over the weekend, I was on the Tuolumne River with a group of women whose work spans food, energy, agriculture, and climate.

A young woman on the trip found me at one point, away from the group.

“My father has non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. We were part of the class action lawsuits that the Supreme Court just ruled on.”

“I am so sorry,” I said. “How is your dad?”

“He’s okay,” she said. “He was a landscaper for over 40 years. It’s why they took his case.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Sixty-five,” she said. And she spoke about how it appeared as a rash on his skin at first, the failure to diagnose it early.

“He’s been told he can’t go in the sun anymore. He can’t touch the dirt.” She looked up. “It’s his entire life. He’s a landscaper.”

Sometimes grief lands without a noise. It did, at that moment, on a riverbank in the Sierra foothills.

She went on. “We weren’t trying to get rich. We were just trying to cover our costs. We had to rent a small apartment in the city where he was getting treatments. There were a lot of costs.”

“I am so sorry,” I said again, because there wasn’t anything else true enough to say.

“I’m getting married in August,” she said. And I thought “I am so glad he is here to walk her down the aisle” and how proud he must be.

Her story sat with me the whole drive home. It was so earnest and so true. And somewhere on that drive, a question started to form that I couldn’t put down: there must be countless families like this one. What happens to them now?

So I started digging.

What the Supreme Court Actually Decided

On June 25, 2026, the Court ruled 7–2 in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell that federal pesticide law preempts state failure-to-warn claims requiring a cancer warning on Roundup labels beyond what the EPA has required. In plain language: because the EPA has never required a cancer warning on glyphosate-based products, the Court found that state juries, the same juries that heard from farmworkers, landscapers, groundskeepers, and their families for a decade, can no longer hold Monsanto or Bayer liable under state law for failing to warn people like this young woman’s father.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. Justices Jackson and Gorsuch dissented, arguing the Court misread the statute and that a cancer warning doesn’t actually conflict with federal law at all.

Whatever your view of the legal reasoning, here is what it means for real families: the door that let a jury of their peers weigh their story, the smell of the chemical, the years of exposure, the diagnosis, the debt, that door is now closed for future cases built on failure to warn.

It is worth remembering how this all started. In 2018, a California jury heard the case of Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a school groundskeeper who spent years mixing and spraying Roundup as part of his job before he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. That jury didn’t just rule in his favor, they found Monsanto acted with malice for failing to warn him. Johnson’s case was the first Roundup trial to go before a jury, and it opened the door to the more than 100,000 people who went on to sue Monsanto in the years since, including the father of the young woman I met on the river. The door that opened with a groundskeeper’s case in 2018 is the same one this ruling just closed for everyone who might have walked through it next.

For anyone who wants to understand how the science around glyphosate’s safety became so contested in the first place, journalist Carey Gillam’s book Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science remains the clearest account of it, years of reporting on how the story was shaped long before it ever reached a jury, or the Supreme Court.

What It Actually Costs

I thought about Vanessa and the things she shared about her father’s diagnosis and illness. She herself had to take a year off of work to help care for her dad. The apartment they rented was on top of the mortgage still being paid. And early on, she said, “We decided as a family we would all chip in.”

Let that land. Really, let that settle in.

And she shared how she felt lucky that he had Medicare, but he still had to reach a deductible, all which came from his retirement account.

She wondered about people that were still working, because she said that she was so relieved that her dad was retired. Becuase in addition to the costs, there were thousands of hours on the phone with insurance companies to cover his prescriptions and so many more spent driving to and from their home to Miami, a trip that was two hours each way.

And yet in all of that, the first call her dad had with a young attorney was the first time she saw him hopeful.

What Recourse Is Actually Left

This is the part I want to be careful and precise about, because families in this exact position deserve facts, not more grief dressed up as hope.

If your family was part of the pending litigation: Before this ruling came down, Bayer had already proposed a nationwide class settlement, announced in February 2026, worth up to $7.25 billion, designed to resolve both existing and future non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims tied to Roundup exposure. A few things matter here:

• It covers people exposed to Roundup before February 17, 2026, who have been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma now, or who are diagnosed within 16 years of the settlement’s final approval.

• Reported payouts range from roughly $10,000 to $165,000 or more per family, depending on the severity of the illness, the length and intensity of exposure, and other individual factors. This is not a flat, equal payout, it is tiered.

• It is structured as a long-term compensation program, funded over as long as 21 years, not a lump sum arriving next month.

• It is being actively contested. A group of people diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma has filed objections, arguing the settlement was negotiated without real adversarial pressure and that it violates their due process rights. Those objections have so far failed to block the settlement, but the fight over its fairness is not over.

• The window to opt out of the class, to preserve the right to sue independently, closed on June 4, 2026. Families who already opted out keep the right to pursue their own claim, though this ruling will make that road significantly harder.

Where to go: The official settlement website is WeedKillerClass.com, run by the court-appointed claims administrator, not a law firm, not a referral service. Right now, registration and claim filing aren’t open yet; the court has scheduled a fairness hearing for August 19, 2026 to decide whether to grant final approval. In the meantime, families can sign up on the site to be notified the moment registration opens, or call the toll-free number, 1-888-403-8201, to talk to someone directly. There’s also an email address, info@WeedKillerClass.com, for questions.

Put that date on your calendar.

A caution, because I want this piece to protect people, not just inform them: a settlement this large draws a lot of secondary websites, law firm marketing pages, “case review” forms, and lawsuit-info sites, all built to route you toward a specific firm, sometimes for a fee or referral. None of that is illegal, but it isn’t the same as the official source.

When you’re searching for this, go straight to WeedKillerClass.com rather than the first result that comes up, and be cautious of anyone who contacts you first, asks for payment up front, or pressures you to decide quickly.

If your family has not yet filed a claim: This is the hardest truth in all of it. The preemption ruling does not retroactively erase what already happened to your father, your mother, your neighbor, the diagnosis is still real, the bills are still real, the loss is still real. But it does mean a new lawsuit built on “they should have warned us” is very unlikely to succeed going forward. The class settlement claims process, if and when it receives final court approval, is likely to be the primary avenue left for people newly coming forward.

What I am not able to tell you: I am not an attorney, and nothing here is legal advice. Every family’s situation is different, how long the exposure lasted, what kind of work it involved, when the diagnosis came, whether a claim was already filed. Those specifics change everything about what options exist. What I can tell you is that mass-tort and personal injury attorneys who have handled Roundup litigation specifically will be able to look at your family’s facts and tell you, honestly, where you stand.

Why I’m Writing This Down

I didn’t grow up planning to write about pesticide litigation on a Monday night after a river trip. I grew up, and built a career, caring about what’s in our food, our water, our soil, and what that does to the people who grow, tend, and harvest it for the rest of us. The young woman I met this weekend wasn’t asking me for anything. She was just telling me about her dad, a man who spent 40 years putting his hands in the earth for a living, and who now can’t touch it, can’t stand in the sun that once was simply part of his workday.

That’s not abstract to me. That’s a father. That’s a family that rented a small apartment near a hospital because that’s what it took. That’s a daughter carrying grief that lands so quietly that it would be easy to dismiss.

We can’t dismiss it.

I don’t have the power to reverse a Supreme Court ruling. None of us do.

But I can pull together what is actually known, right now, about what recourse exists, and put it in the hands of the people who need it, instead of letting it stay scattered across legal filings and press releases that most families will never see.

So this is for Vanessa. And for every other family quietly living some version of her story, wondering where to turn next.

Please share this. Grief is love with no place to go. But if you’re the one living this, or you know someone who is, you can put that love into action and start here: WeedKillerClass.com, or 1-888-403-8201.

I am not an attorney, and this piece is not legal advice. Families exploring their options should consult a mass-tort or personal injury attorney with direct experience in Roundup/glyphosate litigation, who can evaluate the specific facts of their case.

I am the author of the award winning book, The Unhealthy Truth, How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It (Random House, 2009) and an executive producer of the award winning documentary, Common Ground, which fuses journalistic expose’ with deeply personal stories from those on the front lines of the food and agriculture movements.

The documentary and my book unveil a dark web of money, power, and politics behind our broken food system.

Common Ground is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

What comes next didn’t stop with pesticides. Today, while I was finishing this piece, the pattern completed itself one more time.

The FDA just denied a petition that asked it to set limits on PFAS in food. The group behind it, the Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force, originally petitioned in 2023 for the FDA to check up to 30 PFAS compounds across produce, fish, eggs, milk, and bread.

When the FDA sat on that request past its own legal deadline, the Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force scaled it back in 2025 to something much narrower and harder to say no to: just advisory thresholds for two of the most common, most studied PFAS chemicals, in just seafood and milk.

The FDA said no to that too, citing insufficient evidence, and said it would consider only non-binding “action levels” instead of enforceable limits, meaning contaminated food doesn’t have to come off the shelf even if it’s found.

Let me state that again so that you don’t miss it: the FDA won’t enforce limits, and contaminated food will stay on the shelf.

This is the same agency whose own testing found PFAS in 70% of the seafood it sampled, and independent testing has already found it in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature milk.

Milk. The product that the administration is pushing with the reinvigorated milk mustache campaign. At the same, Kennedy knows full well that milk is one of the top eight allergens. His late wife, Mary Kennedy, spent decades advocating for food allergy and asthma-related issues. She was a co-founder of the Food Allergy Initiative, the world’s largest private funding source for food allergy research.

Image from MAHA Action January 12, 2026.

There was real hope that this specific agency, under Robert F Kennedy Jr, a long time advocate of families dealing with food allergies, would be the one to finally take this seriously, eliminating chemicals from food is supposed to be the entire point of MAHA.

Instead, this is now three separate federal decision points in one year, EPA, the Supreme Court, and now FDA, all landing on the same side of the same question, on the same class of chemicals.

Every time I write something like that, I get the same message back from a dozen different people: Okay, but what do I actually do with this? Fair question. Outrage without a next step is just a feeling, and feelings don’t move legislation. So here are five specific things, in order of how much time each one takes, starting with the one that takes thirty seconds.

1. Call your representative about H.R. 7601, today, not eventually. The No Immunity for Glyphosate Act would strip the liability shield back out of February’s executive order. It has real bipartisan support, Democrats and Republicans who agree on almost nothing else agreeing on this, but it has sat in the House Judiciary Committee since the day it was introduced, with no hearing and no vote. Bipartisan support without pressure is just a bill nobody’s forcing to the floor. A phone call takes less time than reading this paragraph. Say the bill number. Say you want a hearing scheduled. Hang up. That’s it.

You can Find Your Representative here.

2. Start your own paper trail, and post it under #ChemGate. In 2016, when Mylan raised EpiPen prices 500%, we didn’t wait for a senator to notice. We posted our own receipts until the number was impossible to ignore, and #EpiGate forced a congressional hearing and a $465 million settlement. Do the same thing here. Photograph the label on the cereal, the corn, the soybean oil. Post the pediatrician bill, the allergy test, the fertility workup nobody warned you you’d need. Show the chemicals for sale in your local garden store. Tag it #ChemGate. One photo doesn’t move anything. Ten thousand photos are a movement, and movements are the only thing that’s ever actually worked on this.

3. Learn to read a registration, not just a label. The label on your food will never tell you that diflufenican is a Bayer product, or that chlormequat’s tolerance was just raised to 40 parts per million on oats. That information lives in the EPA’s own public registration filings, dry, unglamorous, and free to search. You don’t need a law degree. You need ten minutes and the chemical name. When you find something, that’s not a stopping point, it’s a caption for step two. Print it, tag it, #ChemGate.

You can research these products yourself here.

4. Support the organizations already doing the unglamorous legal work. Groups like Center for Food Safety and Environmental Working Group are the ones actually filing the lawsuits and FOIA requests that produced the emails I’ve been writing about, the ones showing this redefinition of “forever chemical” was steered, not accidental. The Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force is doing the same thing right now: they’re the ones behind today’s FDA petition, and their attorney has already said they plan to sue and ask a court to order FDA to actually set thresholds.

As she put it, if it’s worth regulating in water, it’s worth regulating in food, your body doesn’t know which route the chemical came in on.

That work is slow, expensive, and it doesn’t go viral. It’s unglamorous. There is no hair and makeup involved, and it’s also the only reason we know any of this at all. A donation, a signature on their action alerts, or just sharing their reporting instead of a vague secondhand version of it, all matter more than they sound like they should. If you donate, tag it, share it with your network and say why. This is #ChemGate.

5. Vote like you remember this in every election that touches the EPA, not just the presidential one. This didn’t happen because of one bad president. It happened because of an appropriations rider, a committee assignment, a confirmation vote for an administrator most people couldn’t name, the unglamorous machinery that decides who runs the agency deciding what’s in your food. Off-year elections, primaries, the school-board-adjacent races nobody covers: that machinery gets built there, quietly, every single cycle. Show up for those too.

None of these five things requires you to become an activist. None of them requires you to be an expert in fluorinated carbon chemistry. What they require is the same thing that made #EpiGate work: enough of us doing one small, specific thing, at the same time, loudly enough that it stops being easy to ignore.

We’ve done this before. Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and 3M did not get where they are by underestimating regulators. They are, I promise you, underestimating us. Pick one of these five today. Not all five, one. Then tell me you did it. Tag it #ChemGate.

Our children are counting on us.

Every parent has disciplined a child who keeps breaking the same rule. You don’t get more lenient by the fourth time. You get clearer. You get the consequence to actually mean something, because you’ve figured out that a warning without a consequence just teaches a kid that the warning was empty.

