Jordan Chamberlin, an agricultural economist and a principal scientist at CIMMYT, works with his colleagues to understand the constraints farmers face and how they allocate their resources. All of this helps the team target “the bottlenecks for unleashing the potential farmers have,” he tells Food Tank.

In Kenya, producers are working in rainfed systems, which are “inherently risky,” Chamberlin explains. He notes that many solutions being developed for farming systems aim to harness big data and analytics to provide better predictions and site-specific advice that will help producers thrive. But these tools don’t account for everything. 

CIMMYT’s researchers acknowledge that each suggestion provided by these new and emerging tools demand investment from farmers upfront. But recommendations to adopt a new technology or follow a set of practices to grow their crops doesn’t offer the full picture. Farmers may not understand the potential or the risks associated with that approach, making them reluctant to make a change. Knowledge can empower them to make more informed choices. 

“We’re trying to ask: How do we think about the information that we present to farmers to clarify what the value proposition is if we’re trying to encourage technology change on smallholder farms that don’t have a lot of resources?” Chamberlin says. 

In agriculture, however, the return on investment can take years to see and in the face of inconsistent rainfall patterns, pests, and price uncertainty, it’s not always easy to predict. That’s why Chamberlin’s modeling is trying to “better characterize that kind of variability.”

Once researchers have the information, the next step is to share it with farmers who are often coming from different educational backgrounds. 

“Some of the work that we’ve done indicates that farmers respond better to information about the variability of financial returns,” Chamberlain tells Food Tank. And they’ve seen that presenting this clearly can help producers “overcome some of the inertia in the face of all this uncertainty.”

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Jordan Chamberlin on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg to hear more about how we can better mitigate risks for farmers, what CIMMYT is doing to help producers improve soil health, and the effects of funding shocks and conflict that are rippling through communities. 

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Precision agriculture is a data-driven farm management approach that uses technology like GPS, sensors, drones, and Artificial Intelligence to collect and analyze detailed information on crops, soil, and environmental conditions in real time.

These tools can help farmers account for variability within fields, track and analyze soil quality, crop health, pest infestations, and temperature levels, and apply inputs like water, fertilizers, and pesticides with greater precision. The aim is to improve resource efficiency, productivity, and profitability while reducing waste and optimizing decision-making.

Precision agriculture tools can be used separately or combined into integrated data-driven platforms. GPS-guided tractor systems seek to improve field accuracy by minimizing overlaps or gaps in herbicide or fertilizer application. And yield monitoring technologies collect and map GPS and farm equipment data to guide decisions about when to sow, fertilize, or harvest.

Drones and remote sensors capture high-resolution imagery to assess crop health and detect variability. Variable rate technology uses this data to adjust the application of inputs like fertilizers and pesticides in real time.

As investment accelerates, the digital farming sector has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry, valued between US$10 billion and US$30 billion  in 2025 with projections of doubling in the next decade.

Precision agriculture shows potential by enabling farmers to make timely, data-driven decisions tailored to conditions on their land. Precision tools can improve resource efficiency, support more precise decision-making, and facilitate adaptability, which researchers associate with lower fuel, labor, and maintenance costs. These capabilities may contribute to improved outcomes for soils, crops, livestock, and overall farm performance.

But many farmers cannot access precision agriculture technologies because high costs, infrastructure demands, and technical requirements create significant barriers. Farmers must navigate substantial upfront investments, limited training opportunities, and a reliance on consistent internet and electricity, which makes adoption especially difficult for small-scale producers and those in lower-income regions.

Most smallholder farms, which account for about 85 percent of farms globally, continue to operate without these tools, while adoption remains concentrated among larger, capital-intensive operations. Authors of a recent HEAL report warn that these disparities may further exacerbate deeply rooted racial and economic inequities in agriculture.

A report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) links this dynamic to a broader shift toward farm consolidation, as alliances between major agribusiness and technology firms expand control over data, inputs, and decision-making across the food system. “They are shaping what technologies are developed, how food production decisions are made, and what the future of farming looks like,” IPES says.

In parallel, research evaluating environmental outcomes has found limited and inconsistent evidence that precision agriculture reduces inputs or emissions in practice. And there questions about whether the approach could deliver meaningful sustainability gains if it were more equitably accessible.

The wide-spread adoption of precision agriculture is a conflation between efficiency and sustainability, Celize Christy, Member Organizing Lead at HEAL Food Alliance, tells Food Tank. According to HEAL, the production and use of precision agriculture technologies relies heavily on internet-connected devices and energy-intensive operations which generate substantial global emissions.

While innovation is central to improving agricultural efficiency and sustainability, its benefits depend on how it is developed, governed, and deployed, experts caution.

IPES calls for “reclaiming innovation for people and planet,” emphasizing the need to strengthen public oversight, limit the concentration of power among major technology and agribusiness firms, and reshape dominant narratives about what constitutes innovation. HEAL Food Alliance suggests focusing on regenerative practices that regenerate soil, strengthen rural economies, and prioritize equity.

“Climate solutions should serve communities,” Christy tells Food Tank. “Not corporations.”

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California “has always been this incredible leader in terms of social, economic, and ecological progress,” Kristin Coates, Co-Founder and CEO of Regenerative California, tells Food Tank. “And yet, as the fourth largest economy in the world, it’s still quite extractive.” But she wondered what the future could look like if the state prioritized regenerative systems.

To pilot this vision, Coates and her team looked to Monterey County. “At the time, it was considered California’s most wealthy and also poorest county in the state,” she explains. It’s also home to the Salinas Valley, nicknamed the salad bowl of the world.

The Regenerative California team began by interviewing community members to understand the challenges and opportunities they face in creating a more regenerative economy in the region. From these conversations, Coates says that two main themes emerged: the transition to regenerative organic agriculture and the revitalization of the blue economy.

As their priority issues came into focus, they developed a 70-acre demonstration farm, called Regenerate 68! Farm. “Obviously, 70 acres is not going to change the entire system of agriculture in California,” Coates tells Food Tank, “but we’re really using it as sort of a Petri dish.”

Located just off Highway 68 in Monterey County, the farm is a demonstration site for regenerative organic agriculture training, where they can grow nutrient-rich crops. The land is also part of a much larger ranch to be stewarded by the Big Sur Land Trust. Coates says this is an opportunity to prove that their approach to farming can be integrated into broader conservation efforts.

2026 marks the first year that Regenerative California will begin monitoring the farm’s environmental progress. They’re also considering the social and economic benefits that they can offer to farmers and institutional buyers in the area.

Coates recognizes that what’s successful on one farm may not yield the same results on another, but there are ways to translate the lessons they’re learning to scale impact. “We can create a flywheel,” she says. “And we really, genuinely believe that California can lead that work.”

And Regenerative California is capturing the attention of others interested in this transformation. “A dozen other regions want to join in this movement. They want to be the next area where we apply this process of listening, engaging, creating community momentum,” Coates tells Food Tank. “That really excites us.”

This article was written with the support of Katherine Albertson

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The event, taking place at the Tribeca Film Center, begins at 6:30PM ET. A panel discussion featuring author and nutritionist Marion Nestle, Chef Michel Nischan of Wholesome Wave, former USDA Midwest Public Affairs Director Alan Shannon, and journalist Kate Bittman will kick off the evening. This will be followed by a screening of the documentary “The Henry Ford’s Farm To School Lunch Across America” and a reception. 

“This documentary is more than a film—it is an invitation. Through Farm to School Lunch Across America, we are shining a light on communities proving that school meals can nourish students, strengthen local economies, and support farmers caring for the land,” Spence Medford, Senior Vice President and Chief Advancement Officer for The Henry Ford, tells Food Tank. “Our hope is to spark a national conversation around school-supported agriculture and inspire more communities to adapt what’s already working.”

The Henry Ford’s program brings together culinary experts and chefs, farmers, food advocates, and policymakers to amplify the importance of fresh, seasonal meals for students across the United States. Through this work, they try to underscore the need for free, regeneratively grown school lunches for all. 

The pilot program, launched in 2024, reached seven schools in six communities to connect farmers, chefs, and fresh food resources during National Farm to School Month in October. During visits, a film crew captured model school meal programs and interviewed chefs, including Alice Waters and Rick Bayless, along with school meal leaders and innovators.

To inquire about attending and RSVP for the event, email farmtoschool@thehenryford.org.

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Investment in Africa’s Agrifood Systems Is Growing—But Not Enough

A new joint report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, the World Food Programme, and the African Union Commission finds that since 2018, the African continent has seen a general upward trend in government spending on agriculture, forestry, and fishing. In 2022, public expenditure in these sectors amounted to US$16 billion, up from US$12.6 billion in 2020 and US$14.6 billion in 2021. 

While encouraging, the investment is still not enough to meet targets for ending hunger and transforming food and agriculture systems in a region where hunger has increased for eight consecutive years. 

Private sector funding in the form of bank credit and foreign direct investment is particularly low and far below potential, the authors state. The perceived high risk of investing in food and agriculture markets remains a key barrier to financing solutions that can boost food and nutrition security for communities. 

That’s why the report urgently calls for public-private collaboration that will de-risk investments. Policy reforms that are inclusive of women and youth are needed as well. The report also identifies climate finance—which rose nearly 50 percent in two years—as an untapped opportunity if decisionmakers can align this funding with food systems transformation that builds resilience.

COP31 Presidency, IEA Team Up to Push Clean Energy

The COP31 Presidency recently announced a partnership with the International Energy Agency (IEA) to speed up the transition to clean energy. This comes during what IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol calls “the biggest energy crisis in history”

Murat Kurum, Turkey’s Minister of Environment, says that it will take collaboration to “transform the crisis into an opportunity.”

