Ag Secretary Rollins: Real food and open markets are national security

WASHINGTON, DC – Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins delivered an impassioned address to fresh produce leaders this morning, framing the industry’s health not just as an economic question but as a matter of national survival.

“The minute, the day, the month, the year that we can no longer feed ourselves or fuel ourselves is the minute we will lose freedom and liberty in America,” she said.

Rollins, who grew up in a flower shop on the town square in Glen Rose, TX, and studied agriculture and horticulture at Texas A&M, told the crowd at the IFPA Washington Conference, she “felt right at home” among growers.

She then walked through five priorities shaping USDA’s agenda.

On nutrition, Rollins said the administration has carried out “the most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in American history” over the past 16 months. She pointed to revised dietary guidelines built “based on science rather than misinformation,” and to a new final rule on SNAP stocking standards that more than doubles what retailers must carry to accept benefits, from roughly 12 staples to 28 varieties.

The rule also closes loopholes that had let “beef jerky qualify as a meat and jelly or jam qualify as a fruit.”

More fresh produce on shelves, she argued, supports growers while expanding access for lower-income families.

She highlighted the Farmers First Regenerative Agriculture pilot, a more-than-$700 million commitment delivered through familiar EQIP and Conservation Stewardship programs, which she said already covers nearly 700 contracts.

The goal, she said, is to “protect our topsoil from unnecessary erosion and boost the microbiome of the soil” for growers who choose to transition.

Trade drew some of her sharpest contrasts. Rollins noted that an $8 billion agricultural trade surplus had become a $44 billion deficit during the Biden administration and credited 19 new trade deals in just over a year with beginning to reverse it. Apple producers can now sell into Thailand “for the first time.”

On support for growers, she cited expanded specialty crop funding under the Working Families Tax Cut Act, including a near-doubling of the Specialty Crop Research Initiative, and a $1.6 billion package announced last week.

“I hear you. It’s not enough,” she acknowledged. “But we continue to battle to get more funding into the system.”

Labor was her most personal subject. Recalling a Georgia roundtable where farmers spoke “with tears in their eyes,” Rollins described reversing a roughly 40 percent increase in the H-2A adverse effect wage rate—a change she said saves growers $2 billion a year—and urged Congress to codify it.

Closing on regulation, she invited the audience to flag “any rule that is just dumb,” citing California lettuce growers whose compliance costs she said have risen 1,400 percent in 15 years.

Quoting Galatians — “let us not grow weary in well doing” — she pledged to “never stop fighting” for American agriculture.