I bring this up because I think it’s one of the most useful skills we have for what I’m about to describe, and I don’t say that as a joke.

On June 25, President Trump signed an executive order called “Advancing Regenerative Agriculture and Strengthening American Farm Resilience.” Soil health, cover crops, resilience. On paper, and in the room that day, were farmers and issues that so many of us care deeply about. It was signed the same day the Supreme Court ruled in Monsanto’s favor in Durnell v. Monsanto, closing the door on failure-to-warn lawsuits over Roundup.

One hand signed a soil-health order while the other handed Bayer its get-out-of-court-free card, on the same afternoon for the cameras.

The regenerative order also does something quieter: it directs the EPA to “prioritize registration of alternative crop protection tools.”

That sounds like fewer chemicals. Don’t be misled. It has functioned as more. Even the agriculture industry’s own trade groups have said, on the record, that they weren’t consulted on the language and that roughly six new pesticide approvals were reportedly sitting on the administrator’s desk, waiting, because the political optics of approving them looked bad. Then the optics problem solved itself, and the approvals came quickly.

Since November, by the agency’s own count, the EPA has authorized five new PFAS pesticides for use on American crops.

I’ve already told you about two of them: diflufenican and fluoxapiprolin, both Bayer; epyrifenacil, registered by Valent U.S.A.; trifludimoxazin, from BASF; and chlormequat, from Taminco, a subsidiary of Eastman.

Three more belong in that same list. Cyclobutrifluram and isocycloseram, both developed by Syngenta, were approved in November for use on turf, lettuce, cotton, soybean seed, and, for isocycloseram, food crops including oranges, tomatoes, almonds, and oats.

And bifenthrin, already one of the most widely detected insecticides in American rivers and streams, just had its uses expanded again, in the same batch of approvals as diflufenican.

Eight chemicals. Six companies. One redefinition of the word “forever” that made most of them disappear from the government’s own list of things to worry about.

Why flag this? Because “regenerative” doesn’t yet have a formal definition. And at the same time that an executive order was signed promoting it, it directs the EPA to “prioritize registration of alternative crop protection tools”.

So here’s the trick, and it’s a genuinely clever one. Definitions of these words actually matter.

The EPA now says a pesticide only counts as a “forever chemical” if it has two or more fluorinated carbon atoms. One is fine, they say.

In contrast, the international standard, the one most of the world’s scientists actually use, says one is enough. It says if there is one fluorinated carbon atom in the pesticide, it’s flagged as a “forever chemical.”

Internal emails obtained under public records requests show this exact redefinition was steered by the agency’s own political appointees, several of whom spent their careers as registered lobbyists for the same industry they now regulate. The head of EPA’s pesticide office previously lobbied for the soybean industry’s trade group. A principal deputy assistant administrator previously worked for the American Chemistry Council, which represents Bayer. Another senior official, the agency's deputy chief of staff, has a spouse who was, until recently, 3M's own director of government affairs, as reported by Peter Castagno.

This revolving door isn’t new. However, the redefinition of “forever chemical” is.

And then there’s Brian Ballard. His firm, Ballard Partners, lobbies for 3M, the company that invented PFAS and knew for decades what it was doing to the water supply. The same firm is also one of Bayer’s top lobbyists. And one of the EPA’s own current officials overseeing this exact set of approvals is married to a registered Ballard Partners lobbyist who has reported lobbying the EPA directly on 3M’s behalf.

I want to say that slowly, because it’s easy to skim past: the wife works inside the agency approving the chemicals. The husband works outside it, lobbying that same agency, for the company that makes them. Nobody broke a law. That’s the way the game is played. And it should worry you more, not less.

I want to name the coalition that got quietly used in all of this, because I think it deserves to see itself clearly. MAHA built its entire following on the promise that someone in Washington would finally take chemical exposure seriously. RFK Jr. spent a career suing Bayer over the same chemical he now defends by executive order.

You don’t need a conspiracy for this to work. You just need everyone counting on the base to read the headline and not the docket.

So here’s where the discipline comes in, because I don’t think outrage on its own does anything.

When a child keeps doing the thing you’ve told them not to, you don’t lecture louder. You change what happens next. You take away the car keys, you tighten the curfew. You take away the thing that lets the behavior continue.

Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, 3M: every one of them is behaving exactly like a kid who’s figured out there’s no real consequence, because there hasn’t been one. The Supreme Court took the lawsuits away. The executive order took the political pressure away. The redefinition took the label away. Nothing in that chain was ever going to correct itself, because nothing in it was designed to.

Women are good at discipline, and I don’t think that’s an accident or a compliment. We’ve spent our lives being the ones who hold a line when everyone around us is tired of holding it, bedtime, screen time, the fourth “no” of the day that has to sound exactly as firm as the first one. We know that consequences only work if you’re willing to actually follow through on them, past the point where it’s convenient. That is precisely the skill this moment requires, and it is precisely the skill three-quarters of a century of chemical industry lobbying has never had to face, because it has mostly been negotiating with itself.

I’ve held this line before. When Mylan raised the price of an EpiPen 500%, I started #EpiGate, and mothers posting their own receipts did something a decade of quiet policy meetings hadn’t: we made the cost impossible to look away from, until Congress had to hold a hearing and Mylan had to pay $465 million. Nobody handed us that. We built the consequence ourselves, because no one else was going to.

We’re going to have to do it again. Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and 3M did not get where they are by underestimating regulators. They are, I promise you, underestimating us. Start keeping your receipts. Post them under #ChemGate. Post your images, your stories, your articles and label them #ChemGate. Reach out to your local news anchors and local newspapers. Get on social media. Give them the label, too. Call it what it is: #ChemGate.

Let’s see how long this takes, once the label-readers are the ones doing the labeling.

Because if the existing labels aren’t going to protect our children, it’s time to make our own.

This is #ChemGate. Our children are counting on us.

I still have the EpiPen receipts. Nine years later, I don't know why I kept them, old grocery-store printouts gone soft at the folds, $700 circled in pen, except that they were proof. Proof that a company had decided what our children's safety was worth, and proof that nobody was going to hand us that number unless we went and found it ourselves. I'm starting to think I need a new folder.

Here’s the shape: in February, the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act, the same law we use to keep bullets and semiconductors flowing during a war, to guarantee the supply of glyphosate. Not to guarantee food. Not to guarantee safety. To guarantee a chemical, and to extend legal cover to the one company that makes it.

Four months later, the Supreme Court issued a ruling protecting glyphosate, and then without much notice, the EPA approved five new pesticides that regulators in Europe have already had to reckon with. One of them, diflufenican, was recently banned in Denmark because it breaks down into a compound now found in 78% of German wells tested. It’s approved here for corn and soybeans, two of the crops most likely to end up on your child’s plate before lunch tomorrow.

I want to be precise about the order of events, because the calendar is one of the only things this administration hasn’t managed to co-opt yet.

February 18, 2026. An executive order declares glyphosate a matter of national security and hands Bayer a liability shield through the Defense Production Act.

June 25, 2026. The Supreme Court rules in Monsanto v. Durnell that if the EPA has approved a pesticide’s label, no state court can hold the manufacturer liable for failing to warn you. Seven justices agreed. Two didn’t.

Days later. The EPA approves fluoxapiprolin, epyrifenacil, trifludimoxazin, and expanded uses of chlormequat chloride, chemicals that, according to the Center for Food Safety, the agency’s own prior assessments linked to tumors in laboratory animals and reproductive harm in independent studies it dismissed.

Fluoxapiprolin produced uterine cancer and thymus tumors in female rats. Epyrifenacil produced liver tumors in male mice. The EPA called both “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans” anyway. Chlormequat, which doesn’t kill weeds or pests, it just makes grain stalks stiffer for harvest, disrupts reproductive hormones and is now approved at tolerances the agency itself set far above international norms: 40 parts per million on oats.

Center for Food Safety’s science director put it plainly: the agency’s cancer division seems unable to recognize cancer risk “even when it’s the pesticide company’s own studies that show it.”

This isn’t a bad week. It’s a machine, and it was built to run in exactly this order. First you make the chemical a matter of “national security,” so debating it looks unpatriotic. Then you close the courthouse door, so no jury ever has to weigh the evidence. Then, with the door closed and the flag still waving, you approve the next round.

Let’s name who’s actually sitting at that table, because “the industry” is not an abstraction.

Bayer, the company shielded by February’s executive order, the same company that just settled with tens of thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer, is also the registrant behind diflufenican, marketed as Convintro, and fluoxapiprolin, the fungicide the EPA’s own data tied to uterine cancer and thymus tumors in female rats.

Valent U.S.A. holds the registration on epyrifenacil, the herbicide linked to liver tumors in male mice.

BASF developed trifludimoxazin, the same chemical BASF agreed to pull from the market back in 2022 rather than defend in court against a Center for Food Safety lawsuit, and that the EPA just waved back through anyway, years later, under a friendlier set of rules. And chlormequat chloride, now cleared for far broader use on the wheat and oats in your pantry, is made by Taminco, a subsidiary of Eastman Chemical.

Four companies. One legal shield. Every one of them selling into a market the government just made safer for them and, by its own prior findings, less safe for us.

I used to track this kind of sequencing for a living. I spent my Wall Street years reading supply chains the way other people read novels, for the plot, for who benefits, for what happens next. What I’m describing above isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a supply chain.

Executive order secures the input. Court ruling secures the immunity. Agency approval secures the market. Nowhere in that chain is there a line item for the woman who now has to figure out, on her own, whether the box of oat cereal in her cart is one of the ones affected, because no label will tell her, and as of June, no court will make anyone tell her either.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Not the chemistry. The distribution of the labor.

Because here is what doesn’t show up in any EPA risk assessment: who reads the study.

Who calls the pediatrician. Who switches brands three times trying to figure out why a child’s eczema won’t clear. Who sits in the exam room asking about fertility, about miscarriage, about thyroid panels, about the things chlormequat and its cousins have been independently linked to in study after study this administration has waved off.

That labor, the research, the vigilance, the appointments, the label-reading, the second-guessing, still falls overwhelmingly on women, in almost every household.

We didn’t design this system. We are, once again, the ones left to manage its fallout, one grocery run at a time, with less legal recourse than we had six months ago.

Here’s the part I think MAHA hasn’t fully reckoned with yet: they didn’t just fail to stop this. They helped build the runway for it, without meaning to.

For the last few years, RFK Jr. built his credibility on opposing exactly these chemicals. And he built and trademarked “Make America Healthy Again”. RFK Jr. spent a career as a lawyer suing Bayer over Roundup. He told a podcast audience just last month, in plain words, that he believes glyphosate causes cancer. Millions of health-conscious voters, a huge share of them mothers, the exact readers I’m writing to right now, turned out because they were promised someone in Washington would finally take that seriously. That promise is what gave this administration its health-and-wellness halo in the first place. It’s real political capital. It’s also, it turns out, transferable, to an administration that then used the Defense Production Act to hand the very same company a supply-chain guarantee and a liability shield.

The Supreme Court created the legal shield for the chemical industry, and MAHA became the moral shield. Threatening anyone who questioned if it was being used as a moral alibi.

When the glyphosate order came down, RFK Jr., the man whose name is basically synonymous with this movement, defended it anyway, framing it as a national security necessity and warning that an outright ban would put 80% of American farmers out of business. He wasn’t wrong that farmers need tools. He was, I think, unwilling to say the quiet part: that the movement’s trust got spent on a chemical its own figurehead has called carcinogenic, and the man at the center of it chose the administration over the diagnosis.

On the day the Supreme Court closed the courthouse door on two hundred thousand Roundup plaintiffs, Kennedy’s public post to his followers was a picture of his family out sailing. He said nothing about the ruling at all.

That’s how you get played without ever being lied to directly. Nobody had to tell MAHA moms the order was good for public health. They just needed MAHA’s energy, MAHA’s votes, and MAHA’s credibility to get an administration into office that would then treat “national security” and “the pesticide industry’s supply chain” as interchangeable terms, and count on the movement’s own figurehead to defend it once it happened. So far, that bet has paid off. The order stood. The Supreme Court ruling stood. And four months later, the same EPA approved four more chemicals from four more companies, with barely a press release, while the man who built his name fighting Bayer stood behind the administration that just protected it.

So what do we do with all of this. Not despair, I don’t have time for that, and neither do you.

There is a bill sitting in Congress right now, H.R. 7601, the No Immunity for Glyphosate Act, that would strip the liability shield back out of that February order. It has seven cosponsors from both parties, Democrats and Republicans who agree on almost nothing else agreeing on this, which tells you this isn’t actually a partisan fight underneath the noise. It’s a fight about whether anyone gets to be accountable to anyone. But I want to be honest with you about where it stands: it has sat in the House Judiciary Committee since the day it was introduced in February, with no hearing, no markup, no vote. A bill with real bipartisan support is not the same as a bill that is moving. If you want it to move, that’s a phone call to your representative, not a comment box.

The USDA’s comment window on its GMO deregulation docket, USDA-2026-0133, has already closed. It shut on June 30. I’m not going to pretend you can still weigh in on that one; you can’t, not through that door. What you can do is watch for the rule that comes out of it, because a request for information that drew this much industry interest rarely just evaporates. I’ll be tracking it, and I’ll tell you the moment there’s another comment period or a proposed rule to respond to. In the meantime, call your representative about H.R. 7601. That door is still open. I said in my last piece that the labels don’t appear because corporations decide to be generous. They appear because someone demands it. Consider this me, asking you to be one more someone.