While details of the partnership are still limited, one of the most important pillars of this transition will focus on clean cooking, helping the roughly 2.3 billion people reliant on polluting fuels like charcoal, firewood, and waste switch to cleaner cooking solutions. This move can not only reduce emissions but also lower the associated negative health impacts.

The Environment Minister also shared that the IEA will conduct special research on the impact of recycling, which will inform the COP31 Presidency’s agenda on cutting emissions from waste—a top priority for Turkey. 

New South Wales Prepares for Food Waste Prevention Laws

Beginning July 1, sites in New South Wales that generate 3,960 liters of waste a week will be required to separate food waste from their general waste. This will impact larger operations including hotels, food courts, and other high-volume venues. 

By July 2028, the rules will apply to sites that produce at least 1,980 liters of waste per week. By 2030, it will apply to those generating at least 720 liters. 

Currently, households spend roughly AU$2,000 every year on food that goes uneaten. And by 2030, the government states that the country’s landfills will not be able to accept additional waste. 

The New South Wales Environment Protection Authority is offering programs and grants that will help businesses comply with the new laws. 

While their timelines vary, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory, and Queensland are also moving toward circular economy frameworks that will prioritize diverting organic waste from landfills. 

Agricultural Cooperatives Offer Resilience and Hope

A new policy paper from the Co-operative Party finds that agricultural cooperatives could “unleash growth” and boost food security in the United Kingdom. 

At a time when the conflict is driving fuel and fertilizer prices higher, co-ops offer stability. By allowing farmers to pool resources, and share risks, and invest collectively, this model can improve resilience in the face of volatile input markets. 

Paul Gerrard, Director of public affairs at the Co-operative Group, says that a co-op “naturally lends itself to sharing costs and spreading risk” while making “the day-to-day fundamentals of farming more efficient.”

There are around 500 agricultural co-ops in the UK and around half of UK farmers are estimated to be members of a co-op of some kind. But the paper says there is “significant room for expansion.” A new Farming Roadmap for England, which will be published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The report’s authors believe this Roadmap is an opportunity to formalize a commitment to expanding co-ops even further. 

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NDI teamed up with Edacious, a company that provides food testing and analysis, to launch the Regen Nutrition Project in 2024. The project invites NDI’s 50-plus members—including food companies and farmers committed to producing regeneratively—to test samples of their products at Edacious’ food lab.

Edacious’ food analysis technology compares the nutrient content of regeneratively-produced foods with conventional crops to help companies demonstrate the benefits of regenerative practices.

The data “will be critical for demonstrating that eco-friendly practices that build healthy soil and work in synergy with natural systems ultimately produce foods with higher nutrient density,” Mary Purdy, Managing Director of NDI tells Food Tank.

This is particularly important at a time when producers are facing skepticism that labels reflect real differences, Eric Smith, Founder and CEO of Edacious, says. “For producers, nutrition data is becoming a way to validate practices they already believe in—and to communicate that value credibly in the marketplace,” he tells Food Tank.

Edacious and the NDI also developed a Nutrient Density Data Explorer to visualize the nutrient data collected. It breaks down the nutrient content of the samples sent in by NDI members and compares them alongside conventional retail samples.

“We want it to be useful to farmers, researchers, brands, and policymakers alike: a tool that highlights how much variability actually exists in foods, where regenerative systems may be showing early signals of improved nutrient density, and where more research is needed,” Smith says.

Results from the Data Explorer show that regeneratively-produced samples have lower fat content, a better balance of Omega-6 to Omega-3, more protein, and no heavy metals, compared to conventional samples. The project has collected data on proteins in their pilot, and they are looking forward to expanding to grains and produce next.

According to a study in the journal Foods, commercial produce such as apples, oranges, tomatoes, and potatoes have lost up to 25 to 50 percent of their nutrient density in the last 50 to 70 years. And research from the Institute of Environmental Sciences reveals that the climate crisis further threatens nutritional quality.

“As concern about health continues to rise, this evidence becomes a powerful lever for changing purchasing decisions, not only at the consumer level, but also among those with significant purchasing power, including institutions, food service and food is medicine, providers, and retailers,” Purdy tells Food Tank.

Smith makes clear that the goal of the project isn’t to create “perfect foods.” It’s “to shift the conversation toward transparency, context, and continuous improvement, so that nutrition becomes a measurable, valued outcome of how we grow and produce food.”

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Building on our past COP programming, Food Tank will organize a series multi-stakeholder dinners, host an evening of farmer storytelling, engage with climate negotiators, and much more. Check back here for more details about our COP31 plans as they become available!

To request an invitation, suggest a speaker, or explore partnership opportunities, please reach out to Food Tank’s Events Director Kenzie Wade at kenzie@foodtank.com.

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The weeklong series of programming will include panel discussions, live performances, networking receptions, and delicious food as we discuss the many solutions that will make our food and agriculture systems an answer to the climate crisis. Summits will touch on themes including soil health, farmland conservation, the private sector’s role in driving climate action, food and nutrition security, and much more.

Last year’s Climate Week NYC programming brought together more than 300 chefs, journalists, academics, CEOs, farmers, advocates and Broadway performers. And in 2026, we’re looking forward to making an even greater impact. Check back here for more details about our Climate Week plans as they become available!

To request an invitation, suggest a speaker, or explore partnership opportunities, please reach out to Food Tank’s Events Director Kenzie Wade at kenzie@foodtank.com.

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After fierce debates over issues including the year-round sale of E15—a fuel blend of 15 percent ethanol—and pesticide provisions, reports emerged that the vote on the legislation would be delayed. But lawmakers were able to reach a consensus and passed the Bill with a bipartisan vote of 224-200. 

Anti-hunger advocates had hoped the House would revisit changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) seen in the tax and spending bill last summer, but those have remained in place. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that one in eight participants will lose access to some food relief as a result. 

“People don’t understand how bad it’s going to be,” Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University, tells Food Tank. Across her home state of Arizona, food pantries are already seeing lines grow longer. But because the worst won’t be felt for months to come, it will likely take a while for the effects to sink in. “A lot of people who are going out to vote in November won’t realize that the safety net is pulled out from under them.”

Representatives did, however, remove a provision designed to shield pesticide manufacturers from health-related lawsuits tied to their products. 

“I don’t like a lot of what’s in this Farm Bill. It doesn’t excite me,” Merrigan tells Food Tank. “But I have to say that pesticide victory was sweet.” The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement likely played a role in this win, she acknowledges.

“We’re seeing this pesticide issue being a tipping point right now in food and agriculture policy,” Merrigan says. “And a lot of this has really bubbled up through the MAHA movement.”

From here, the Senate will take up the Farm Bill, with a markup expected in late May or early June. If they succeed in passing the legislative package, it will be the first Farm Bill since 2018. “They typically are on an every five year timeline,” Merrigan explains. “We’re very much overdue at this point.”

But Merrigan believes that a new Farm Bill isn’t something to celebrate if it’s compromised, and she hopes that lawmakers will act to protect farmers and eaters. “I would say the costs of having success in the Farm Bill—if the Farm Bill looks like what just passed in the House—is not worth it. We need to stand tall.”

Listen to the full conversation with Kathleen Merrigan on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg to hear more about what else may change with this legislation, the impending impacts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s reorganization plans, and what lies at the heart of a successful Farm Bill. 

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Food and agriculture systems generate a variety of environmental, health, social, and economic impacts that are not generally reflected in the prices consumers pay for food, referred to as externalities in economics. True Cost Accounting (TCA) is an evolving, holistic framework for measuring and valuing the positive and negative externalities of the food system.

TCA seeks to make the impacts of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption more visible to support improved decision making by policymakers, farmers, and consumers and reduce the true costs of food. Drawing from the four-capitals framework of the TEEBAgriFood Evaluation Framework, TCA assesses four key capitals: natural, human, social, and produced.

The agrifood system generates myriad positive and negative externalities, says Salman Hussain, Coordinator The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food initiative (TEEBAgriFood).

Common examples of positive externalities include a beekeeper incidentally providing a benefit to neighboring farmers when their bees pollinate the farmers’ crops and community cohesion. Examples of negative externalities include emissions from use of fuel in farm machinery, water pollution from fertilizer runoff, and healthcare costs for workers in unsafe conditions.

Though invisible in market prices, the costs of externalities across agrifood systems are nonetheless borne—just rarely by those who create them. Instead, they are passed on to the environment, workers, consumers, and society more broadly.

Environmental costs show up in the 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that agriculture produces, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. Workers in food and farming systems face risks like pesticide exposure and heat-related illness and death.

Consumers bear rising rates of diet-related diseases and issues that are linked to modern food environments. 2.5 billion adults suffer diet-related illnesses, 733 million people live in hunger, and 2.8 billion people are unable to afford a healthy diet. And these burdens are often disproportionately carried by vulnerable populations who face higher exposure to environmental risks, poor health outcomes, and economic instability.

The hidden environmental, health, and social costs of global agrifood systems amount to roughly US$12 trillion each year, according to a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that Lauren Baker, the Deputy Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, calls a “startling call to action.” A Rockefeller Foundation study attributes US$1.1 trillion unaccounted-for costs to human health, US$900 billion to environmental and biodiversity damage, and US$100 billion in unaccounted livelihoods.

