The MAHA Movement’s Climate Conundrum

At a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) roundtable in Washington, D.C. in July, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins sat down to speak with invited farmers about the topic at hand: soil health.

“The health and the vibrancy of American farms is critical to the success of the MAHA movement,” Kennedy said during his opening remarks. “We have the best farmers in the world in our country. We have people who are developing innovative techniques for restoring the soil, for restoring the microbiome, for producing the healthiest food in the world, and one of the purposes of this meeting is to get that message out to the rest of America: that there’s hope.”

Elisa Lane is one of those innovators. Lane owns Two Boots Farm in Northern Maryland, where she tends to a 200-tree pawpaw orchard, grows vegetable seedlings for home gardeners in the spring, and harvests endless varieties of flowers that get arranged into farmers’ market and bridal bouquets. She does it all without pesticides or tilling, while building soil fertility with a variety of cover crops and compost.

But on a sweltering day a week before the roundtable, with a heat advisory in effect, one thing she was thinking about—for the first time—was crop insurance.

Over the last decade, she explained while hanging freshly harvested garlic in her barn, it’s been getting hotter. Her crew starts at 5 a.m. some days to get field work done before the unbearable heat sets in. Summers are drier. The weather varies more wildly. When storms hit, they seem more intense than in the past.

“They come on so fast and so quick. I just remember that happening in the last three years or so,” she said. “That causes power outages, which is something I’m so nervous about. If we have a cooler worth of stuff, it could all spoil.” The thing that scares her the most, though, is the prospect of losing entire crops, which is what happened recently on two nearby farms during hailstorms.

It’s not just hail. In recent years, Hurricane Helene damaged or destroyed crops on close to 5 million acres of North Carolina farmland. Farmers in Vermont lost vegetable crops worth millions of dollars to unprecedented flooding. In the West, some farms couldn’t plant crops due to historic drought conditions; others lost crops and livestock herds to wildfires.

While it’s difficult to attribute any single weather event to climate change, the evidence is clear that more frequent and intense extreme-weather events are making it increasingly challenging for farmers to grow healthy food regardless of their ability to innovate, complicating the MAHA movement’s goals.

The last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered two big takeaways, said Rachel Bezner Kerr, the lead author of a chapter about climate impacts on food, fiber, and ecosystems. Overall agricultural productivity has been reduced from what it would have been with less or no global warming, and more robust evidence now shows extreme weather events are diminishing food security and nutrition.

“Going forward, unless we’re able to significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, those impacts are going to be quite severe,” Kerr said.

However, in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration’s actions are likely to increase U.S. emissions. During the first week of his presidency, Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, rolling back electric vehicle subsidies, and directing his agencies to increase the production of fossil fuels.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has since proposed removing all limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and overturning the finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has canceled programs and contracts that pay farmers to use climate-friendly practices and has stripped the word “climate” from its vocabulary. Trump’s sweeping tax legislation, which Republicans in Congress named the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” also dismantles Biden-era climate actions and boosts the fossil-fuel industry.

Trump has promised that the administration is fully invested in Kennedy’s MAHA movement goals to reduce chronic disease by, among other actions, getting Americans to eat more fresh, healthy, whole foods.

But in response to questions from Civil Eats, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the administration is not concerned by the fact that climate change is compromising the country’s ability to produce that food.

“When nearly 70 percent of American children’s caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods—contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions—the Make America Healthy Again movement has more pressing short term priorities to address than vague climate change concerns about agricultural yields and nutrient density,” he said in an email.

As a result, it’s unlikely that the second MAHA report—due out this week and aimed at helping Americans eat healthier—will include climate policy directives, even if experts say they should undoubtedly be included.