Women have absorbed this labor for so long that absorbing it started to look like our job. It was never our job. We didn’t design this system, we didn’t approve these chemicals, and it would be nice if we could mail the invoice, the pediatrician co-pay, the specialist referral, the fertility workup nobody warned us we’d need, straight to the people who signed off on it. We can’t. But I’ve done this before. When Mylan jacked up the price of a life-saving EpiPen by 500%, I created the hashtag #EpiGate, and began sharing parents’ own receipts, evidence of the price gouging, until the pressure was undeniable. I regularly appeared on Claman’s Countdown with Liz Claman, and the pressure forced a congressional hearing and a $465 million settlement.

We didn’t wait for permission then.

We built that pressure ourselves, one receipt, with the evidence we already had in hand, one doctor’s visit at a time, with #Epigate.

So let’s call this what it is, #Chemgate, collect the receipts and do it again.

Notes: manufacturer attributions were cross-checked against EPA’s own Federal Register registration filings: Bayer CropScience (fluoxapiprolin, diflufenican), BASF Corporation (trifludimoxazin), Taminco US LLC/Eastman Chemical (chlormequat chloride), and Valent U.S.A. LLC (epyrifenacil, Valent is Sumitomo Chemical’s U.S. registrant subsidiary, but Valent itself is the named EPA applicant; Full source for the “hazardous pesticides” claims: https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/7141/trumps-epa-approves-more-hazardous-pesticides]

I still have the EpiPen receipts. Nine years later, I don't know why I kept them, old grocery-store printouts gone soft at the folds, $700 circled in pen, except that they were proof. Proof that a company had decided what our children's safety was worth, and proof that nobody was going to hand us that number unless we went and found it ourselves. I'm starting to think I need a new folder.

Here’s the shape: in February, the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act, the same law we use to keep bullets and semiconductors flowing during a war, to guarantee the supply of glyphosate. Not to guarantee food. Not to guarantee safety. To guarantee a chemical, and to extend legal cover to the one company that makes it.

Four months later, the Supreme Court issued a ruling protecting glyphosate, and then without much notice, the EPA approved five new pesticides that regulators in Europe have already had to reckon with. One of them, diflufenican, was recently banned in Denmark because it breaks down into a compound now found in 78% of German wells tested. It’s approved here for corn and soybeans, two of the crops most likely to end up on your child’s plate before lunch tomorrow.

I want to be precise about the order of events, because the calendar is one of the only things this administration hasn’t managed to co-opt yet.

February 18, 2026. An executive order declares glyphosate a matter of national security and hands Bayer a liability shield through the Defense Production Act.

June 25, 2026. The Supreme Court rules in Monsanto v. Durnell that if the EPA has approved a pesticide’s label, no state court can hold the manufacturer liable for failing to warn you. Seven justices agreed. Two didn’t.

Days later. The EPA approves fluoxapiprolin, epyrifenacil, trifludimoxazin, and expanded uses of chlormequat chloride, chemicals that, according to the Center for Food Safety, the agency’s own prior assessments linked to tumors in laboratory animals and reproductive harm in independent studies it dismissed.

Fluoxapiprolin produced uterine cancer and thymus tumors in female rats. Epyrifenacil produced liver tumors in male mice. The EPA called both “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans” anyway. Chlormequat, which doesn’t kill weeds or pests, it just makes grain stalks stiffer for harvest, disrupts reproductive hormones and is now approved at tolerances the agency itself set far above international norms: 40 parts per million on oats.

Center for Food Safety’s science director put it plainly: the agency’s cancer division seems unable to recognize cancer risk “even when it’s the pesticide company’s own studies that show it.”

This isn’t a bad week. It’s a machine, and it was built to run in exactly this order. First you make the chemical a matter of “national security,” so debating it looks unpatriotic. Then you close the courthouse door, so no jury ever has to weigh the evidence. Then, with the door closed and the flag still waving, you approve the next round.

Let’s name who’s actually sitting at that table, because “the industry” is not an abstraction.

Bayer, the company shielded by February’s executive order, the same company that just settled with tens of thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer, is also the registrant behind diflufenican, marketed as Convintro, and fluoxapiprolin, the fungicide the EPA’s own data tied to uterine cancer and thymus tumors in female rats.

Valent U.S.A. holds the registration on epyrifenacil, the herbicide linked to liver tumors in male mice.

BASF developed trifludimoxazin, the same chemical BASF agreed to pull from the market back in 2022 rather than defend in court against a Center for Food Safety lawsuit, and that the EPA just waved back through anyway, years later, under a friendlier set of rules. And chlormequat chloride, now cleared for far broader use on the wheat and oats in your pantry, is made by Taminco, a subsidiary of Eastman Chemical.

Four companies. One legal shield. Every one of them selling into a market the government just made safer for them and, by its own prior findings, less safe for us.

I used to track this kind of sequencing for a living. I spent my Wall Street years reading supply chains the way other people read novels, for the plot, for who benefits, for what happens next. What I’m describing above isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a supply chain.

Executive order secures the input. Court ruling secures the immunity. Agency approval secures the market. Nowhere in that chain is there a line item for the woman who now has to figure out, on her own, whether the box of oat cereal in her cart is one of the ones affected, because no label will tell her, and as of June, no court will make anyone tell her either.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Not the chemistry. The distribution of the labor.

Because here is what doesn’t show up in any EPA risk assessment: who reads the study.

Who calls the pediatrician. Who switches brands three times trying to figure out why a child’s eczema won’t clear. Who sits in the exam room asking about fertility, about miscarriage, about thyroid panels, about the things chlormequat and its cousins have been independently linked to in study after study this administration has waved off.

That labor, the research, the vigilance, the appointments, the label-reading, the second-guessing, still falls overwhelmingly on women, in almost every household.

We didn’t design this system. We are, once again, the ones left to manage its fallout, one grocery run at a time, with less legal recourse than we had six months ago.

Here’s the part I think MAHA hasn’t fully reckoned with yet: they didn’t just fail to stop this. They helped build the runway for it, without meaning to.

For the last few years, RFK Jr. built his credibility on opposing exactly these chemicals. And he built and trademarked “Make America Healthy Again”. RFK Jr. spent a career as a lawyer suing Bayer over Roundup. He told a podcast audience just last month, in plain words, that he believes glyphosate causes cancer. Millions of health-conscious voters, a huge share of them mothers, the exact readers I’m writing to right now, turned out because they were promised someone in Washington would finally take that seriously. That promise is what gave this administration its health-and-wellness halo in the first place. It’s real political capital. It’s also, it turns out, transferable, to an administration that then used the Defense Production Act to hand the very same company a supply-chain guarantee and a liability shield.

The Supreme Court created the legal shield for the chemical industry, and MAHA became the moral shield. Threatening anyone who questioned if it was being used as a moral alibi.

When the glyphosate order came down, RFK Jr., the man whose name is basically synonymous with this movement, defended it anyway, framing it as a national security necessity and warning that an outright ban would put 80% of American farmers out of business. He wasn’t wrong that farmers need tools. He was, I think, unwilling to say the quiet part: that the movement’s trust got spent on a chemical its own figurehead has called carcinogenic, and the man at the center of it chose the administration over the diagnosis.

On the day the Supreme Court closed the courthouse door on two hundred thousand Roundup plaintiffs, Kennedy’s public post to his followers was a picture of his family out sailing. He said nothing about the ruling at all.

That’s how you get played without ever being lied to directly. Nobody had to tell MAHA moms the order was good for public health. They just needed MAHA’s energy, MAHA’s votes, and MAHA’s credibility to get an administration into office that would then treat “national security” and “the pesticide industry’s supply chain” as interchangeable terms, and count on the movement’s own figurehead to defend it once it happened. So far, that bet has paid off. The order stood. The Supreme Court ruling stood. And four months later, the same EPA approved four more chemicals from four more companies, with barely a press release, while the man who built his name fighting Bayer stood behind the administration that just protected it.

So what do we do with all of this. Not despair, I don’t have time for that, and neither do you.

There is a bill sitting in Congress right now, H.R. 7601, the No Immunity for Glyphosate Act, that would strip the liability shield back out of that February order. It has seven cosponsors from both parties, Democrats and Republicans who agree on almost nothing else agreeing on this, which tells you this isn’t actually a partisan fight underneath the noise. It’s a fight about whether anyone gets to be accountable to anyone. But I want to be honest with you about where it stands: it has sat in the House Judiciary Committee since the day it was introduced in February, with no hearing, no markup, no vote. A bill with real bipartisan support is not the same as a bill that is moving. If you want it to move, that’s a phone call to your representative, not a comment box.

The USDA’s comment window on its GMO deregulation docket, USDA-2026-0133, has already closed. It shut on June 30. I’m not going to pretend you can still weigh in on that one; you can’t, not through that door. What you can do is watch for the rule that comes out of it, because a request for information that drew this much industry interest rarely just evaporates. I’ll be tracking it, and I’ll tell you the moment there’s another comment period or a proposed rule to respond to. In the meantime, call your representative about H.R. 7601. That door is still open. I said in my last piece that the labels don’t appear because corporations decide to be generous. They appear because someone demands it. Consider this me, asking you to be one more someone.

Women have absorbed this labor for so long that absorbing it started to look like our job. It was never our job. We didn’t design this system, we didn’t approve these chemicals, and it would be nice if we could mail the invoice, the pediatrician co-pay, the specialist referral, the fertility workup nobody warned us we’d need, straight to the people who signed off on it. We can’t. But I’ve done this before. When Mylan jacked up the price of a life-saving EpiPen by 500%, I created the hashtag #EpiGate, and began sharing parents’ own receipts, evidence of the price gouging, until the pressure was undeniable. I regularly appeared on Claman’s Countdown with Liz Claman, and the pressure forced a congressional hearing and a $465 million settlement.

We didn’t wait for permission then.

We built that pressure ourselves, one receipt, with the evidence we already had in hand, one doctor’s visit at a time, with #Epigate.

So let’s call this what it is, #Chemgate, collect the receipts and do it again.

Notes: manufacturer attributions were cross-checked against EPA’s own Federal Register registration filings: Bayer CropScience (fluoxapiprolin, diflufenican), BASF Corporation (trifludimoxazin), Taminco US LLC/Eastman Chemical (chlormequat chloride), and Valent U.S.A. LLC (epyrifenacil, Valent is Sumitomo Chemical’s U.S. registrant subsidiary, but Valent itself is the named EPA applicant; Full source for the “hazardous pesticides” claims: https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/7141/trumps-epa-approves-more-hazardous-pesticides]

My youngest child stopped breathing at the breakfast table. I remember that day like it was yesterday.

I was a Wall Street equity analyst. I spent my days following the money inside the food and technology industries, tracking margins and supply chains and shareholder returns for a team managing $20 billion in assets. I was good at seeing systems. What I had not yet seen was the one quietly behind the food on my own kitchen table.

That morning changed that. And what I found when I turned my analyst’s lens on the American food supply was not negligence, exactly. It was something more insidious: a system designed and controlled by a relatively small number of publicly traded companies, optimized for profit, shelf life, and investor returns, and never once required to account for the health of the people eating the food.

Twenty-five years later, the crisis has only deepened. And the people absorbing the fallout, in the grocery store, in the pediatrician’s office, in the school cafeteria line, in the 3 a.m. worry about a child who won’t stop coughing, are overwhelmingly women.

The Crisis Is Not Hidden. It’s Just Been Mislabeled.

Roughly one in three American children now has a chronic health condition, and by some pediatric-hospital-network measures, the share is closer to nearly half. Rates of childhood food allergies have risen 50 percent since the late 1990s, according to the CDC, and federal data show prevalence climbed by roughly that much again between 2007 and 2021. Autoimmune diseases, which disproportionately affect women, at close to four times the rate of men overall, and as much as nine times the rate for conditions like lupus and Sjögren’s disease, are among the fastest-growing categories of chronic illness in the developed world.

The food system’s role in this is not speculative. It is documented, peer-reviewed, and largely ignored by the financial structures that govern what gets grown, processed, and sold. The same multinational companies marketing to American families sell cleaner versions of their products in Europe, without the artificial dyes, without the pesticide residues, without additives like potassium bromate and titanium dioxide that are restricted or banned across the EU, the UK, Canada, and Japan and remain legal here.

They are not doing this because European mothers are more vigilant. They are doing it because European regulators demanded it, and American ones, until recently, largely had not.

The word we have been given for this is “personal responsibility.” The grocery store, we are told, is a free market. Read the labels. Make better choices. The problem, if there is one, is yours to solve.

That framing is the most expensive lie the food industry ever told. And women, who read more labels and make more food decisions and carry more of the chronic disease burden than anyone else in this economy, have been paying the price for it.

The Financial Architecture Nobody Talks About

Here is what my years on Wall Street taught me that no nutrition label will ever tell you: the food system is not primarily a food system. It is a financial system. The decisions about what gets into your food, which additives, which pesticides, which processing shortcuts, are made by publicly traded companies whose executives are compensated on quarterly earnings, whose boards are answerable to institutional investors, and whose lobbying arms have spent decades shaping the regulatory environment to protect those returns (see last week’s Supreme Court ruling on glyphosate as a recent example).

The metrics have not changed since 1985. Revenue growth. Operating margins. Return on equity.