TCA evaluates four forms of capital—natural, human, social, and produced—reflecting the environmental, health, social, and economic dimensions of agrifood systems. The eco-agri-food system is like a puzzle, Alexander Müller, Study Leader for TEEBAgriFood, tells Food Tank. One only understands the full picture when all the pieces are considered together unclear.

TEEBAgriFood established the four-capital framework in 2018 with contributions from more than 150 researchers and experts across 30 countries. It now underpins most True Cost Accounting assessments used today.

Natural capital refers to the stock of physical and biological resources and ecosystem functions that sustain life and enable food production. In agriculture, this includes land, water, soil, biodiversity, and atmospheric systems.

Social capital captures the networks, institutions, and shared norms that enable cooperation and collective action within societies. This can include labor conditions, fair wages, worker protections, community well-being, and the broader social impacts of food production, such as rural livelihoods, job creation or loss, and community stability.

Human capital refers to individuals’ knowledge, skills, health, and capabilities. This includes farmers’ expertise, agricultural training and education, food system innovation, and the health outcomes associated with both food production and consumption.

Produced capital includes the manufactured and financial assets that support economic activity. This encompasses physical infrastructure such as buildings, machinery, and irrigation systems, as well as financial and intellectual capital that enable food production, processing, distribution, and retail.

The goal of TCA is not to increase retail prices, according to Adrian de Groot Ruiz, Co-Founder of True Price, a Dutch social enterprise that helps identify and measure products’ social and environmental costs. Rather, TCA seeks to reveal information that can ultimately help improve the way food is made and reduce the true costs of food, De Groot Ruiz tells Food Tank.

When externalities go unmeasured, they remain unaccounted for in policy decisions, private purchases and markets fail to prevent or address them. Failing to put a value or price negative impacts “creates a dishonest pricing scheme and perpetuates farming systems which destroy our planet and cause a catastrophic impact on public health,” says Patrick Holden, Founder and CEO of SFT.

By identifying and valuing externalities, TCA can help governments, businesses, and investors design policies, legislation, incentives, and investments that reduce harmful impacts, reward practices that generate public benefits, and support food systems in which nutritious food is accessible, workers are compensated fairly, and consumers can make informed choices.

As detailed in FAO’s reports, The State of Food and Agriculture 2023 and 2024, identifying and assessing all hidden costs across agrifood systems is resource- and data-intensive, requiring collaboration between political, economic and social actors and prioritization of the most decision-relevant impacts.

To be effective, TCA must be incorporated into national and international policy frameworks, accounting standards, and performance evaluation systems, supported by standardized metrics that allow impacts to be measured consistently across food value chains, according to government bodies and industry experts.

Some organizations and researchers advocate for policies under which governments tax activities that impose environmental or social harm so market prices reflect their full costs, alongside subsidies or incentives for practices that generate positive externalities such as improved soil health or ecosystem protection. Ultimately, according to Nature Food, TCA calls for a fundamental change to the valuation of food.

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Many consumers reasonably assume that regenerative food is grown without toxic pesticides. After all, how can a system claim to regenerate soil, biodiversity, and human health while relying on chemicals designed to kill living organisms? 

Yet Friends of the Earth’s new label guide finds that some regenerative labeling programs still allow the use of synthetic pesticides, including substances linked to cancer, hormone disruption, infertility, and neurological harm.

That disconnect matters. For families trying to reduce pesticide exposure—especially those with young children or who are pregnant—labels are not just values statements. They are health decisions.

It also matters for the land itself. Decades of scientific research make it clear that reducing reliance on fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers is foundational to any credible regenerative system. These chemicals degrade soil biology, decimate pollinators, contribute significantly to climate emissions, and pollute our air and water. A label that ignores this reality risks reinforcing the very system it claims to transform.

The report finds that certifications using the term regenerative vary dramatically in what they require—not just for harmful inputs but also for soil health practices. It also finds that some of the most rigorous standards meeting regenerative principles don’t use the term at all. 

Overall, the analysis shows that the USDA Organic seal, and labels that build on it—Regenerative Organic Certified and Real Organic Project—lead in prohibiting toxic pesticides and synthetic fertilizers as well as in requiring ecological soil health practices like cover cropping, crop rotations, appropriate tillage, and feeding the soil with biological sources of fertility.

A label is only as strong as the verification system behind it. The report also highlights another source of inconsistency: some labels are backed by rigorous, enforceable criteria while others rely on vague requirements and weak verification systems.

For a labeling program to be credible, it needs to do more than make claims—it needs to define clear standards and verify that farmers meet those standards through independent audits. 

Equally important is traceability—the system a labeling program puts in place to track a product through the supply chain. 

This matters in a very practical way for consumers trying to avoid pesticide residues. With no reliable way to trace a product from the field where it’s grown to the labeled product, it’s impossible to know whether it was mixed with conventional supply at some point along the way.

Again, organic stands out: it requires third-party certification, annual inspections, and binding standards with a full audit trail from farm to shelf. And it’s the only food labeling system in the U.S. backed by federal law.

Studies show that just one week on an organic diet can reduce pesticide levels in people’s bodies up to 95 percent. And decades of data show that organic farming systems result in regenerative outcomes for the land. 

More concerning still is how thoroughly the term regenerative can be co-opted when it’s not attached to any standards at all. Pesticide companies now market themselves as leaders in regenerative agriculture, even as they continue to profit from the very products that decimate soil life, biodiversity, and our health. When a single word can be used to describe both pesticide-free farming and farming systems drenched in toxic chemicals, it ceases to function as a meaningful word. 

This kind of greenwashing doesn’t just create confusion—it diverts public energy and attention away from true solutions. For those seeking a genuinely healthier food system, labels grounded in rigorous standards—like organic—offer a clear path.

Labels matter because public policy is failing. The explosion of regenerative labels points to a deeper issue: the failure of U.S. food and farm policy. Farmers operate within a system that heavily subsidizes chemical-intensive monocultures while making it riskier to adopt ecological practices like crop diversification or cover cropping. 

Meanwhile, regulators in the United States continue to allow over 80 pesticides banned in other countries because science shows they threaten our health or the environment.

Meaningful labels are doing important work to bridge the chasm between what farmers, consumers, and the planet need and the toxic food system our public policies are delivering.

But labels alone cannot fix a broken system. Ultimately, the goal should not be a marketplace crowded with competing labels, each asking consumers to decode its meaning. It should be a food system where the highest standards—healthy soil, clean water, thriving biodiversity, safe food, and fair conditions for farmers and workers—are the baseline, not the exception.

Until then, the clarity, transparency, and integrity of food labels matter. 

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Q2 2025

May 2025

• May 2, 2025: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and detains 14 farmworkers from a farm in Western New York.
• May 3, 2025: At least 15,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees have taken the Trump-Vance Administration’s offers to resign, according to a briefing from the agency.
• May 12, 2025: The USDA rescinds decades-old regulations that required farmers to record their use of pesticides known to pose the highest risk to human health.
• May 14, 2025: The House Agriculture Committee voted 29-25, along party lines, to advance legislation that would cut as much as US$300 billion in food aid spending, shifting costs to the states.
• May 14, 2025: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announces plans to rescind several key protections intended to keep perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, out of drinking water, about a year after the Biden-Harris administration finalized the first-ever national standards.
• May 15, 2025: EPA approves the first permit allowing an industrial-scale fish farm to begin operating in federal waters.
• May 19, 2025: Rollins announces the Small Family Farms Policy Agenda, a set of policy proposals she says are aimed at improving the viability and longevity of smaller-scale family farms.
• May 22, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission releases a new MAHA report identifying the key contributors to rising rates of chronic disease among American children. According to the report, ultra-processed foods, exposure to environmental chemicals, lack of physical activity, and the overuse of medications and vaccines are among the primary drivers.
• May 27, 2025: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announces a plan to increase funding for US$14.5 million in reimbursements to states for meat and poultry inspection programs.
• May 28, 2025: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cancels funding for a trial testing the safety and efficacy of a vaccine to protect Americans from bird flu, should the virus begin circulating in humans.
• May 29, 2025: The White House acknowledges errors in the MAHA Assessment report, including citations to studies that do not actually exist.

June 2025

• June 2, 2025: The U.S. Department of the Interior proposes reversing an order issued by President Joe Biden in December that banned oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
• June 9, 2025: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces that the agency will get rid of all members sitting on a key U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts and reconstitute the committee.
• June 10, 2025: ICE arrests and detains 70 workers at Glenn Valley Foods, a meat production plant in Omaha, Nebraska.
• June 12, 2025: President Donald Trump acknowledges on social media that his immigration policies are hurting the farming and hotel industries, making a rare concession that his crackdown is having ripple effects on the American workforce. “Changes are coming,” he says.
• June 12, 2025: The Senate Agriculture Committee releases its proposed text for the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” While the House plan proposed cuts of nearly US$300 billion in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) spending, the Senate’s plan would cut US$209 billion from the program. According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, a “vote for this bill is not a vote for farmers – it’s a vote to abandon them.” The Food Research and Action Center says the bill marks “a devastating reversal in the fight against hunger in America.”
• June 13, 2025: The Washington Post reports that there will be no policy changes underway to exempt farm, hotel and other leisure workers from Trump’s immigration crackdown.
• June 12, 2025: Trump pulls the U.S. federal government from an agreement brokered by President Joe Biden with Washington, Oregon, and four Native American tribes to recover the salmon population in the Pacific Northwest, calling the plan “radical environmentalism”.
• June 17, 2025: Rollins announces that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will terminate over 145 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion focused awards, totaling US$148.6 million. Programs that will be terminated include: educating and engaging socially disadvantaged farmers on conservation practices, creating a new model for urban forestry to lead to environmental justice through more equitably distributed green spaces, and expanding equitable access to land, capital, and market opportunities for underserved producers.
• June 20, 2025: Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian appointed to oversee the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act as it moves through Congress, rules that Republicans can’t use the budget reconciliation process to impose a state cost-share for SNAP, negating a major source of spending cuts for the legislation. She also says Republicans could not include a provision that would bar immigrants who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents from receiving SNAP benefits.
• June 25, 2025: The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) will no longer enforce a 2024 rule that expanded protections for guest workers who come to the U.S. to work on farms through the H-2A program. According to DOL, “The decision provides much-needed clarity for American farmers navigating the H-2A program, while also aligning with President Trump’s ongoing commitment to strictly enforcing U.S. immigration laws.”

Q3 2025

July 2025

• July 1, 2025: Senate passes the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act with SNAP cuts intact. The bill is now headed to the House, where it’s still unclear if Republicans have the votes to pass it.
• July 10, 2025: The USDA will no longer employ the race- and sex-based “socially disadvantaged” designation to provide increased benefits in USDA programs. Rollins says: “We are taking this aggressive, unprecedented action to eliminate discrimination in any form at USDA.”
• July 10, 2025: ICE arrests and detains 361 workers during farm raids in Carpinteria and Camarillo, California.
• July 12, 2025: A Mexican farmworker dies from injuries sustained during a federal immigration raid on July 10.
• July 15, 2025: USDA terminates the Regional Food Business Centers (RFBC) program, which provided funding for organizations to build support for local and regional farm and food businesses.
• July 24, 2025: Rollins announces that the USDA will close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. The plan could undermine research on pests, blight, and crop genetics crucial to American farms, according to lawmakers, a farm group, and staff of the facility.

August 2025

• August 11, 2025: The U.S. Congressional Budget Office releases a report confirming that reductions to SNAP will significantly shrink access to food assistance, disproportionately harming children, older adults, people with disabilities, and working families. The report projects that millions will see reduced benefits or lose access to SNAP entirely.
• August 12, 2025: The USDA notifies union leaders representing the Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that the agency plans to end contracts for thousands of employees.
• August 19, 2025: The USDA announces it will no longer fund taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland or allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in USDA projects. The announcement describes that prime farmland has been displaced by solar farms and the new investment guardrails are meant to keep farmland affordable, but data from the agency show that a very small amount of rural land is used for solar and wind projects and that most continues in agricultural production even after the projects are installed.
• August 26, 2025: Trump revokes an executive order, issued by President Joe Biden, that tasked the USDA and Federal Trade Commission with curbing consolidation across the food system to improve fairness and competition for farmers and consumers.
• August 28, 2025: Kennedy and Trump fire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez over disagreements on vaccination policy. Four other officials quit in frustration over vaccine policy and Kennedy’s leadership.
• August 29, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration suspends an annual charity drive that resulted in federal employees donating about US$70 million a year to nonprofit organizations, including US$5 million to food and agriculture initiatives.

September 2025

• September 2, 2025: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announces that the agency is abandoning a plan to regulate water pollution from the country’s slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities.
• September 4, 2025: In one of the largest workplace raids in New York, ICE arrests and detains 57 people from Nutrition Bar Confectioners, a nutrition bar manufacturer.
• September 9, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission releases its Strategy Report, outlining the federal government’s approach to reducing childhood chronic disease. The 20-page document confirms earlier leaks that the administration will avoid imposing new restrictions on pesticides or ultra-processed foods.
• September 20, 2025: The USDA announces the termination of future Household Food Security Reports, calling the study “redundant, costly, and politicized.”
• September 25, 2025: Rollins announces new efforts to investigate market conditions that have led to high input prices for farmers, shortly after the USDA quietly cancelled partnerships that helped states tackle anticompetitive markets in agriculture.
• September 30, 2025: The Trump-Vance Administration is canceling US$72 million for USAID’s Feed the Future Innovation Labs by using a controversial loophole to cancel federal funding at the end of the fiscal year, which ended on September 30, 2025.

Q4 2025

October 2025

• October 1, 2025: The U.S. federal government shuts down, following a failure by Congress to pass appropriations bills for the new fiscal year. Federal agencies will be governed by their respective Lapse of Funding plans until the government reopens.
  • According to the USDA Lapse of Funding Plan, approximately 42,000 agency employees will be furloughed. 67 percent of employees at the Farm Service Agency will be furloughed. The Farm Service Agency will stop processing farm loans and commodity payments, and it will stop implementing disaster assistance programs. 96 percent of the Natural Resources Conservation Service will be furloughed, effectively freezing conservation programs. The National Organic Program will cease operations, leaving certifiers without oversight or support. The Economic Research Service, National Agricultural Statistics Service, and National Institute for Food and Agriculture are each losing more than 90 percent of their staff and ceasing all program operations. Core operations related to nutrition programs, including SNAP, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and school meals will continue but funding for those programs could start to become an issue depending on how long the shutdown lasts.
  • According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plan, the agency will retain about 86 percent of staff. Routine inspections will be suspended and the agency will instead focus on “for-cause” inspections, or those tied to foodborne illness outbreaks, recalls, or consumer complaints.
  • According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s shutdown plan, the agency will retain about 11 percent of its total workforce. The agency will stop conducting and publishing research “unless necessary for exempted or excepted activities.”
• October 2, 2025: A news release posted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security adjusts the H-2A paperwork process to speed up applications with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
• DHS says the changes are part of a larger collaborative effort with the DOL to streamline the program “in light of an urgent demand for an authorized agricultural labor force and requests from the regulated community and members of Congress to make the H-2A program easier to use and more efficient for U.S. agricultural producers.”
• October 2, 2025: The DOL publishes rules altering the way H-2A wage rates are calculated, effectively lowering wages for labor across the board. United Farm Workers calculated that the change will reduce wages by US$5 to US$7 per hour in some states, leading to US$2.46 billion less paid to H-2A workers annually.
• October 2, 2025: The DOL warns in an obscure document that the Trump-Vance Administration’s immigration crackdown is threatening “the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
• October 7, 2025: Civil Eats reports on industry ties within Trump’s food and agricultural leadership. Many of the president’s top officials at the USDA, EPA, HHS, and FDA have connections to chemical, agribusiness, or fossil fuel interests.
• October 10, 2025: According to a letter obtained by Politico, SNAP is running out of funds. Ronald Ward, the USDA’s acting associate administrator for the program, instructed regional and state SNAP directors to delay sending next month’s funds to electronic benefit transfer vendors responsible for delivering benefits to participants: “We understand that several States would normally begin sending November benefit issuance files to their electronic benefit transfer (EBT) vendors soon,” Ward writes. “Considering the operational issues and constraints that exist in automated systems, and in the interest of preserving maximum flexibility, we are forced to direct States to hold their November issuance files and delay transmission to State EBT vendors until further notice.”
• October 16, 2025: NPR reports that at least 27 states have turned over data (including their names, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, and benefits amounts) about millions of food stamp recipients to the USDA, which framed the data demand as necessary to accomplish the Trump-Vance Administration’s goal of identifying and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
• October 16, 2025: Rollins says SNAP will run out of funds in two weeks because of the partial government shutdown, potentially leaving nearly 42 million people without monthly benefits.
• October 20, 2025: Politico reports on six food and agriculture programs experiencing delays or funding concerns as a result of the shutdown: SNAP, school meals, WIC, H-2A processing, farm aid, and Farm Service Agency offices.
• October 22, 2025: Trump announces plans to increase the volume of beef imports from Argentina, raising concerns among American cattle-producing farmers and ranchers.
• October 31, 2025: Two federal judges order the Trump-Vance Administration to use emergency funds to keep SNAP running.

November 2025

• November 1, 2025: Nearly 42 million Americans lose their food stamp benefits as Congress fails to reopen the government. Politico reports that the Trump-Vance Administration says they don’t have the authority to use emergency money for SNAP or have enough funds to support the estimated US$9 billion for November benefits. Even if they comply with the court order to fund benefits, it could still take days or weeks to disburse partial funds.
• November 3, 2025: NPR reports that the Trump-Vance Administration will restart SNAP benefits, but only at 50 percent of normal payments and the payments will be delayed. The Trump-Vance Administration says it will use money from a US$5 billion Agriculture Department contingency fund. Officials say that depleting the fund means “no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely.”
• November 8, 2025: The USDA directs states to “immediately undo” any steps that have been taken to send out full food aid benefits to low-income Americans, following a U.S. Supreme Court order temporarily halting a lower court order requiring those payments.
• November 10, 2025: Retrieved from the USDA website on Nov. 10: “Senate Democrats have voted 14 times against reopening the government. This compromises not only SNAP, but farm programs, food inspection, animal and plant disease protection, rural development, and protecting federal lands. Senate Democrats are withholding services to the American people in exchange for healthcare for illegals, gender mutilation, and other unknown “leverage” points.”
• November 12, 2025: The U.S. federal government shutdown ends after Congress signs a funding package for 2026. Lasting 43 days, the shutdown was the longest in U.S. history. Roughly 670,000 federal employees were furloughed, and 730,000 worked without pay.
• November 13, 2025: The U.S. Department of the Interior reverses an order issued by President Joe Biden in December 2024 that banned oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
• November 14, 2025: Trump rolls back tariffs on more than 200 food products, including such staples as coffee, beef, bananas and orange juice, in the face of growing angst among American consumers about the high cost of groceries.
• November 21, 2025: According to an annual FDA report, sales of antibiotics for farm animals climbed 16 percent in 2024, the “biggest increase we’ve ever seen,” according to Steve Roach, director of the Safe and Healthy Food Program at Food Animal Concerns Trust.