There is no line on a food company’s earnings call for childhood allergy rates. There is no metric for the cumulative health burden on the women absorbing the costs of sick households.

You cannot fix a broken food system without understanding that it is, first and foremost, a broken financial system. And you cannot fix a broken financial system without changing who is at the table, as investors, as board members, as the people determining what gets measured and what gets ignored.

The People Most Positioned to Change This System Are Women

Women are widely reported to make somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of household food purchasing decisions in the United States, and more rigorous recent surveys still show us doing the clear majority of grocery shopping in most households. We are the primary navigators of family health.

We now farm or co-farm 43 percent of U.S. farmland, nearly 388 million acres, according to American Farmland Trust.

We are the fastest-growing group of investors in the country as an estimated $124 trillion in wealth transfers between generations over the next quarter-century, including roughly $40 trillion moving to widowed Baby Boomer and older women from their spouses, and another $47 trillion moving to younger women in the decades after that, according to Cerulli Associates’ most recent projections.

We vote at higher rates than men.

We are increasingly present in corporate boardrooms.

And perhaps that growing presence and economic power are why so many of us are either censored or silenced.

We did not design this system. We did not write its regulations, set its metrics, or sit on the boards that determined what would go into the food supply.

What we have done, for decades, without adequate information or compensation, is absorb the consequences of those decisions in our bodies, our children’s bodies, our household budgets, and our caregiving hours.

That history of consequence is not a liability. It is the source of an extraordinary, largely untapped power.

When women shift purchasing behavior, supply chains follow. When women investors demand transparency and accountability from food companies, boards respond. When women farmers are financed to transition to regenerative practices, the soil recovers and local food economies stabilize. When women vote with a full understanding of what food policy actually means for their families, agricultural bills, regulatory appointments, and food assistance funding look different. When women sit on food company boards, the questions that have never been asked, why do we sell a cleaner product in Germany than we do in Ohio?, start getting asked.

The reason none of this has happened at scale is not that women lack power. It is that women have been deliberately kept from the information they need to exercise it.

What Informed Women Do to Broken Systems

The food industry spends billions on marketing directed at women and almost nothing on transparency. This is not incidental. It is strategic. Confusion at the point of purchase is a competitive advantage. A mother standing in a grocery aisle trying to decode an ingredient list with a toddler in the cart and twelve minutes before school pickup is not a free-market actor making an informed choice.

She is a target.

What happens when that mother has the financial literacy to understand why the same company sells a cleaner product in Germany? When she understands that her 401(k) may be invested in the very companies whose practices she’s fighting at the school board level? When she knows that the chronic fatigue she has been told is stress, and the autoimmune flares she has been told are just how her body is, have documented links to the chemical load in the food supply?

She stops blaming herself.

She starts asking different questions. And different questions, asked by enough women with enough clarity, do not produce incremental change. They produce structural change.

I have watched this happen. A mother in a pediatric allergist’s office who starts reading supply chain disclosures. A woman farmer who realizes that a regenerative transition could make her land more profitable, not less. A portfolio manager who starts asking her fund what metrics it uses to evaluate food company risk. A school board member who reframes a cafeteria contract not as a budget line but as a public health decision. These are not isolated acts. Multiplied across the millions of households where women are navigating food decisions, they are the food system changing from the inside.

The Frame Changes Everything

The exhaustion is real. The diagnoses are real. The impossible task of feeding a family well inside a system that was never designed to support you is real.

I am not here to tell you it is easy or that personal choices are enough.

What I am here to tell you is this: the burden you have been carrying is not a personal failing.

It is the entirely predictable result of being handed the consequences of a system you were never invited to design, never given the financial literacy to interrogate, and never compensated for managing. The confusion is manufactured. The isolation is strategic. And the solution is not to try harder inside a broken system, it is to understand the system well enough to change it.

Markets work best when they have honest information. For too long, the people most affected by the food system, and most positioned to change it, have been the last to receive that information. That is not inevitable. It is a choice someone else made.

We can make a different one.

I spent years on Wall Street analyzing food companies. I knew how to read a balance sheet, how to follow the money, how to identify patterns, especially when the numbers didn’t add up.

What I didn’t know was that the biggest risk on those balance sheets wasn’t being disclosed. Not to investors. And certainly not to the families buying the food.

Last week, the Supreme Court made sure it stays that way.

In a 7-2 ruling in Monsanto v. Durnell, the Court decided that if the EPA says a product doesn’t need a warning label, you cannot sue a company for failing to warn you. You cannot go to your state court. You cannot ask a jury of your neighbors to weigh in. The federal government’s word is final, and right now, the federal government says glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is safe.

Seven justices. Two dissented. The courthouse doors closed.

Monsanto didn’t just make Roundup. They engineered the crops, corn, soybeans, canola, sugar beets, to survive being routinely sprayed with it. “Roundup Ready” crops. That’s what GMO meant in practice for most of the last thirty years: plants genetically modified to withstand a chemical that, according to the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

So when the Supreme Court rules that you have no legal recourse over what goes on a glyphosate label, they are also ruling on the system that delivered GMO agriculture into your grocery cart without a meaningful label, without your consent, and, if this week’s USDA news is any indication, with even less oversight to come.

Here’s what they’re actually considering. In 2020, USDA put in place a regulatory framework called the SECURE rule that began moving toward risk-based review of genetically engineered crops, fewer automatic exemptions, more scrutiny.

A federal court struck it down in December 2024, and we reverted to older regulations. Now the USDA is using this reset as an opportunity to explore something more sweeping: potentially deregulating GMO organisms that don’t show an obvious “plant pest risk.”

Plant pest risk. That’s the legal hook they’re hanging this on. The Plant Protection Act gives USDA authority over organisms that could harm other plants, spread like weeds, that kind of thing. It says nothing about what ends up in your body. That’s technically the FDA’s job. And the FDA’s GMO disclosure system, the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, is riddled with holes big enough to drive a combine through.

If the genetic modification can’t be detected in the final product, no label is required. Highly refined oils and sugars from GMO crops? No label. Food served at a restaurant? No label. Meat and dairy from animals raised on GMO feed? No label. And the law doesn’t even use the word “GMO”, it says “bioengineered,” a term that most Americans don’t recognize as the same thing.

Without labels, there is no traceability. Without traceability, there is no accountability. Without accountability, there is no liability. And the industry can keep saying exactly what it has always said: there is no evidence of harm. And they will be right. You cannot find evidence of something you’re not looking for. Every mom who has ever read a label knows this.

Now let me tell you what a financial analyst sees when looking at everything that has happened in the last six months. Because this isn’t a story about science. It’s a story about money and access.

The contact listed on USDA docket USDA-2026-0133 is a lawyer in the USDA’s Office of the General Counsel. But the political architecture around this rulemaking, who shaped it, who benefits, who had the access to make it happen, tells a more important story.

Let’s start with Trump’s White House Chief of Staff. Susie Wiles was co-chair of Mercury Public Affairs, one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms, before she walked into the West Wing. She joined Mercury in February 2022 in an expansion that simultaneously brought on Toby Moffett as a Mercury partner. Moffett is a former Democratic Congressman who went on to become the top government affairs executive at the Monsanto Company, the company whose products are now at the center of every one of these fights.

TIME calls Wiles “one of the most powerful unelected figures in government.”

Wiles and Moffett were colleagues at the same firm at the same time. Moffett lobbied for Monsanto.

But it doesn’t stop at Mercury. Before Mercury, Wiles spent a decade at Ballard Partners, the firm that registered to lobby for Bayer (Monsanto’s parent company since 2018) in December 2024, just as Trump was winning the election. Ballard’s founder is Brian Ballard, who campaign sources told multiple news outlets, bundled more than $50 million for Trump's 2024 campaign.

And here is what the documents show:

Internal government emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm that Bayer’s CEO Bill Anderson met directly with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin months before Trump’s February executive order. The agenda, in the EPA’s own words, covered “Supreme Court Action”, Bayer would “give an update to the Administrator on where they stand in litigation and labeling options”, and included a line item to thank the agency for updating the glyphosate webpage, a reference to the EPA’s decision to withdraw its support for California’s cancer warning on glyphosate products. Visitor logs confirm the meeting took place.

Politico and The Guardian reported broader meetings between Bayer’s CEO and top administration officials in the lead-up to the executive order. What is beyond dispute in the public record is the lobbying disclosure trail: Bayer’s network of firms had direct lines into the White House, the DOJ, the EPA, and the USDA, and the timeline of what happened next speaks for itself.

The executive order declaring glyphosate “critical to national defense” gave Monsanto’s parent company immunity from lawsuits related to the very chemical at the center of a Supreme Court cancer case.

Then the Justice Department filed not one but multiple amicus briefs in the Supreme Court siding with Monsanto. Trump’s Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued alongside Monsanto’s lawyer in the courtroom. The administration’s Solicitor General, who first urged the Court to take the case, was D. John Sauer, the former Solicitor General of Missouri, the home state of Bayer-Monsanto’s U.S. headquarters.

Investigators at U.S. Right to Know reviewed the public records and found 16 key Trump administration officials with documented ties to Bayer’s lobbying or legal network, with Bayer deploying 45 registered lobbyists across 13 outside firms, seven of which are now among the highest-paid lobbying operations in Washington. More than 30 senior officials at firms retained by Bayer have direct ties to Trump’s administrations or campaigns. What they found is not a conspiracy theory. It is a lobbying disclosure form. It is a calendar record. It is a public document. It is the system working exactly as it was designed, for the people who paid to design it.

And people across the political spectrum are saying so out loud.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the steps of the Supreme Court during oral arguments and said: “The federal government, and especially the executive branch, do not have this power to issue get-out-of-court free cards. And we’re going to fight it.” He had already introduced the bipartisan No Immunity for Glyphosate Act alongside Democrat Chellie Pingree specifically to undo Trump’s executive order. On the House floor, Massie put it even more bluntly: “All three branches of this government are under siege by lobbyists and lawyers from a German company named Bayer.”

After the ruling came down, Massie didn’t mince words: “Trump DOJ argued alongside Bayer/Monsanto that because the EPA had already blessed glyphosate, no state government could require labels disclosing cancer risk. The EPA and DOJ in this instance were only there to protect Bayer.”

This was a Republican congressman. Saying this. About a Republican administration. That tells you how obvious the capture has become.

Bayer wants you to believe this is complicated.

But it is not complicated. It is actually very simple.

Follow the money.

The people making decisions about what goes on your food label are the same people who have a financial interest in what is not on your food label.

The revolving door between Monsanto, the EPA, the FDA, the DOJ, and the USDA has been spinning for decades. I documented it in The Unhealthy Truth.

It did not stop. It accelerated.

This week, that door completed another full rotation. The Supreme Court locked in the EPA’s authority over pesticide labels, foreclosing state-level accountability. The DOJ spent months helping make that outcome happen. The White House issued an executive order protecting the company’s production before the case was even decided. And now the USDA has opened the door to reducing oversight of the GMO crops that those pesticides were engineered to support.

It is a clean sweep. Industry could not have designed a better outcome. In fact, the public record strongly suggests that industry did design it, one lobbying disclosure form, one executive order, one amicus brief, and one regulatory docket at a time.

Here is what I want every parent, every farmer, every person who has ever stood in a grocery aisle trying to figure out what they’re actually buying to understand:

The legal and regulatory tools that existed, imperfect as they were, to hold companies accountable for what they put in our food and on their labels are being systematically removed. State lawsuits: gone. State warning labels: gone. Federal GMO oversight: being loosened. Federal disclosure requirements: already full of loopholes.

What’s left?

Your purchasing power. And unfortunately, it is a highly imperfect, expensive solution, and it prices many people out. But right now, third-party certification, Certified Organic, Non-GMO Project Verified, is more important than ever, because it is essentially the only remaining system that gives you reliable information. It is voluntary, it is imperfect, and it hits your wallet. But it is what we have.

And your voice.

The USDA’s comment period on this GMO rulemaking has been extended to June 30, 2026. That is one day from now. You can submit a comment at regulations.gov, docket number USDA-2026-0133. You do not need to be a scientist or a lawyer. You need to be a person who eats food and believes you have a right to know what’s in it.

What all of us fighting this fight understand, regardless of where we are politically, is that the system will not protect you unless you make it. The data doesn’t move on its own. The labels don’t appear because corporations decided to be generous.

Every piece of information you have ever had about what is in your food came because someone demanded it.

Countries around the world demand transparency on glyphosate and GMOs.

In Europe, over one million people signed a European Citizens' Initiative, called the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), calling on the EU Commission to fully ban glyphosate. It directly led to a new Regulation on transparency and sustainability of EU risk assessment in the food chain. It is a powerful, citable proof point that countries aren't just asking, they're legislating it.

This week, the Supreme Court made it harder to demand. That doesn’t mean we stop.

It means we get louder. Tell everyone you know about what is now on the docket at the USDA. Forward this email, share this link.

Demand it here, too. Make your voice heard and comment here.

Let’s make sure that the United States is not kept in the dark.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling was a legal defeat. It was not surprising. The courtroom is one arena. And seven justices just narrowed our options to protect our families. That means the energy, the love, the anger, and the organizing capacity of every person who has been paying attention to this fight has to find new channels, specific, concrete, and harder to block than a lawsuit.

A lot of people have reached out, asking, “What can we do?”

Here is what I want you to do. Not eventually. Starting now.