December 2025

• December 1, 2025: The FDA announces “the deployment of agentic AI capabilities for all agency employees” for tasks including meeting management, pre-market reviews, review validation, post-market surveillance, inspections, and compliance and administrative functions.
• December 6, 2025: Trump issues an executive order directing the U.S. Attorney General and Federal Trade Commission to investigate food-related industries and determine whether anti-competitive behavior exists in food supply chains.
• December 10, 2025: The USDA announces a US$700 million Regenerative Pilot Program.
• December 10, 2025: Rollins approves SNAP Food Restriction Waivers in six states, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Hawai’i.
• December 17, 2025: The USDA’s Office of the Inspector General releases a report finding that the agency lost nearly one-fifth of its workforce in the first half of 2025: more than 20,000 employees left the agency out of more than 110,000, including 15,114 who accepted a voluntary resignation program.

Q1 2026

January 2026

• January 1, 2026: SNAP waivers go into effect in Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, and West Virginia, bringing the total number of states with approved waivers to 18.
• January 7, 2026: The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services release the Dietary Guidelines for 2025 to 2030, recommending a reduction in highly processed foods with added sugar and excess sodium and endorsing whole, nutrient-dense foods and products like whole milk, butter, and red meat.
• January 14, 2026: The American Federation of Government Employees announces that the Department of Health and Human Services is reinstating National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) employees laid off in 2025, but does not specify how many will return to their jobs. Almost 900 of NIOSH’s 1,000 employees were laid off last year.
• January 14, 2026: Trump signs the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act into law. The legislation modifies current regulations, which require milk to be fat-free or low-fat, to permit schools to offer students whole, reduced-fat, low-fat, and fat-free organic or nonorganic milk.
• January 15, 2026: Rollins publishes an op-ed in The Hill promoting the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. She writes, “Eating healthy can cost as little as $3.00 per meal.”
• January 19, 2026: The USDA launches Lender Lens on the Rural Data Gateway, making Rural Development’s entire commercial guaranteed loan portfolio available to the public, guaranteed borrowers, and commercial lending stakeholders.
• January 22, 2026: The USDA launches an online portal for reporting foreign-owned agricultural land transactions. They say the portal is part of a broader effort to “strengthen enforcement and protect American farmland” as the agency continues its implementation of the National Farm Security Action Plan.
• January 30, 2026: Rollins shares that around 1.75 million fewer people are participating in SNAP since the start of the Trump-Vance Administration.

February 2026

• February 2, 2026: Trump announces plans to lower tariffs on goods from India from 25 percent to 18 percent after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to stop buying oil from Russia.
• February 4, 2026: The USDA announces that it is assuming operation of the foreign food aid program Food for Peace, formerly operated by USAID. Humanitarian aid experts say the program has been used flexibly to respond to different emergency settings, but it may become a way to offload surplus U.S.-grown food commodities.
• February 6, 2026: The FDA publishes a letter to the food industry announcing that the agency will scale back artificial food dye labeling enforcement.
• February 6, 2026: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reapproves dicamba, a pesticide that has raised concern over its tendency to drift and destroy nearby crops, for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton.
• February 6, 2026: Trump issues a proclamation opening a marine protected area off the northeastern U.S. to commercial fishing. The 4,913-square-mile area was the only U.S. marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean.
• February 6, 2026: Trump releases an Executive Order, calling for higher volumes of imported beef from Argentina to lower prices for eaters.
• February 11, 2026: The USDA announces the Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework, a plan to protect, preserve, and partner with American agriculture, while “ending onerous regulations and the weaponization of government against American farmers and ranchers. It formalizes USDA’s ongoing efforts to eliminate systemic agricultural lawfare,” according to the agency.
• February 12, 2026: The FDA publishes final guidance which advises, but does not require, drug companies to set “duration limits” for livestock antibiotics in animal feed.
• February 13, 2026: The USDA issues final Emergency Livestock Relief Program (ELRP) payments totaling more than US$1.89 billion. Eligible applicants who applied for ELRP 2023 and 2024 Flood and Wildfire assistance will receive 100 percent of their eligible payment in a single lump sum.
• February 13, 2026: The USDA announces US$1 billion in assistance for farmers of specialty crops and sugar, commodities not covered through the previously announced Farmer Bridge Assistance program.
• February 13, 2026: Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee release a draft farm bill package. The draft is scheduled to be reviewed and revised the week of February 23, 2026.
• February 13, 2026: USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden announces on social media that the Department of Justice will stop defending farm programs that benefit socially disadvantaged producers.
• February 17, 2026: The USDA announces proposed updated regulations that would speed up line speeds at poultry and pork production facilities.
• February 18, 2026: Trump issues an Executive Order directing the Secretary of Agriculture to ensure “a continued and adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides.”
• February 20, 2026: Trump announces new tariffs under the Trade Act of 1974, and increases the tariff rate to 15 percent.
• February 20, 2026: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency repeals a 2024 rule that imposed limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, the primary source of the mercury that accumulates in fish.

March 2026

• March 3, 2026: Trump-Vance Administration lawyers submit an amicus brief in favor of Monsanto to the U.S. Supreme Court, stating that the Court should rule in favor of Bayer in a case that could prevent individuals from suing pesticide companies over claims their products cause cancer and other illnesses.
• March 4, 2026: The USDA approves SNAP waivers in four states: Kansas, Nevada, Ohio, and Wyoming.
• March 4, 2026: The U.S. House Agriculture Committee votes to advance a 2026 Farm Bill. To be adopted, the legislation must still pass a vote in the full House of Representatives before going to the Senate.
• March 6, 2026: U.S. officials release a video of an explosion on social media, capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador. A subsequent New York Times investigation indicates that the military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound.
• March 10, 2026: During a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, lawmakers and witnesses including American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall, multiple senators from both parties, and farm advocacy group Farm Action warn of how the war in Iran, and its impact on fertilizer markets, could affect farmers.
• March 18, 2026: Rollins and Kennedy publish the joint opinion piece, “We’re bringing families more healthy foods in a SNAP.”
• March 23, 2026: USDA issues termination notices for 49 of the 50 projects under the Increasing Land, Capital, And Market Access (ILCMA) Program.
• March 27, 2026: Speaking at a White House event celebrating farmers, Trump promises to bolster small-business loan guarantees for farmers, who have been hit hard by his tariffs and rising prices from the war in Iran, and announces a final EPA rule raising the minimum amount of renewable fuels that must be blended into the U.S. fuel supply. Biofuels like ethanol, biodiesel, and renewable diesel are largely made with corn and soybean oil, meaning this rule could boost demand for those crops.
• March 30, 2026: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sends a memo to hospitals requesting they align meals with the updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans by phasing out ultra-processed food and high-sugar foods in favor of fruits, vegetables, and minimally processed proteins.
• March 31, 2026: The USDA suspends all grants under the Rural Energy for America Program to comply with an Executive Order issued in July 2025.

Q2 2026

April 2026

• April 1, 2026: The FDA approves Foundayo, a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist in tablet form. The approval was issued 50 days after filing, marking the fastest new molecular entity approval since 2002.
• April 3, 2026: The Trump-Vance Administration releases its proposed budget for fiscal year 2027, which begins on October 1, 2026. The proposal includes a 19 percent cut in the USDA budget.
• April 7, 2026: The USDA finalizes regulations that overhaul how the National Environmental Policy Act is implemented, including by reducing and removing procedural requirements, removing climate change and environmental justice considerations, and eliminating opportunities for public comment.
• April 8, 2026: The Trump-Vance Administration nominates Luke Lindberg, Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs at the USDA, for Executive Director of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP). United Nations officials subsequently announce that Secretary-General António Guterres will not appoint a new Executive Director to WFP before he steps down.
• April 10, 2026: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration removes workplace inspection goals related to heat-related hazards, both indoors and outdoors, that may lead to serious illnesses, injuries, or death.
• April 15, 2026: Rollins announces the creation of the new USDA Office of Seafood.
• April 22, 2026: The U.S. House Appropriations Committee releases the Fiscal Year 2027 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Bill. It cuts the overall funding level by US$1.1 billion compared to 2026.
• April 23, 2026: The USDA announces reorganizations of the Food Safety and Inspection Service and the Research, Education, and Economics Mission Area, aiming to streamline functions and improve operational efficiency. As part of the reorganizations, a substantial portion of the agencies’ workforces will be relocated and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center will be decommissioned.
• April 30, 2026: The House of Representatives votes to pass the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026. The Farm Bill now advances to the Senate.

Is there an update you want to see included that isn’t on the list? Email Danielle at danielle@foodtank.com.

The post One Year On: How Trump and Vance Have Changed Food, Agriculture, Health, and Climate appeared first on Food Tank.

Green Roofs Can Restore Nature in Cities

A new report from the European Commission (EC) is calling attention to a key opportunity to help cities deliver climate solutions: green rooftops and walls. They confirm that better integration of greenery can improve biodiversity, climate adaptation, stormwater management, energy efficiency, and social well-being in urban environments, all of which can make cities more livable as urban populations continue to grow. 

Green roofs, also called living roofs or eco-roofs, are not new, but in the 1980s, the technology for widespread installations became more readily available. Despite the many benefits, their integration is uneven across Europe. Regulatory challenges, skill gaps, funding shortages, and limited integration in mainstream planning and building practices can hold cities back from scaling these green spaces.

But the report offers a way forward. Targeted incentives and funding schemes, biodiversity-oriented design and monitoring requirements, and stronger planning and building regulations can help cities move in the right direction. 

Although it is an investment upfront, Steven Peck, Founder and President of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, says it’s worth it: “They’re going to be healthier places to live in the face of ongoing climate change impacts. And that’s where the money is going to be. That’s where the creativity is going to be.”

Is the MAHA Movement Becoming Disillusioned with the Trump Administration?

Supporters of Make America Healthy Again seem to be losing faith in the Trump-Vance Administration and members of the Republican Party, the New York Times reports.

Six of MAHA’s most prominent leaders have, in separate videos, announced that they are so disappointed with President Donald Trump that the party risks losing them. Many are upset by contradictory messaging or inaction that they’re seeing. This includes the recent executive order to boost domestic production of the herbicide glyphosate despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s earlier promises to ban or restrict agri-chemicals and the failure to secure enough votes for Casey Means to become Surgeon General. 

But this doesn’t mean that MAHA supporters are flipping to the Democrats. Zen Honeycutt, Founder of Moms Across America, says, “The only thing that matters is action. Not a political party.” And some, feeling that their vote is useless, may ultimately sit out of the next election in November.

But this shouldn’t keep Democrats from trying to win them over, according to Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. She has seen independent and undecided voters tip elections in close races. Congressmember Chellie Pingree sees the opening and is telling her colleagues that they’re “missing a big opportunity” if they’re not talking about pesticides and healthy food. “The reason Donald Trump ran on them, the reason he put R.F.K. in office is because people care about them,” Pingree says. “We should be all over this.”

New York Acts to Close GRAS Loophole

New York legislators recently passed the New York Food Safety and Chemical Disclosure Act, banning several food additives from products manufactured, distributed, or sold in the state. 

In March, the bill passed in the Senate with unanimous bipartisan support, and it now heads to Governor Kathy Hochul for her signature. 

The legislation will eliminate three additives—potassium bromate, propyl paraben, and Red Dye No. 3—that have been linked to cancer, hormone disruption, and reproductive toxicity from foods. Red 3 has been banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since the legislation was first introduced. The law also requires companies to disclose the safety data for all food chemicals in a publicly available database. 

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, this progress represents “significant strides” toward closing the GRAS loophole, which currently allows companies to decide which chemicals are “generally recognized as safe” for us in food. 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to close the GRAS loophole nationally, but advocacy groups are still waiting for action at the federal level, prompting Jessica Hernandez, Environmental Working Group’s Legislative Director, to declare, “New York is stepping up where Washington has slowed down.”

Hunger Is Becoming Concentrated in Conflict-Hit Countries

The United Nations finds that of the 266 million people in 47 countries who experienced high levels of acute food insecurity, two-thirds are concentrated in just 10 countries. Conflict is the major driver of this crisis, accounting for more than half of all cases of severe hunger. 

The severity of hunger is also worsening. The number of people experiencing catastrophic hunger has increased ninefold since 2016. Young people are the most vulnerable, with 35.5 million children acutely malnourished, including nearly 10 million suffering from severe acute malnutrition, a life-threatening condition. 

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres says the new report is “a call to action to summon the political will to rapidly scale up investment in lifesaving aid, and work to end the conflicts that inflict so much suffering on so many.”

Aid organizations also warn that unless the world changes its strategies for addressing hunger, the world may become trapped in a cycle of deepening crises. FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu says that we can’t rely solely on food assistance, and must prioritize the protection of local food production that builds long-term resilience over time. 

Bolivia’s Farmers Are Protecting Their Land—And Future

The Guardian reports that cacao producers are pushing back against the gold mining industry to protect their land. 

In 2017, residents in Palos Blancos and Alto Beni, situated in the northwest region of Bolivia that are reliant on organic agriculture, noticed a mining dredge appear on the nearby Boopi River. Gold mining hadn’t touched the municipalities yet, but farmer Roberto Gutierrez says that he and his neighbors saw the environmental destruction it caused in other areas. 

Communities responded quickly, pushing back against the miners, and they left. Four years later, thanks to persistent organizing efforts, the two municipalities passed mining bans. Three years after that, in 2024, a departmental law further legitimized their stance. “We showed people that mining does more harm than good. People have realized that gold is temporary, but agriculture and conservation are for life,” Ulises Ariñez, former environment secretary for Palos Blancos, says. 

In the last five years, the price of gold has skyrocketed, driving miners into new regions. At least 10 other municipalities and Indigenous territories are exploring bans like those in Palos Blancos and Alto Beni even as the national government seeks to loosen regulations for the industry. 

Pablo Solón, an environmental activist, says that the local bans may represent their best hope to protect the Amazon. And there is reason for optimism. Just last year, four new areas in Bolivia were established to keep them free from mining. And on Peru’s side of Lake Titicaca, a court suspended mining outside authorized areas along Bolivia’s Madre de Dios River. 

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Photo courtesy of Arlington Country, Wikimedia Commons

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: NY Acts on GRAS Loophole, Green Roofs Offer Climate Solutions, Bolivia’s Farmers Protect their Future appeared first on Food Tank.

Barfield returns to her central philosophy often: “Agriculture is the culture.” This means that farming is not separate from daily life. From food to clothing to building materials, agriculture underpins the systems people rely on, even if they rarely see it, she says: “Everything you touch on a daily basis…that is thanks to a farmer somewhere sometime.”

Barfield did not set out to become a farmer. But after spending her early career in a high-volume medical office in Philadelphia, she took a trip to the island of Martinique. There, she encountered a community-based model of food production, where people sourced food directly and regularly from those growing it. The experience shifted her perspective on what food systems could look like.

Barfield describes drinking tea picked fresh from her hosts’ backyard garden and joining community members distributing boxes of fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs for their neighbors. These were direct, human-to-human transactions paid in cash—something she rarely saw at home.

“The real magic of that moment was that I then was able to see these multicultural people walking in, and they were coming in and taking these boxes,” says Barfield. She remembers thinking, “What is this that I’m seeing?”

She was hooked, deciding shortly after that she would become a farmer. “I was going to start a tea company, and I was going to start a farm,” Barfield says. “And that’s exactly what we did.”

But bringing FarmerJawn to life required a period of intense work and instability. Barfield says she would drive for ride-share companies from 5 to 9 a.m., manage her business all day, then make grocery deliveries from 5 to 9 p.m. to make ends meet. She experienced housing insecurity for years.

“I built it brick by brick,” says Barfield.

Now FarmerJawn is expanding its impact, with the farm now eligible for regenerative organic certification. Barfield is prioritizing stable, well-paying jobs—an approach she sees as essential to building a more just food system.

“The only way that businesses can actually grow the right way is if you’re paying and taking care of your team,” says Barfield.

Her work has earned national recognition, including a James Beard Award in 2024 and a role in state-level agricultural leadership. But Barfield says visibility does not shield her from the challenges facing Black farmers: “Just a few months after winning that James Beard award, there was an eight-foot swastika painted on my barn. It reminded me and my team that our safety was in question.”

For Barfield, these experiences reinforce the urgency of her work. She sees agriculture as a critical front line in addressing interconnected crises, from climate change to public health.

“What I’m getting to do is really just be used as a tool to tell the story that the Earth can’t,” she says. “That it’s literally dying right before our eyes.”

Barfield believes, however,  that agricultural systems can reconnect people to land, food, and each other. She believes that transforming agriculture can help transform broader systems of health and equity.

“When I think about, is it worth it?” Barfield says. “Honestly, the only answer, it is.”

Watch Barfield’s story below and find others from our farmer storytelling events on Food Tank’s YouTube channel.

This article is part of Food Tank’s ongoing Farmer Friday series, produced in partnership with Niman Ranch, a champion for independent U.S. family farmers. The series highlights the stories of farmers working toward a more sustainable, equitable food system. Niman Ranch partners with over 500 small-scale U.S. family farmers and is committed to preserving rural agricultural communities and their way of life. 

Photo courtesy of FarmerJawn

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Carbon farming refers to agricultural practices designed to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soils and plants. By increasing carbon sequestration, carbon farming aims to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while improving soil health and adaptability.

Human activities have increased GHG emissions—particularly carbon dioxide, the primary GHG emitted through human activity—intensifying the greenhouse effect and raising global temperatures.

Agriculture and land-use change are major drivers, and global food systems are responsible for about one-third of annual GHG emissions.

One of the agrifood system’s largest contributions to carbon emissions is soil organic carbon (SOC) loss. Soils have a tremendous capacity to store carbon and can function as either carbon sinks or carbon sources. “If soil is a bank account, soil organic carbon is the currency,” Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science at the Ohio State University and a Goodwill Ambassador for the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, tells Food Tank.

But modern agricultural practices have caused soils to emit more carbon than they retain. Soil organic carbon levels hover between 0.05 percent and 0.10 percent, well under the roughly 2 percent threshold that Lal identifies as necessary to sustain healthy, productive soils.

Converting forests or grasslands to farmland, and practices like over tillage, monocropping, heavy machinery use, overgrazing, and removing crop residues disturb soil structure, expose SOC to water and oxygen, and lead to SOC loss. Lower SOC levels weaken soil structure and diminish microbial activity and biodiversity.

Over the past 12,000 years and particularly in the last two centuries, agriculture has released about 133 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from soils, and in some areas, soils have lost up to 70 percent of their original SOC. Soils emit around ten times more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels.