1. File a formal comment with the EPA demanding an independent scientific review of glyphosate.

The EPA’s determination that glyphosate is “not likely carcinogenic”, the regulatory position that seven justices just made the ceiling of your legal rights, is not settled science.

It is a contested finding, produced under documented industry pressure, with the agency’s own scientists overridden.

The EPA is legally required to accept public comments and petitions for new rulemaking. That process is slow, unglamorous, and absolutely essential. The Intercept, the Guardian, and internal EPA documents obtained through litigation have established the record of interference. Your comment cites that record and demands a new, independent review, one conducted without the involvement of registrants or their funded researchers, using the IARC methodology that produced the WHO’s 2015 “probably carcinogenic” classification.

Comments can be submitted at regulations.gov.

Share the link. Make it easy for others to copy and send. Volume matters.

A thousand comments from informed, specific citizens is not nothing.

It is the beginning of a paper trail that the next EPA administrator cannot pretend doesn’t exist. Build the trail.

Pave it for your children.

2. Contact your state legislator today and ask them to introduce or support a bill restricting glyphosate use on public land.

This week’s ruling blocks state courts from piercing the federal label floor on failure-to-warn claims. It does not prevent state legislatures from restricting where and how glyphosate can be used. Those are different powers, and the second one is still fully intact.

France banned glyphosate in public spaces. Germany phased it out for non-professional use. Austria moved to a complete ban.

American states can do the same, for schools, parks, playgrounds, roadsides, and state-funded agricultural programs, without touching federal preemption at all.

Find your state legislator at openstates.org. Call the office. Send a letter.

Ask specifically: will you introduce or co-sponsor legislation restricting glyphosate use on state and municipal land? Ask for a written response.

Bring five friends with you when you do it. Make it a date.

3. Ask every institution your family touches whether they use glyphosate, and put the answer in writing.

Your child’s school. Your municipality’s parks department. Your hospital. Your university. The golf course your city maintains. The athletic fields your children play on. These institutions make procurement decisions that are entirely within their own authority, independent of federal preemption, independent of the EPA’s label, independent of yesterday’s ruling. They can stop using Roundup tomorrow if they choose to. Most of them haven’t been asked directly.

Ask directly. Request a written response, not because you expect perfection, but because a written response creates accountability.

When an institution tells you in writing that it uses glyphosate on the fields where children play, and you share that response publicly, the calculus for that institution changes.

Document everything.

4. Move your purchasing dollars, visibly and vocally.

Market signals are among the few levers that require no one’s permission and no favorable ruling. When organic market share rises, food companies reformulate. When retailers face sustained consumer pressure, they change supplier requirements.

When enough purchasing power concentrates around a demand, transparency, organic sourcing, glyphosate-free certification, the industry that spent billions building yesterday’s legal wall spends the next decade trying to catch up to consumer behavior it cannot control. Buy organic where you can. If cost is a constraint, prioritize the crops with the highest documented glyphosate residue: oats, wheat, chickpeas, lentils, and non-organic soy.

Then tell someone why you made that choice. The most powerful thing about consumer action is not the individual purchase. It is the conversation that follows it.

5. Build the electoral record, starting now, not in October.

The 2026 midterms are months away. That is not a long time to recruit, vet, fund, and elect candidates who will appoint EPA leadership that reads independent science without flinching.

The administration that filed an amicus brief defending Bayer’s immunity, invoked the Defense Production Act to protect glyphosate production, and confirmed EPA leadership that has never challenged the glyphosate label has given you a specific, documented, undeniable record to run against.

Use it.

Find the candidates in your district who are willing to answer hard questions about pesticide regulation and EPA independence, in writing, on the record, before you give them a dollar or a vote. Fund them early. Canvas for them.

The chemical industry has been playing this game for decades with extraordinary patience and institutional discipline.

Citizens who want different outcomes have to match that discipline, not just the anger.

This cannot be performative.

It has to be love in action, disciplined, firm and consistent.

We know how to do this. Now forward this email and share this link with your family and friends.

And let’s get going.

Today, Bayer’s stock rose 17% before trading had to be halted. That is the opening sentence. Everything else is context.

In a 7-2 ruling this morning, the court’s majority held that Americans cannot sue Bayer in state courts for failing to warn them that Roundup might cause cancer. The case centered on John Durnell, a Missouri man who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma and won a $1.25 million jury verdict. That verdict is gone now. And so, potentially, are tens of thousands of others like it.

The ruling didn’t say Roundup is safe.

It said the EPA’s label, the one that carries no cancer warning, creates a federal ceiling that state courts cannot pierce. A liability shield.

That distinction matters enormously, because the science the EPA is relying on is itself deeply contested.

The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015. Two large meta-analyses have linked it to elevated rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. EPA scientists’ own internal risk assessments were overridden by agency leadership under industry pressure, a fact documented in internal emails obtained through litigation. The EPA’s conclusion that glyphosate is “not likely carcinogenic” is not a scientific consensus. It is a regulatory position, taken under documented influence, that seven justices just made the law of the land.

This didn’t happen in isolation. In February, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to boost domestic glyphosate production , triggering a liability shield for manufacturers under that same statute. The Department of Justice then filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court defending Bayer’s immunity.

The executive branch built the runway. The Supreme Court just landed the plane.

What the financial press grasps that MAHA hasn’t fully reckoned with: this ruling is not about Roundup. It is a template, and by tonight it will be in the hands of every corporate defense attorney in America.

The logic, that a federal agency’s approval creates a ceiling above which state courts cannot impose liability, applies wherever a federal agency has set a label, a standard, or a registration. Generic drug makers, already protected from failure-to-warn suits since 2011, will cite Monsanto v. Durnell in every filing. Medical device manufacturers whose products cleared FDA premarket approval have operated under a similar shield since 2008; today’s ruling tightens it. PFAS manufacturers are watching closely: the moment EPA sets enforceable forever-chemical standards, those standards become a liability shield under precisely today’s reasoning.

The tobacco industry built this road in Cipollone v. Liggett in 1992. Bayer just paved it in asphalt.

The MAHA movement didn’t just fail to stop this. It helped build the political conditions that made it possible.

The people who rallied around Trump, Kennedy, and Zeldin in 2024 were told they were voting for a health revolution. Instead, they handed the presidency to a man whose Justice Department filed a brief defending Bayer’s immunity, and whose EPA is now the single institution standing between Monsanto’s label and any accountability in court.

You cannot campaign for the people who built this architecture and then express shock when the building goes up.

And RFK Jr. is someone who won nearly $290 million for a Roundup cancer victim in 2018. Who built his career proving in court what glyphosate does to human bodies. Then he took a cabinet seat, backed the executive order that shielded Bayer, and told his followers that “unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals.”

That isn’t constraint. That is capitulation, dressed up in the language of pragmatism to make cowardice sound like wisdom.

There was a moment when he could have resigned in public protest, used his name and documented expertise to blow this open before the court ruled. He chose the title. He chose the access. He chose himself.

The people who trusted him paid for that choice today, in verdicts, in bodies, in cancer diagnoses that will never be traced back to a bottle with no warning on the label.

Courage in this moment would have looked like one person with power saying no, loudly, at personal cost. What we got was a 7-2 ruling and a press release.

The courtroom was one avenue. It’s narrowed.

The leaders who should have stood here didn’t. The ones with the credentials, the platforms, the access, the names large enough to have made this fight visible at the scale it deserved, they calculated their risk and chose their careers. That is the record.

Remember it.

But here is what I want you to understand about this moment: Bayer’s stock rose 17% this morning before trading had to be halted. Not because they proved Roundup is safe. Not because the science changed.

Because seven justices determined that the EPA’s label is the ceiling of your rights, and the market immediately calculated what that means for corporate liability.

The financial world understood the implications of today’s ruling within minutes.

The question is whether the rest of us will.

I’ve been doing this work for nearly two decades. I know what it looks like when a politician suddenly discovers food safety as a campaign issue. There’s a particular quality to the language, urgent, parental, righteous, that sounds familiar to anyone who has spent years saying it.

Attorney General Ken Paxton announced this week that his office has launched a “sweeping investigation” into glyphosate residue in food, issuing Civil Investigative Demands to Bayer and PepsiCo. “If any corporation is using regulatory loopholes to poison our kids with glyphosate,” he said, “we will find out and we will secure justice.”

I want to take this seriously. I really do. Because the issue is serious. I’ve spent decades meeting with leaders and speaking about it in my home state of Texas. Texas is one of the largest agricultural states in the country. This issue impacts Texas cotton farmers and Texas consumers, my family and friends there.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the United States. Bayer has paid out more than $11 billion to settle cancer claims tied to Roundup. The EPA’s formal safety review of glyphosate has been listed as “pending” since 2015. It is still pending. These are not fringe concerns. They are the documented, public record.

But I’ve also been around long enough to know the history of Texas candidates and the difference between a cause and a campaign. And right now, I need to be honest with you about which one this looks like.

I didn’t come to this work as an activist. I came to it as an investment analyst and a mother, two roles that turned out to be more compatible than I expected. When my youngest daughter had a severe allergic reaction, I started digging. What I found wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a system: regulatory agencies with revolving doors, industry-funded studies that shaped policy, and a food supply that had changed faster than our ability to understand it.

What I also found was that the parents who cared about this, deeply, urgently, across every zip code and political affiliation, were rarely the ones with a microphone. The ones with microphones showed up later, polished and organized.

Ken Paxton won his Republican Senate primary runoff on May 26. The announcement from his office came on June 2. That one-week gap is not incidental context. It is the context.

Here is what the polling looks like right now. The most recent survey, conducted the day after Paxton’s runoff win, shows him trailing Democrat James Talarico 44% to 47% in the general election. His net favorability sits at -19. Read that again.

Fifty-seven percent of Texas likely voters view him unfavorably. But the number that is concerning his campaign most is this one: nearly a third of the Republicans who voted for John Cornyn in the runoff, voters Paxton needs to consolidate, say they would vote for Talarico in November.

More than half of them cite Paxton’s criminality and corruption as their reason.

How do I know this? I am from Texas. Friends and family are on the front line on this issue and voting in this election.

As one Houstonian wrote to me: “Living the Ken Paxton hell in Texas. This is a political move like few others. The damage he has single-handedly done in this state is too immense to describe.”

So I need you to think about this for a moment. Ken Paxton is bleeding moderate Republican voters specifically because they don’t trust his character. He’s bleeding voters who can no longer tolerate his lies and corruption. He needs those voters back. And what better way to make a character argument than to position yourself as the man standing between corporations and your children’s food? And haven’t we seen this before?

The Civil Investigative Demands his office issued are real legal instruments, they compel document production and carry genuine authority. I want to be fair about that. But the framing, “poison our kids,” “no corporation is above the law,” “we will secure justice”, is the language of a stump speech, not a legal brief.

We have seen this playbook before. Very, very recently. And it is worth walking through it carefully, because the parents who trusted it last time deserve to understand what happened.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made glyphosate a centerpiece of his platform. He had spent years building that credibility, he helped win a $289 million verdict against Monsanto, he named the chemical by name, he talked about what it was doing to our children’s microbiomes and immune systems and cancer rates. When he endorsed Donald Trump and the MAHA movement found a home inside the Republican Party, millions of parents who had been fighting this battle in relative obscurity felt, for the first time, like they had a seat at the table. Like someone with real power was finally listening.

Then Trump won. Kennedy was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. And in February 2026, Trump signed an executive order designed to boost domestic glyphosate production, framing the herbicide as essential to national security and agricultural independence. Kennedy, the man who had built his entire public identity on holding chemical companies accountable for poisoning communities, defended it. The movement that had carried them both to power erupted. One strategist predicted it could cost Republicans ten to twenty House seats in the midterms.

So here we are again. At the state level. Same language. Same parents. Same children.

I am not recounting this to be partisan. I am recounting it because it is the most instructive recent case study we have in what happens when food safety becomes a vehicle for electoral ambition rather than a sustained policy commitment. When a movement is co-opted for votes. The MAHA coalition gave politicians a winning message and received, in return, an executive order that accelerated production of the very chemical they had been promised would finally be addressed. That is not a failure of good intentions.

That is how the system works when the politics matter more than the outcome.

Ken Paxton is now reaching for the same language, “poison our kids,” “no corporation is above the law”, in a Texas Senate race where he is trailing and desperately needs to win back moderate Republicans who don’t trust his character. The framing is not aimed at Bayer’s legal team. It is aimed at the suburban Texas parent who voted for Cornyn last week and is still deciding whether Paxton is someone she can trust in November. The question is whether she has seen enough of this playbook to recognize it.

Here is what I’d want any parent reading this to understand: the gap between a Civil Investigative Demand and actual reform is enormous, and it is filled with lawyers, lobbyists, successor officials, and time.

In 2017, Bayer moved to acquire Monsanto in a $63 billion deal that would combine the world’s largest seed company with one of its largest pesticide makers and leave just three corporations controlling the global agrochemical market. The Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation. More than a dozen state attorneys general joined it. Texas farm groups and nonprofits wrote directly to Paxton, urging him to join. Texas is one of the largest agricultural states in the country. The merger directly threatened Texas cotton farmers, Texas consumers, Texas food prices.

Ken Paxton did not join the investigation. He said nothing. He did nothing. The merger closed in 2018, Bayer absorbed Monsanto’s glyphosate liability along with its market dominance, and Texas farmers have been living with the consequences ever since.

That was Paxton and Bayer when there were no votes at stake. Now there are votes at stake, and suddenly Bayer is poisoning our kids and no corporation is above the law. Bayer spent nearly $92 million on federal lobbying between 2017 and 2024. They do not panic when an attorney general holds a press conference a week after winning a primary. They have seen this before. They wait.

And Paxton won’t even be attorney general much longer. He is leaving the office regardless of what happens in November.

Let that land for a moment. The investigation Paxton announced with great fanfare will be handed to a man whose political identity is built on loyalty to the same administration that signed an executive order boosting glyphosate production. Middleton will inherit the CIDs, the legal staff, and the choice of whether to pursue them, quietly, without cameras, with no election on the line.

That chain of custody matters more than the announcement. It almost always does. And right now, that chain leads somewhere that should give every Texas parent pause..

None of this means the investigation should be dismissed. If Paxton’s office has assembled a legal team that is genuinely prepared to pursue this, to follow the evidence to the regulatory failures at the FDA and EPA that allowed these residues to accumulate in the first place, not just issue demands and hold press conferences, that would be meaningful work regardless of the timing.

But the parents in this country who are worried about what’s in their children’s food deserve more than an announcement calibrated to move poll numbers. They deserve to know what specific legal standards Paxton’s office is using to evaluate labeling compliance. They deserve a commitment from the candidates running to replace him about whether they will carry this investigation forward. They deserve, at minimum, a timeline, not a slogan.

What I know from two decades of watching this system is that the corporations being investigated are very, very good at waiting out election cycles. They have done it before. They will do it again. A CID issued in June by an outgoing attorney general running for Senate is, from Bayer’s perspective, a manageable inconvenience. A sustained, multi,year, fully staffed legal effort with bipartisan cover and successor commitment is something different entirely.

What I know as a Texan is that many are questioning Paxton’s motives here.

As one Texas voter shared: “This guy is the worst of the worst. He is a corrupt, cheating, liar. He did this to get new donors and as a political stunt to try and save his career. When he could have just been a better human. I live in Austin and have to be mindful of posting such an opinion. However I had to message you and share my thoughts.”

Ken Paxton has announced something. Many are waiting to see evidence.

And they’re not wrong to question the motives here.

We heard a lot of campaign promises about glyphosate in 2024. We heard them from a man with much more credibility than Paxton on the issue, someone who had spent years in courtrooms holding Monsanto accountable, who knew the science, who named the chemical by name on the debate stage. Then came the cabinet seat. Then came the executive order boosting production of the very herbicide he had promised to address. Then came his full throttle endorsement of the production of that chemical. The promise lasted about a year.

Now it’s 2026. New election. New candidate. Same chemical. Same language. Same urgency.

“Poison our kids.” “No corporation is above the law.” “We will secure justice.”

We have heard this before. We will hear it again. It’s strong campaign rhetoric. And it worked to secure the 2024 presidential election.

And Bayer, which has spent nearly a hundred million dollars lobbying the federal government over the past decade, which has paid out more than eleven billion dollars in settlements while its product remains on shelves, will keep doing what it has always done while the promises cycle through.

Didn’t MAHA PACs use this exact playbook to secure the 2024 presidential election? They did. They mobilized a movement, channeled genuine parental rage about glyphosate and food dyes into votes, delivered the White House, and within months watched the administration sign an executive order boosting the very herbicide they had promised to eliminate. The outrage was real. The follow-through was not.

So the question worth asking now is a simple one: are the MAHA PACs running the same play in Texas? Is Ken Paxton’s sweeping investigation into corporate poisoning a genuine legal reckoning, or a familiar bait and switch, this time aimed at Texas voters who are tired of the corruption, appreciate the honesty of Talarico and are paying attention to what’s on their plates.

The playbook feels dangerously familiar, and Texas voters are being asked, once again, to trust a politician who cares about their votes more than he cares about the safety of the food supply.

Buyer beware.

Robyn O’Brien is the author of The Unhealthy Truth (Random House 2009). She has spent two decades at the intersection of food, finance, and public health.

I spent years on Wall Street learning to read a balance sheet. So let me read you this one.

The federal government just announced a $7.5 million investment through HHS to partner with HATCH for Hunger, a nonprofit that redirects surplus protein, eggs, chicken, beef, to food banks nationwide. The goal: improve health outcomes and reduce chronic disease. I’ve spent two decades making this exact argument. Real food. Nutrient-dense food.

Food that prevents illness rather than postponing it.

On its face, this is good. Now look at the other side of the ledger.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that H.R. 1 cuts SNAP by nearly $187 billion through 2034, the largest reduction in the program’s history. When fully implemented, 4 million people in a typical month will lose food assistance entirely or see it cut substantially. These are not future projections. SNAP participation has already fallen by more than 3.5 million people since the law was enacted in July 2025.

$7.5 million in. $187 billion out.

I’m not a political person. I’m an analyst. No analyst in the world, regardless of party, can look at those two numbers and call it a nutrition policy.

Not a Math Problem. A Values Problem.

SNAP serves more than 40 million Americans each month, 16 million children, 8 million seniors, 4 million adults with disabilities. The science is unambiguous: food insecurity in early childhood causes lasting developmental harm.

SNAP is also an economic engine. Every dollar in benefits generates $1.54 in economic activity. These cuts don’t just hurt families, they hurt the farmers, grocers, and local economies that depend on that spending. They create a massive unfunded mandate on state governments. Some states won’t be able to fill the gap. The downstream consequences are generational.

You cannot solve a hunger crisis with a charitable workaround while dismantling the floor beneath 40 million people.

That is not food policy. That is a press release.

Ask Who’s at the Table

Here’s what the press release didn’t lead with: HATCH for Hunger was founded by Jeff Simmons, the CEO of Elanco Animal Health, one of the world’s largest animal pharmaceutical companies, and he chairs its board today. The man announcing this federal nutrition partnership is simultaneously the head of a company that sells the drugs and growth products used in the protein supply chains HATCH promotes.

Look at the board: the former CEO of Tyson Foods. The co-founder of fairlife, now owned by Coca-Cola. The former CEO of Hilmar Cheese. The CEO of Zinpro Corporation. A former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. These are not hunger advocates who stumbled into food policy. These are the architects of the industrial protein supply chain, the same supply chain that benefits most from federal dollars flowing toward protein distribution and from Dietary Guidelines that emphasize animal protein.

The food is real. The need is real. But $7.5 million in federal funding, announced with fanfare while $187 billion in food assistance is stripped away, serves the industry’s story far more than it serves hungry families.

The Farmers Aren’t Fooled

Farmers have a finely tuned radar for this kind of thing. They’ve seen too many Washington announcements that promise to help and end up serving someone else’s bottom line. I reached out to several after this announcement, and one put it plainly:

“It would be great to see investment in those types of programs. It’s going to take boots on the ground efforts and people making best use of those dollars … They upset the apple cart too much by messing with SNAP. How do we get more actual food grown in the United States? We show farmers how they can be more profitable working in tandem with nature and gradually transitioning away from government programs. Anytime the government says they are ‘here to help’ I am wary.”

- An American farmer

That farmer identified the real question: not how do we distribute more surplus protein, but how do we build a food system that grows more actual food, by farmers who can make a living doing it. The path forward is the transition she described, profitable, regenerative, nature-aligned, not more programs that entrench the status quo.

But none of that is possible if 4 million people lose their food assistance while we’re still building the alternative.

The MAHA Paradox

I believe the concern behind Make America Healthy Again is right. Real food. Less ultra-processing. More protein. Less chronic disease. Dietary Guidelines that prioritize nutrient-dense foods and call out highly processed foods represent progress.

But you cannot make America healthy again by making America hungry first.

SNAP is not a handout, it is the most cost-effective chronic disease prevention program the federal government has ever run.

Food insecurity is a clinical risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and mental illness. Every condition we claim we want to prevent.

I didn’t become a food advocate because I stopped believing in markets. I became one because markets work best when they have honest information, and for too long, the true cost of our food system has been kept off the books. The hunger. The illness. The degraded soil. The farmer who can’t make a living without a government check. The family that can’t make rent and eat in the same week. Those costs are real, even when they don’t appear on a balance sheet.

$187 billion has been stripped from 40 million people and replaced with $7.5 million and a press release from the protein industry. What’s happening right now is what it looks like when a system optimizes for everything except the people it’s supposed to feed.

We can do better than this. But first, we have to be honest about what this is.

This is not food policy. This is a vertically integrated PR campaign for the protein industry.

Robyn O’Brien is the author of The Unhealthy Truth, founder of the AllergyKids Foundation, and co-founder of rePlant Capital. She has been called “Food’s Erin Brockovich” by Bloomberg and The New York Times.

Last Tuesday, a Houston startup called Fervo Energy went public on the Nasdaq. It raised $1.9 billion on its first day. Its stock opened 35% higher. By noon, it was worth more than $10 billion.

You might wonder what a geothermal energy company has to do with the food on your family’s table.

I grew up in Houston, got my MBA from Rice, and spent years in finance covering the food industry. Fervo’s CEO, Tim Latimer, is also a proud Texan who left the oil fields for Stanford and came back home to build something that could outlast them. Rice is even a formal research partner on the geothermal technology that just went public. This is a Houston story, and Rice has always known that the people closest to how legacy industries actually work are often the ones best positioned to disrupt them.

And what happened last week with Fervo isn’t just an energy story. It’s a blueprint, and regenerative and organic agriculture needs to read it carefully.

I know what it looks like when capital decides it’s done waiting. And Fervo’s IPO just showed that it’s done waiting.

Reliability Is the New Premium

Fervo didn’t win over investors by being “alternative” energy. It won by being better energy. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, carbon-free power, regardless of weather, regardless of season. In a world of rolling blackouts and AI data centers that never sleep, reliability stopped being a nice to have. It became the whole game.

I think about this every time I hear regenerative and organic organizations struggle to articulate their value proposition. The story isn’t actually that the food is “cleaner” or their methods are more ethical, though both are true. The story is that healthy soil delivers consistent outcomes, year after year. Drought hits and the regenerative farm holds water. Input costs spike and the organic operation is already off the treadmill. That’s reliability. That’s what Wall Street just paid $10 billion for in a different sector.

The food industry needs to tell that story in those terms.

Borrow the Drill

Here’s what surprised people most about Fervo: the technology that unlocked geothermal’s potential came from oil and gas. Horizontal drilling. Fracking techniques. Reservoir engineering. The same tools that built the fossil fuel economy are now being used to replace it.

I get the instinct to recoil from that. Believe me, I do. I was recruited by the oil and gas industry out of business school (Enron and Exxon, to be exact) and had no interest in joining them. But purists don’t build industries, pragmatists do.

Regenerative agriculture is sitting on an analogous opportunity. Satellite soil sensing. AI-driven carbon verification. Precision fermentation. Tools developed in other sectors can dramatically accelerate what is currently slow, expensive, and hard to prove. The farmers I admire most aren’t waiting for a perfect set of tools built by perfect companies. They’re taking what works and putting it to use.

Show Me the Cost Curve

Between 2022 and 2025, Fervo cut its drilling costs by 70%. That number is in the IPO filing. It’s a fact investors could underwrite. It told a story not about where geothermal is today, but where it’s going.

This is where our food movement has real work to do. We defend current cost premiums when we should be showing the trajectory. Every year that a regenerative farm builds soil carbon, it needs fewer inputs. Every year the supply chain matures, organic price premiums compress. That’s a cost curve. That’s a story investors can back.

When I was on the equity desk, we weren’t investing in what a company was. We were investing in what it was becoming. We need to show that math.

The Google Lesson

Before Fervo had a single commercial power plant running, Google signed a long-term purchase agreement to buy its electricity. That contract didn’t just give Fervo revenue, it gave every investor in the room a reason to believe. One anchor buyer changed the entire risk profile of the business.

Food companies need to play that role for regenerative and organic agriculture. Not as charity. Not as PR. As strategy. Lock in forward supply agreements with farms in transition before those farms have completed the switch.

Be the Google.

The farmers who can’t afford the risk of transitioning their land to regenerative practices aren’t failing because of a lack of conviction. They’re failing because no one has de-risked the demand side.

That’s fixable. It’s a choice.

Stop Leading with Climate

I’ll say something that might surprise people coming from me: Fervo succeeded in the current political environment partly because it didn’t lead with climate.

It led with reliability. With energy security. With American jobs. With technology that both a Biden DOE grant-maker and a Trump-era Energy Secretary could get behind. The result? Bipartisan support. Federal land auctions. Two bills moving through Congress simultaneously.

Regenerative and organic agriculture has the same opportunity, and largely hasn’t taken it. Soil health is water retention. It’s drought resilience. It’s reduced dependence on foreign-made fertilizer. It’s rural economic stability. These aren’t liberal or conservative values. They’re farming values. And it’s national security.

When we lead with carbon credits and climate targets, we win half the room. When we lead with yield resilience and input independence, we win the whole country.

I started asking hard questions about our food system because of what happened to my daughter at a breakfast table. I came to this work not as an activist but as an analyst, someone trained to follow the money and ask what it means.

The money, right now, is flowing toward energy systems that are reliable, scalable, politically durable, and getting cheaper every year. Fervo just proved you can take a century-old technology, apply modern engineering, line up anchor buyers, reframe the politics, and convince Wall Street to write a $10 billion check.