Because of their capacity to store carbon, soils also have significant potential to help mitigate climate change. Research suggests that improved land management could enable croplands to sequester up to 1.85 gigatons of carbon per year, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of the global transportation sector.

And soils in good condition could capture a meaningful share of the emissions reductions needed to keep global warming below 2°C. What we have taken from the land, Rattan Lal says, we can put back.

By increasing soil carbon storage and reducing the release of carbon into the atmosphere, carbon farming aims to shift soils from carbon sources to carbon solutions.

Carbon farmers earn credits for sequestering carbon, with each credit representing a measurable reduction or removal of GHGs. Carbon credits can be sold in carbon markets to companies or other buyers seeking to offset their emissions and meet climate goals. Companies like Grassroots Carbon are helping operationalize this model, recently delivering 1.9 million tons of verified carbon removals. Ranchers participating in these programs report generating meaningful new income streams and reducing operational costs while also improving soil health.

One common carbon farming approach involves adding organic materials to the soil, such as compost or biochar, increasing soil organic matter which in turn increases soils’ carbon storage capacity.

Planting perennial crops, which remain in the ground year after year, can also help store carbon. Their deeper and longer-lasting root systems allow more carbon to accumulate in the soil compared with annual crops that are replanted each season.

Another widely used practice is cover cropping. Farmers plant crops during periods when, or in areas where, fields would otherwise remain bare. These plants not only protect soils from water and air erosion, but they also capture carbon dioxide and transfer some of that carbon into the soil through their roots and plant residue. Cover crops add additional organic matter to soils when they decompose.

Other carbon farming strategies focus on minimizing the carbon that is released into the atmosphere by reducing soil disturbance, particularly through practices that minimize plowing or tilling.

In addition to mitigating GHG emissions, practices that increase or maintain SOC levels enhance soil structure, fuel microbial activity, and improve fertility. By improving overall soil health, these practices can increase agricultural yields while reducing the need for agricultural inputs.

And carbon-rich soils are generally more resilient to environmental pressures. Higher levels of soil organic carbon improve water holding capacity and infiltration, helping farmland better withstand both drought and flooding. “If your neighbor’s land has twice as much carbon as yours, their land will sequester twice the amount of water as your land,” Peter Byck, Arizona State University Professor and Director, Producer, and Writer of Carbon Nation, tells Food Tank.

They also support more active microbial communities, boosting biomass by 40 to 70 percent, and stronger soil structure, enabling soils to absorb shocks and sustain productivity under stress.

Despite its potential to reduce emissions and nourish soils, carbon farming remains the subject of ongoing debate among scientists and policymakers. There is currently no universally accepted system for measuring, reporting, and verifying soil carbon credits, creating confusion for farmers entering carbon markets.

And significant uncertainty remains about how much carbon agricultural soils can store and how accurately sequestration can be measured. Because soil carbon levels can change quickly in response to management practices or weather, stored carbon may also be released back into the atmosphere, complicating efforts to treat soil carbon as a long-term or permanent climate solution.

Concerns about carbon farming also include rebound effects: if certain practices reduce yields, farmland expansion elsewhere could generate emissions that offset the original climate gains. Evidence also shows that widely used no-till systems often rely on herbicides for weed control, accounting for roughly one-third of U.S. pesticide use in corn and soy production.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Sohail Shaikh

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Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced that John Deere will open two new U.S. facilities—a distribution center near Hebron, Indiana, and a manufacturing site in Kernersville, North Carolina.

According to a press release from Indiana Governor Mike Braun, the company plans to invest US$125 million to construct and equip a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse and distribution center on 234 acres near Hebron. In North Carolina, Deere is putting US$70 million toward expanding its Kernersville plant, which will take over excavator production previously based in Japan.

John Deere estimates that each site will generate about 150 jobs, underscoring the company’s intent to continue driving U.S. innovation and jobs, says John May, Chairman and CEO of John Deere.

Deere has also pledged to invest US$20 billion in U.S. manufacturing and is reinstating some previously laid-off employees including 146 employees in Waterloo, 24 in Dubuque, and 75 in Davenport.

But the new facilities and limited callbacks make only a modest dent in the significant losses across Deere’s U.S. operations in recent years. John Deere, an American company with deep midwestern roots, began making substantial lay-offs in October 2023, when the company fired 225 production employees from a plant in East Moline, Illinois.

In 2024, Deere cut 2,167 jobs across key facilities, including nearly 1,000 in Waterloo and hundreds more in Davenport, Dubuque, Ankeny, Ottumwa, Moline, and East Moline. Layoffs continued into 2025, with over 500 workers let go in Iowa alone.

Deere says that about 80 percent of the equipment it sells in the U.S. is manufactured domestically. Nevertheless, its international operations remain integral to its business model and supply chain.

International markets are a major driver of Deere’s revenue, providing nearly half of its consolidated net sales and revenues. The company employs 75,000 people worldwide, but more than half are abroad: only 30,000 employees are located in the U.S.

The company manufactures equipment and components throughout a global network, producing backhoes and planting equipment in Brazil, tractor engines and combines in Argentina, crushers and sprayers in Germany, feederhouses in France, cotton harvesters in China, and tractor screens in India.

And Deere continues to expand internationally, prompting scrutiny over how the company balances U.S. manufacturing with global production. The company recently announced that they’re moving their skid steer and track loader manufacturing from Dubuque, Iowa, to a new facility in Ramos, Mexico, and confirmed plans to build a US$55 million plant in Nuevo León to manufacture mini track loaders and mini wheel loaders.

Trump has said Deere’s new facilities as a win for U.S. manufacturing, announcing the projects at a January rally and on social media. The White House also highlighted Deere’s U.S. projects as part of a list of new investments during Trump’s second term as evidence of the President’s “unwavering commitment to revitalizing American industry.”

However, the groundwork for both projects had been laid in 2024 under the Biden-Harris administration. Deere’s planned expansion in Kernersville was first announced in 2024, according to Reuters.

Plans for the Indiana site trace back to a land acquisition that same year, which details the purchase of a 234-acre undeveloped parcel in northwest Indiana that “will be the future site of a 1.2-million-square-foot John Deere warehouse/distribution.” When asked about the timing, the company noted that some of these plans had been disclosed earlier.

Deere has indicated that its long-term strategy will continue “regardless” of political developments in the U.S.. But policy changes under the Trump-Vance administration are proving expensive. According to The Wall Street Journal, Deere incurred roughly US$600 million in tariff-related costs in its 2025 fiscal year and expects that figure to climb to about US$1.2 billion this year.

The broader equipment manufacturing sector is also facing headwinds: output and employment have declined from 2022 levels, according to the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, prompting concerns about the long-term trajectory of U.S. production. “The path that we are on is leading us to less manufacturing in the United States,” says Kip Eideberg, the Association’s Senior Vice President of Government and Industry Relations.

The workers being called back represent a small but significant reprieve for communities hit hard by recent layoffs. “When those layoffs are announced, it doesn’t just throw the family—it throws an entire town into confusion and chaos and worry,” explains Charlie Wishman, President of the Iowa AFL-CIO.

But for many others, the damage remains: Deere’s sweeping changes to its U.S. workforce have sparked both uncertainty and outrage, leaving hundreds of families questioning how they will pay rent, put food on the table, and find new sources of income.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Chris Robert, Unsplash

The post Can New Deere Jobs and Facilities Offset Years of Layoffs? appeared first on Food Tank.

Can Conflict Drive a Transition to Sustainable Packaging?

As the war in Iran continues and oil prices stay high, plastic prices are soaring. That’s becoming a problem in China, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia, which consume roughly a third of the world’s plastics. According to OECD data, their plastic use has increased from 17 million tonnes in 1990 to 152 million tonnes in 2022.

With the material so expensive, countries are worried the material will become far less accessible. In Tokyo, for example, wholesalers are already warning that there may be a shortage of plastic trays and bags. That’s driving a search for alternatives. 

In Malaysia, one dairy producer has temporarily switched from plastic containers to paper-based milk cartons. And in South Korea, packaging firms have seen a spike in demand for paper tubes and pouches. 

As more companies pivot, analysts are wondering if the shift to more sustainable options can be sustained in the long-term, ultimately reducing our reliance on plastics.

2025 Floods May Have Affected 3.3 Million Jobs in Pakistan

New estimates from the International Labor Organisation (ILO) show that around 3.3 million jobs may have been affected by the 2025 floods in Pakistan, which led to more than 1,000 deaths and the displacement of tens of thousands of people. 

Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London says the country is a “hotspot for increases in extreme rainfall” and it’s “undoubtedly on the front line of climate change.”

The ILO finds that the agriculture sector was hit the hardest, with rural communities bearing the brunt of the impacts. 

While provincial compensation measures helped with some of the most immediate needs, the Organization is calling for more comprehensive support to restore livelihoods in affected areas. This includes cash-for-work programs, skill-training, and subsidized credit which can help households restart their farms as well and other income-generating activities.

Women Fishers Challenge Taboos in Kenya

As told by Al Jazeera, women in Kisumul Kenya near Lake Victoria are defying gender norms.

Traditionally, women in the region worked as fishmongers, while fishing was reserved solely for men. These gender roles stem from deep seated beliefs held by members of Lake Victoria communities. But in the early 2000s, Rhoda Ongoche Akech realized that her income was dwindling and selling fish was no longer enough to support her family. Something needed to change.

One day, women from a neighboring county arrived in Akech’s village and she watched, surprised, as they went fishing. Even though it was a novel sight, it pushed Akech to learn how to fish herself. While those around Akech warned her that women didn’t belong on the water, she insisted on continuing because she knew her family depended on the income.