Soil has been foundational to food security, nutrient density and water retention for longer than geothermal has been producing power. We have the science. We have the farmers. We have the demand signal. What we need now is the same discipline Fervo showed: building the institutional architecture that turns a compelling idea into an investable asset class.

So here is my ask, specific, and urgent.

To the food companies: Stop treating regenerative sourcing as a sustainability report line item. Sign five-year forward purchase agreements with farms in transition this year. Be the anchor buyer. Get on the plane. Pick up the phone.

To the institutional investors: The USDA’s own data shows that organic and transitioning farms outperform on operating margins as soil health compounds. You are sitting on a mispriced asset. Entrenched interests are protecting the status quo. Get your analysts into the field and on the farm.

To the farmers and the advocates: Retire the slide deck that leads with carbon sequestration numbers. Lead with water retention. Lead with input cost reduction. Lead with the fact that healthy soil is national food security. Tell the story Wall Street can fund and Washington can defend, because it happens to also be true.

To the land grant universities and ag schools: Fervo built its cost curves on rigorous data collection from day one. Our transition farms need the same standardized measurement infrastructure, not in five years, not after the next Farm Bill, but now. Take a hard look at who is funding the data capture, and when you see the conflict of interest, name it.

Fervo Energy didn’t wait for the perfect political moment. It built something undeniable and let the moment come to it.

We have a food system feeding 330 million people on soil that, by some estimates, has lost a third of its topsoil in a century. That is not a slow-moving crisis. It is an urgent one. And urgent problems, when properly framed and properly financed, have a way of attracting urgent capital.

The blueprint is sitting right there on the Nasdaq. Let’s use it.

Robyn O’Brien is the author of The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It (Random House, 2009) and Seeding Innovation (Wiley Publishing, 2023). She is a former Wall Street equity analyst, Rice University MBA, and a leading voice in food systems investing and advocacy. She teaches a course at Rice University’s business school on innovation.

I need you to sit with something for a moment. The people feeding this country, the ones waking before sunrise, watching the sky for rain, passing land down through generations, are in crisis. Not the kind of crisis that makes headlines easily, because there are no explosions, no visible rubble. Just quiet, grinding financial pressure. Foreclosure notices. Sleepless nights. And sometimes, unbearable despair.

As a former Wall Street analyst and a mother of four, I’ve spent years following the data that connects our food system to the health of our families, our economy, and our communities. I am also named after a farmer who is both a cancer survivor and the mother of a cancer survivor. And what I’m seeing right now is a convergence of policy decisions, tariffs, immigration crackdowns, energy freezes, budget cuts, landing simultaneously on the backs of the very people who grow our food.

This isn’t political talking points. This is the balance sheet of the American farm, and it is in crisis. Here are twelve things you need to know.

1. The Trade War Is Back, And This Time It Cuts Deeper

When I was analyzing food systems a decade ago, I watched the first Trump trade war hit farmers in the gut. China, which at the time consumed more than 60 percent of the world’s traded soybean supply, retaliated against U.S. tariffs by turning away American exports. Farmers with crops already in the ground watched prices collapse and income evaporate. That war required more than $32 billion in government bailouts to contain the damage.

Now we are in round two, and economists say this iteration is worse. In March 2025, Beijing suspended import licenses for several major U.S. soybean exporters following a new round of American tariffs on Chinese goods. A deal struck in October 2025 promised China would purchase 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually, but before the first trade war, China was buying 30 to 36 million metric tons a year. That gap is not a negotiating footnote. It’s lost income for farmers across the Midwest. And for farmers looking to transition away from conventional soybeans to regenerative and organic agriculture, this type of financial pressure makes it even harder

2. Every Country We Taxed Has Taxed Us Back, Through the Farm

Here’s something you need to understand: tariffs are taxes. And when we impose them, other countries don’t absorb the cost, they retaliate. Countries that were once reliable buyers of American corn, wheat, pork, and soybeans have systematically reduced their purchases from U.S. farms, redirecting orders to Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. This is not theory. It happened. It is measurable. And the people absorbing those losses are not the policymakers in Washington. They are farmers in Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, and Arkansas.

Since 2022, the United States has crossed a threshold almost no one is talking about: we are now importing more agricultural goods than we export, by value. The country that has long fed the world is importing more food than it sells abroad. A widening agricultural trade deficit is not a strength. It is a warning signal and a national security risk, and it is flashing red right now.

“Any economist worth their salt predicted that this tariff policy was going to lead to inflationary pressure and hurt our farm sector, especially because it’s a very export-oriented sector of the economy.” Harry Kaiser, Cornell University

3. The Strait of Hormuz Is Now a Kitchen Table Issue

You might not think that a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman has anything to do with the price of bread or the viability of a family farm in Nebraska. But it does, and here is why. The United States imports approximately 25 percent of its fertilizer, and nitrogen supply chains run through the Strait of Hormuz. Following U.S.-Iran tensions in 2025 and into 2026, those supply chains became congested and costly. Urea fertilizer prices have spiked 30 percent this planting season alone.

At the same time, diesel, which farmers burn at two to six gallons per acre every growing season, hit $4.92 per gallon nationally in March 2026. That’s up from $3.59 just one year earlier. A 37 percent increase in fuel costs doesn’t just trim margins. On a farm already operating near breakeven, it can tip the entire operation into the red. These aren’t abstract commodity fluctuations. They are the difference between planting a crop and selling the land.

4. American Farm Debt Is Heading Toward a Record $624 Billion

When I analyze a company’s balance sheet, the first thing I look at is whether debt is funding growth or covering losses. Right now, American farm debt is funding survival. The USDA estimates that total farm sector debt will rise 5.2 percent to a record $624.7 billion in 2026. Annual interest expenses will top $33 billion. That is not investment in new equipment or technology. That is farmers borrowing money simply to buy seed, fuel, and fertilizer, the inputs you need just to plant a crop.

The average operating loan in 2025 was 30 percent larger than in 2024, with repayment terms stretching three months longer. Forty percent more new farm operating loans were opened in the final quarter of 2025 than a year prior. Lenders, rather than calling in loans, are quietly extending terms, pushing the reckoning down the road. This is not a signal of a healthy sector managing through a rough patch. This is a signal of systematic, structural distress being deferred. And deferred distress always comes due.

5. Farm Bankruptcies Surged 46%, and the Worst May Be Ahead

In 2025, 315 American family farms filed Chapter 12 bankruptcy, a form of debt restructuring designed specifically for farm operations. That’s a 46 percent increase over 2024, and the third consecutive annual rise. The Midwest alone saw bankruptcies jump 70 percent. Arkansas recorded 33 filings, nearly double its prior year, with farms reporting years of consecutive losses. The number 315 sounds manageable until you remember that Chapter 12 bankruptcy is a last resort, it means years of financial deterioration have already occurred before that paper gets filed.

Fifteen thousand farms closed entirely in 2025, bringing the national count to 1.865 million, and not a single state saw its farm count increase. The farms that close don’t just disappear. They get absorbed by larger corporate operations, accelerating the consolidation of America’s food production into fewer and fewer hands. Seventy-two percent of agricultural economists surveyed expect this consolidation to accelerate. We are watching the slow disappearance of the family farm in real time.

6. Behind Every Foreclosure Notice Is a Human Being, and We Are Losing Them

This is the point that stops me cold. Every time I speak about the food system, I try to remind people that behind every data point is a human life. And when I look at the mental health data for American farmers, I feel a moral urgency that goes beyond policy analysis. Perhaps it is because I am named after a farmer. I watched her lose her husband, then turn around and battle cancer herself, while also helping one of her daughters survive cancer.

Farmers in this country die by suicide at a rate 3.5 times higher than the general working population, according to the CDC. The suicide rate for male farmers is 43.2 per 100,000, compared to 22.5 for the general male population.

Sixty percent of farmer suicide victims had no prior mental health diagnosis. They suffered in silence, because in farming communities, asking for help has long carried a stigma that feels as heavy as debt itself. Rural isolation, access to firearms and chemicals, and a culture of stoic endurance create a perfect storm. When a farm faces foreclosure, when a family legacy built over generations is threatened, when the weather, the markets, and the government all seem to be working against you at once , the weight becomes unbearable for some. We cannot talk about the farm crisis without talking about the human cost. We cannot let these numbers stay abstract.

“When the future of the farm feels threatened, stress can sink into despair.” , Oklahoma Farm Report, 2025. Financial stress is not just an economic emergency. For too many farm families, it has become a matter of life and death.

7. The Immigration Crackdown Is Emptying the Fields

I want to say something clearly, as someone who has spent years at the intersection of food, business, and policy: the labor force that feeds this country is largely immigrant. Approximately 40 percent of the U.S. farm workforce has historically consisted of undocumented workers. For dairy farms, that number climbs to between 60 and 90 percent, because there is no visa category designed for year-round, farm-skill agricultural work. That isn’t a loophole or a failure. It’s the reality the food system was built around over decades.

The current administration’s aggressive deportation policies have driven workers away from farms and introduced paralyzing uncertainty. Farmers who turn to the legal H-2A guest worker program face costs that are prohibitive for small operations: they must pay a federally mandated wage more than double the minimum wage, provide free housing, and arrange transportation. Large agribusinesses can absorb that. The family farm in Wisconsin or Georgia often cannot. The fields aren’t just losing workers. They’re losing the capacity to harvest what’s already in the ground.

8. The Lifelines Are Being Cut, One by One

For years, renewable energy had become one of the most meaningful income diversification tools for rural America. Leasing land for wind turbines or solar panels brought tens of thousands of dollars a year to family farms, providing the cushion that kept operations viable when crop prices dropped. Iowa now generates roughly 63 percent of its electricity from wind. Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas had seen explosive growth. This wasn’t an abstract climate debate. It was a survival strategy, and it was working.

In August 2025, a Treasury Department policy change froze billions in rural renewable energy investment, pushing projects into limbo across the Midwest. At the same time, the USDA began disrupting, delaying, and canceling contracts with farmers and farm-serving organizations. In April 2026, the President proposed cutting an additional $5 billion from the USDA , roughly 20 percent of the agency’s entire budget. Programs supporting organic transition, rural business development, and conservation are all on the chopping block.

9. The People Who Need Food Are Losing the Support to Buy It

Here is a connection most people miss: the collapse of farm income and the collapse of food access are not separate crises. They are the same crisis, felt at opposite ends of the food chain. The One Big Beautiful Bill, signed in July 2025, included cuts to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. By early 2026, an estimated 2.5 million Americans had lost SNAP benefits. The federal government also quietly discontinued its household food insecurity survey in September 2025 , placing the responsible economists on administrative leave two days later.

SNAP dollars don’t just feed families. They circulate directly back into local food economies, supporting the farmers markets, small grocers, and regional producers who often operate on the thinnest margins. When 2.5 million people lose food assistance, the ripple reaches the farm. And we are being asked to make peace with the fact that we can no longer officially measure hunger in America , not because the problem has been solved, but because we’ve stopped looking.

10. The Threat to Your Dinner Table Has Never Been More Real

So what does all of this means for you? Whether you’re a farmer, a parent, a grocery shopper, or someone who simply eats. The USDA projects overall food prices will rise 2.9 percent in 2026, but that headline number masks significant volatility in specific categories. Beef and veal prices could surge as high as 16.6 percent. Sugar and sweets are forecast to rise 6.7 percent. Non-alcoholic beverages, including coffee, are expected to climb 5.2 percent. Restaurant prices are rising at 3.8 percent annually. And over the past five years, your grocery bill has risen more than 25 percent in total. It has not come back down, and it will not come back down.

The structural fragility of our food system is no longer a future risk. It is a present reality. We have fewer farms. They carry more debt. They have less labor. Their export markets are shrinking. Their input costs are rising. Their government support is being cut. And the people growing our food are experiencing a mental health crisis that too few people in power are willing to name out loud.

Food security is national security. The resilience of the American food supply depends on the resilience of the American farmer, and right now, that resilience is being tested at every level simultaneously. And young people are turning away from farming creating, what farming families call, a generational risk.

What happens to the farm does not stay on the farm. It shows up on your grocery receipt, in your community, in the stories of families who’ve worked the land for a hundred years and are now wondering if they can make it through one more season.

We have a choice about what kind of food system we want. But first, we have to be willing to look clearly at the one we have.

11. The People Healing the Land Had the Rug Pulled Out From Under Them

If you’ve followed my work over the years, you know that regenerative and organic farming sit at the center of what I do. The farmers growing food this way are doing it because they understand that the health of the soil is inseparable from the health of the people eating from it. They took on greater risk, invested years in transitioning their land, reduced their synthetic inputs, and built practices that actually improve the ecosystem rather than deplete it. And then, in January 2025, the government they had trusted pulled their funding mid-project.

The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, a $3.1 billion, five-year investment in 141 projects covering more than 14,000 farms and 3.2 million acres, was frozen on the day Trump took office, and officially cancelled in April 2025. Organizations like Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, which was running a $40 million project across 15 states, received termination letters while farmers were mid-implementation, having already invested their own time and money. At the same time, the $85 million Organic Market Development Grant program and the $100 million Transition to the Organic Partnership Program were both paused, even as federal courts ordered the administration to release funds. The National Organic Program itself lost roughly one-third of its staff. These are not line items in a budget. They are the structural support systems that allowed farmers to take the leap toward something better. Cancelling them mid-leap is not efficiency. It’s abandonment.

“USDA funding, quite frankly, has been transformative for the regenerative agriculture movement. It’s a critical source of support, and if we see that it’s not continuing, it will certainly have significant ripple effects throughout the agriculture sector.” Ellen Griswold, Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment

12. Mid-Transition Farmers Are the Most Vulnerable and the Most Forgotten

There is a particular cruelty in what has happened to farmers who were in the middle of transitioning to organic or regenerative practices. Transition is the hardest, most financially exposed phase of the journey. Organic certification requires a mandatory three-year transition period during which a farmer bears all the costs of organic practices, no synthetic fertilizers, no prohibited pesticides, stricter record-keeping, but cannot yet command organic market prices. That gap can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The support programs that helped bridge it were not luxuries. They were what made the transition financially survivable.

One farmer in Pennsylvania invested $8,000 of his own money to secure water infrastructure for grass-fed livestock, applied for transition support through a PCSC partner, and was left in limbo when the program was frozen. Across the country, farmers had enrolled in multi-year projects, completed year one or two of five, and were waiting on reimbursement payments that never arrived. Organizations had hired staff, built partnerships, enrolled hundreds of farms then received cancellation letters with no timeline, no appeals process, and no reimbursement for completed work. And the $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program announced in December 2025 as a replacement, while welcomed in principle, is less than a quarter of what was cancelled. And it is being administered by an agency that has lost nearly 25 percent of its conservation staff and does not require the reduction in synthetic pesticides that defines true regenerative practice.

The Change Does Not Start in Washington. It Starts With Us.

I’ve spent my career believing that informed people make better decisions, as consumers, as investors, as citizens, and as voters. It began when my youngest had a life-threatening allergic reaction, and it will always be my call to action.

The farm crisis unfolding across this country is not inevitable. It is a consequence of choices, and choices can be changed.

Support farmers directly when you can, at the farmers market, through CSAs, through brands that pay fair prices to the people growing your food. Demand transparency. Ask where your food comes from. Push your representatives to prioritize a food system that is durable, equitable, and grounded in the long-term health of the land and the people who tend it.

And there is one more piece of this picture that must be named because it shapes everything else. The USDA, the federal agency whose entire purpose is to serve American farmers, is being hollowed out in plain sight.

Since January 2025, more than 15,000 USDA employees have left through deferred resignation and early retirement offers. Nearly 2,000 additional staff have been lost from research agencies alone, delaying grant programs, deferring data collection, and in some cases skipping entire fiscal-year research cycles altogether.

In July 2025, Secretary Rollins announced a sweeping reorganization plan, drafted without farmer input, that will relocate up to 2,600 of the remaining Washington-area staff to five regional hubs in cities like Indianapolis, Kansas City, Fort Collins, Raleigh, and Salt Lake City. Secretary Rollins herself has publicly stated she expects up to half of those employees to quit rather than move.

When USDA tried this same approach in 2019, relocating two offices to Kansas City, it lost more than half of its affected staff and saw significant drops in productivity. The department is now repeating that experiment at many times the scale, at the worst possible moment, with a workforce already stretched thin and farmers already in crisis.

This is not efficiency. This is institutional erosion — and the farmers waiting on loan approvals, conservation contracts, and program payments will be the ones who pay the price when the phone goes unanswered and the office is gone.

If you know a farmer, call them. Check in. The mental health crisis on American farms is real, and sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer is simply the reminder that they are not alone.

A Final Word: This Is Not Love.

I have thought long and hard about how to name what is happening between the Trump administration and the farmers who voted for it, who believed in it, who hung signs for it, who wore the hats and held the line through the first term and came back for more. And the only honest word I can find is this: it is an abusive relationship. I don’t say that lightly or to hurt anyone. I say it because I’ve watched the pattern too many times to call it anything else.

The promises of protection. The language of loyalty, ‘we have your back,’ ‘we’ll fight for you,’ ‘you are the backbone of this nation.’ And then the tariffs that slam your markets shut. The bailout check that arrives just large enough to keep you from leaving, but never large enough to make you whole. The programs cancelled without warning mid-implementation. The staff who answered your calls, gone. The offices that processed your loans, closing. The policies dressed up in the language of patriotism while the economic reality of your farm deteriorates season by season.

This is the cycle: idealize, destabilize, apologize with a check, repeat. And it works, because farmers are, by nature and by necessity, people of extraordinary resilience and extraordinary loyalty. They don’t quit. They don’t walk away from the land their grandparents cleared. That endurance is beautiful. And it is being exploited.

So here is what I believe, with everything I have: the way out of this is not through Washington alone. It is through us. It is through every person who eats, which is every person, deciding that the food system we have is not the food system we have to keep. It means buying directly from farmers when we can. It means demanding that our elected representatives, on both sides, treat agricultural policy as the national security issue it is, not as a bargaining chip or a bailout opportunity.

It means supporting the organizations on the ground, Farm Aid, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Organic Farmers Association, and hundreds of others, who are doing the patient, unglamorous work of keeping farms alive and farmers supported while the politics sort themselves out. It means refusing to accept that hunger is unmeasurable, that farmers are expendable, or that the family farm is simply an inevitable casualty of a modern economy. None of that is true. None of it has to be.

The farmers of this country have fed us through wars, droughts, depressions, and pandemics. They have asked for very little in return, just fair markets, reliable support, and the basic dignity of being able to pass something on to the next generation. That is not too much to ask. And if we show up for them the way they have always shown up for us, we can build a food system that is not just surviving, but genuinely, durably, beautifully alive.

IF YOU OR A FARMER YOU KNOW IS IN CRISIS

Farm Aid Crisis Hotline: 1-800-FARM-AID (1-800-327-6243) · National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: 988 · Rural Response Hotline: 1-800-464-0258You are not alone. Your life is worth more than this season’s harvest.

Written in memory of Scott McAllister and others who lost their lives serving our country on the farm.

Sources: USDA Economic Research Service · American Farm Bureau Federation · CDC National Vital Statistics · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · Farm Aid · Cornell University · Investigate Midwest · Oklahoma Farm Report · Kansas Reflector · Foreign Policy · Newsweek · Civil Eats · Organic Farmers Association · National Organic Coalition · Beyond Pesticides · Pasa Sustainable Agriculture · National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition · May 2026

This morning, after the most wonderful Mothers’ Day, I am sitting with the gentle ache that is love.

Knowing that at any moment, when you truly love someone, you are vulnerable.

Your heart is so completely exposed to the fullest spectrum of emotion, from joy to pain.

No one tells you about this when you become a mother. You hear ‘The days are long but the years are short.’ And as your journey unfolds, you know this to be profoundly true.

But perhaps the thing I wasn’t prepared for is the gentle ache of motherhood. I’ve felt it a thousand times, with every milestone and every transition. Something as innocent as a pre-school graduation to something as a momentous as an adult child accomplishing her career dreams. And then everything in between. From the dark nights when love and faith hold you together on the side of a child’s bed in the hospital, to the tenacity and stubborness that refuse to quit.

Motherhood, in its pain and in its ease, is acutely intense and refreshingly easy.

It is a river that carries you through life-threatening rapids into the most serene swirling pools, only to pull you back underwater again, wondering if you will ever come up for air.

And you find your way to the surface, again and again and again.

It is a quiet, beautiful, resilient strength that not only births a child but also the unshakeable strength of a woman.

I’ve written before about being the mother of adult children, and how when your children are self-sufficient, rather than an empty nest, you become an aircraft carrier.

They return to you, to touchdown, to land, to dump things, either emotionally or physically, to refuel, with time together and new memories, only to fly off again.

I am the aircraft carrier. My four children are now grown, and living their own lives. I can travel to them, they can travel to me.

And my hope has always been that no matter where they are, that they return to refuel and drop off the things that they no longer wish to carry. That I am a safe place to land, to refuel. That they call me in when they need me.

My youngest wrote this song for my birthday, My Maman. I woke up yesterday, hearing her voice singing it. It is all I could ever want for my children.

Happy Mothers’ Day, to all who celebrate, for the love that holds us together, whether a birth mother, an adopted mother, a mother figure or anyone who poured her life and love into another child.

And as I think about the words written by my youngest, I want her to know that she can always find home in herself, too.

I hope that the gentle voice in her head, saying “Sweet girl, you can do incredible things” becomes her own.

And perhaps that is the next chapter of motherhood, to mirror back to these adults who continue to blow me away, the incredible attributes and characteristics that they already have, so that they not only feel safe, when they tuck into my life, but more importantly, that they are forever safe, tucked into their own.

I’ve spent two decades watching the debate around our food system get hijacked by the loudest argument in the room. Right now, that argument is preemption, the legal question of whether federal law overrides state and local attempts to warn consumers about glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.

Courts are wrestling with it. There are active lawsuits representing sick farmers nationwide. Advocates are organizing around it. And I understand why. It is a fight worth having.

Preemption is a procedural question. It’s about jurisdiction, who gets to put a label on a bottle. And while that fight consumes our energy and attention, the herbicide itself remains on the market, sprayed on hundreds of millions of acres of American farmland, residues showing up in our cereals, in our honey, even in umbilical cord blood.

The substance isn’t on trial. The warning label is.

That’s a distraction. And we can’t afford it.

Let’s be honest about what we know.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015. That’s not a fringe finding, IARC is the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization, and it doesn’t use the word “probable” lightly. Since then, litigation has unearthed thousands of internal documents from Bayer (which acquired Monsanto) showing company scientists and executives who were, at minimum, deeply uncomfortable with some of the findings about their flagship product.

Juries have agreed. Billions of dollars in verdicts have been rendered. Attorneys continue to line up. And still, glyphosate is being sold, applied, and consumed.

So let’s ask the question plainly: why hasn’t it been pulled from the market?

That’s not rhetorical. It’s the question our regulatory agencies should be answering in public, with data they’re willing to defend. The EPA’s position, that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” puts it at direct odds with IARC and with growing independent science. When federal regulators and international health bodies can’t agree on something this fundamental, that should trigger scrutiny, not a preemption lawsuit.

Now we know it goes further than that. Internal EPA emails obtained through a FOIA request and revealed at a congressional hearing last week show that Bayer met with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and his senior staff to discuss its Supreme Court litigation strategy and promised him “a small thanks” for updating the agency’s glyphosate webpage in a way that withdrew support for California’s cancer warning. That update was subsequently cited in the Solicitor General’s brief backing Bayer’s case before the Supreme Court.

Waiting for that system to fix itself is not a strategy. It’s a prayer.

The people paying the price aren’t the ones in the courtroom.

When I talk about glyphosate, I always come back to farmers. American farmers in particular. Because we have done them a profound disservice.

American farmers didn’t wake up one day and decide to drench their fields in herbicide. They were sold a system, a fully integrated package of genetically engineered seeds and the chemicals those seeds were designed to tolerate. They were told it was the future of agriculture. They were promised efficiency, yield, and simplicity. And many of them bought in, literally, often going into debt to do so.

Now, decades later, we have superweeds resistant to glyphosate spreading across millions of acres. We have soil microbiome disruption that scientists are only beginning to understand. We have farmers increasingly trapped in a chemical treadmill, applying more product to get the same results they used to achieve with less, and carrying record levels of debt to achieve it.

And what are we offering them? A label fight.

They deserve investment in alternatives. They deserve research into regenerative practices that can genuinely compete on yield and economics. They deserve a transition pathway that doesn’t bankrupt them. And they deserve an honest conversation from the rest of us, from consumers, from advocates, from policymakers, that says: we know this system isn’t working, and we are going to help you find a way out of it.

What we should be doing instead.

First, let’s redirect some of the advocacy energy that’s going into preemption litigation toward demanding a comprehensive, independent re-review of glyphosate’s safety profile, one that isn’t funded or influenced by the registrant, and one that accounts for the most recent science on endocrine disruption, gut microbiome effects, and combined exposures.

Second, let’s put real money behind alternatives. I cannot emphasize this enough.

We need robust public investment in cover cropping, precision weeding technology, biological pest management, and the agronomic knowledge that makes these systems actually work at scale. Some of the most exciting tools in this space, laser weeding robots, targeted biological herbicides, AI-assisted precision application, are advancing rapidly. They need funding and farmer-facing infrastructure to become real options, not just conference presentations.

Third, let’s change the economics. Right now, the cheapest option available to many farmers is still the chemical one, because the externalized costs, health impacts, water contamination, biodiversity loss, are borne by everyone else, including their families.

We need agricultural policy that doesn’t just talk about the label, but that rewrites those incentives.

Fourth, let’s support farmer-to-farmer networks. The most compelling evidence that alternatives work comes from farmers who are already doing it. Peer learning is more persuasive than any government pamphlet. Invest in the networks, the field days, the mentorships that spread real-world knowledge of what’s possible.

A final word on the preemption debate.

I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. It does. If states and localities can’t warn their residents about potential risks, that’s a genuine problem for democracy and for public health.

But don’t let it substitute for the harder conversation.

Warning labels don’t protect farmers whose livelihoods depend on a system built around a product that may be harming them and their land.

Labels don’t clean up waterways. Labels don’t restore soil biology.

The question isn’t just who gets to put a warning on the bottle. The question is why the bottle is still being filled.

And more importantly: what are we prepared to do, together, to help the people who grow our food find a better way forward?

That’s the conversation I want to be having. I hope you’ll join me.

Robyn O'Brien is named to Forbes' Impact 50 List for her work at the intersection of food, agriculture, and climate. She is named after a farmer who is a cancer survivor, and she is the author of The Unhealthy Truth and Seeding Innovation.