She spent 16 years as the only fisherwoman in her village. Then in 2018, Faith Awuor Ang’awo braved the social stigma and joined Akech on the water. In the years that followed a few more women joined the pair.

According to village elder William Okedo the taboo preventing women from fishing has broken down and attitudes among male fishers have shifted as well. But systemic hurdles still remain. Susan Claire, acting director of fisheries and blue economy for Kisumu County, refuses to officially recognize the work that women fishers are doing even though it’s the same as their male counterparts.

While the climate crisis and declining fish stocks pose additional challenges, Akech and her team are still making enough of a living on the water. And for now, they’re still fishing. 

President Trump Pushes for Cuts to WIC

For the second year in the row, President Trump is pushing to cut benefits for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

His fiscal year 2027 budget calls for a reduction in the fruit and vegetable component of WIC. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that it could take away US$1.4 billion in benefits from 5.4 million parents and young children. 

Under the proposed plan, monthly benefits for toddlers and preschoolers would drop from US$26 to US$10. Benefits for pregnant and non-breastfeeding postpartum mothers would fall from US$47 to US$13. And benefits for breastfeeding mothers would drop from US$52 to US$13. 

For the last three decades, presidents and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have fully funded the program to ensure that eligible families receive their full benefits because they understand how critical it is. WIC provides nutritious foods, counseling on healthy eating, breastfeeding support, and health care referrals to almost 7 million low-income expecting and postpartum people, infants, and young children at nutritional risk.

Anti-Immigration Bills Fail to Gain Traction

A new analysis from the Washington Post finds that of the roughly 200 bills targeting immigration communities across the country fewer than two dozen have made it into law so far.

One bill in Utah would have prevented undocumented pregnant mothers from accessing public assistance for food. Another bill in Idaho would have forced employers to use the government’s E-Verify system to keep undocumented people from securing jobs.In Tennessee, a third would have limited undocumented students’ access to education.

More than 80 measures like these have died, some were vetoed, and several have made little progress in states’ legislative spring season. Businesses and religious groups, alongside other advocates, have helped to stop these bills from moving forward, recognizing that the attacks only harm their communities.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Kabiur Rahman Riyad, Unsplash

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Tens of millions of Americans struggle to consistently access healthy food. Diet-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension now drive approximately 85 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. For roughly the same cost as expanding the war with Iran, the United States could make a generational investment in nutrition security—and build the nation’s strength, resilience, and well-being through healthy food.

Policy must move beyond short term food aid and prioritize system design. Providing access to healthy food, integrating it into every aspect of the healthcare system, and building infrastructure to process and deliver healthy food represent a three-pronged strategy to build long-term nutritional security.

First, access. Today’s unhealthy food system results not simply from individual choices but policy choices that limit access. Expanding support to fully cover the cost of a nutritious diet through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) healthy fruit and vegetable incentives —paired with universal healthy school meals—would reduce food insecurity and create a stable baseline of demand for healthier foods.

The evidence shows clear benefits. A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pilot program that provided Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) families with a 30-cent-on-the-dollar fruit and vegetable incentive resulted in a 26 percent increase in fruit and vegetable consumption. A study of more than 23,000 SNAP participants found healthy incentives improved key health outcomes.

Second, health care. Medically tailored meals and produce prescriptions reduce hospitalizations and overall costs for patients with chronic disease. Yet these programs remain small and inconsistently funded. Integrating nutrition into standard reimbursements through Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers would shift the system from treating disease to preventing it.

Food as medicine programs, when supporting local farm ecosystems, also drive economic growth. According to The Rockefeller Foundation, supporting local farmers through food is medicine programming would provide more than US$45 billion in annual economic benefits. Underlying all this research is a simple point: food is medicine, and food systems must be better designed to produce and deliver the medicine where it’s needed most. That is not just better care; it is a more efficient use of public dollars.

Third, infrastructure and production. The current food system excels at producing and distributing shelf-stable, highly processed foods. It is far less effective at producing and moving fresh, nutritious food at scale. That is not a failure of farmers. It is the result of policies that support factory farms and feedlots over family farms growing nourishing food. Strategic investment in regional processing, cold storage and distribution, paired with support for farmers transitioning to fruits, vegetables and diversified crops, would make healthy food more available and more affordable.

These three pillars reinforce one another. When families can afford healthy food, demand rises. When health systems and institutions commit to purchasing it, markets stabilize. When infrastructure and farms can meet that demand, accessibility improves. Over time, the system starts to sustain itself.

This is what security looks like when it is built, not just defended. The U.S. faces real threats and military readiness matters. But security is not a single line item in the federal budget. It is the product of a society’s overall resilience: its health, its economic stability, and its capacity to withstand shocks. Our fragile, unhealthy food system supply chains fail each of these priorities. We don’t need to wait for another COVID-19 sized failure to recognize the system fails Americans every day.

Economist Paul Collier once wrote that “war is development in reverse” pointing to the immense poverty and hunger in war-torn regions. The same consequences occur in countries who choose to fund war instead of feeding their people.

Congress will debate whether this war is worth the cost. It should also ask a parallel question: What would it look like to invest at the same scale in preventing the diet-related disease crisis that kills Americans every day and undermines our nation’s health and strength?

The U.S has demonstrated that it can mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars when it decides something is urgent. The challenge now is deciding whether the long-term health and resilience of the American people qualifies.

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At the same time, how we produce protein has profound implications for the planet. From agricultural systems to processing methods, protein sits at the intersection of human and ecosystem health. I walked into the 2nd Protein Summit expecting to hear talks and panels centered exactly on this. While health and sustainability were certainly key drivers of the conversation, it kept circling back to something more experiential—taste. 

Food enterprises have long understood the power of taste. They have cultivated for it in fields and formulas by sometimes sourcing the most delicious ingredients from regenerative farms and sometimes by optimizing for fat, salt, and sugar in ways that drive overconsumption and contribute to poor health outcomes.

The conversation here felt different. We’re amid a value-based and health-based global protein transition, reshaping what we produce, how we produce it, and how we deliver it at scale for the health of people and planet. Tyler Lorenzen, CEO of Puris, stated it clearly: Taste is the on-ramp to healthier habits. As a former NFL player, a target market for performance nutrition, he deeply understands protein foods for muscle synthesis. Yes, leucine may be the key amino acid for muscle growth, but muscles can’t tell where amino acids come from. People, not muscles, choose foods and they choose for taste. More than 80 percent of Americans are estimated to prioritize taste when making food choices. 

Food enterprises across the protein spectrum from regenerative beef ranchers to fermentation, insect, plant-based, and blue food innovators are converging on this realization: We cannot compromise on taste, convenience, or affordability if we want health and sustainability solutions to scale.

Beneath this transition sits a deeper scientific question: How do we ensure protein quality, and can we make it delicious? For decades, protein has been measured through total protein that we see at the back of a nutrition label. More recently the dialogue has expanded to amino acids and digestibility. Yet these measures do not fully capture protein quality, defined by the diversity and interactions of proteins with the food matrix, human physiology, and the environment, including: biomolecular diversity, including bioactive peptides; food matrix interactions that influence digestion and function; functional properties that shape texture, stability, and nutrient release; bioavailability, digestibility, and metabolism; and biological responses across pathways such as muscle synthesis, inflammation, and gut health.

Critically, proteins shape taste. Peptides contribute to flavor including umami. Interactions within the food matrix determine how flavors are released and perceived over time.

The next frontier of protein is moving from crude measures to high-resolution data that drives desirability in our psyches and mouths, and functionality in our bodies. The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) maps food molecular diversity, revealing how protein quality, and more broadly how food quality varies across crops, environments, and production methods.

A recent study led by PTFI Center of Excellence Javeriana University and the Future Seeds gene bank makes this clear across bean varieties. Beans are often treated as uniform protein sources, valued for accessibility, soil-enhancing properties, and low ecological footprint. This study reveals that different bean varieties carry distinct protein and enzyme profiles, and links to metabolic pathways that influence ecological resilience, nutrition, health, and taste.

This points toward a new way forward. There is no single best protein. There is a landscape of protein diversity that meets each of our values, desires, and microbiomes. Within this diversity is the potential to design foods that deliver on function and flavor with precision. And this knowledge must translate into food environments where the most desirable protein choice is healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant.

This is where new AI tools bridge the gap upstream, removing the burden from the consumer. Heritable Agriculture uses AI to design and breed healthier, more resilient crops. PTFI’s Swap It Smart tool led by the American Heart Association in collaboration with UC Davis and funded by a Bezos Earth Fund AI Grand Challenges Award uses AI to optimize meal quality across ecological sustainability, nutrition, health, affordability, and taste. In parallel, advances in sensory modeling, including efforts led by NECTAR, are predicting how molecules translate into flavor. Together, these efforts move us toward shaping desirable food systems grounded in data.

We must start with what we want to experience. We can build food systems where place-based biodiversity is celebrated, protein is understood in its complexity, and where the foods that enable us to thrive are the foods we crave and can access. The future of protein is delicious. 

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Building on the success of our 2024 and 2025 programming, the event will bring together more than 180 CEOs, CSOs, Founders, and Impact Officers from leading food and agriculture brands during London Climate Action Week to discuss the solutions they can advance to shape the future of sustainable food systems. Check back here for more details about the program as they become available!

To request an invitation, suggest a speaker, or explore partnership opportunities, please reach out to Food Tank’s Events Director Kenzie Wade at kenzie@foodtank.com.

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