Former USDA leader: No easy answers for food and ag

Tom Vilsack is all for improving school lunches.

But that’s not what the former head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture sees happening with federal policy aiming to “Make America Healthy Again.”

“You can’t say we’re going to do more, but you don’t get any resources; in fact, you’re going to get less resources,” Vilsack said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

Vilsack, who was the secretary of agriculture in the Obama and Biden administrations and served as Iowa’s governor from 1999 to 2007, stopped by the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus Wednesday in his current role as CEO of the World Food Prize Foundation. The Minnesota Youth Institute event brings together high schoolers from around the state who research food security.

The Iowa Democrat warned against the allure of quick and painless solutions to problems like excess sugar and childhood obesity.

“When it comes to food and agriculture, there are no easy answers,” he said. “It takes time to figure it out to a point where you don’t substitute one problem for another problem.”

Vilsack found a number of student-led solutions to global food issues at Wednesday’s event.

That’s the kind of broad view Vilsack said Americans, and policymakers, need to bring to agriculture.

While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decries sugar as “poison,” the food system emphasizes maximal production and an abundance of calories because that’s what decades of policy has incentivized, Vilsack said.

“The challenge with any proposed change here is to first of all understand why things are the way they are, and not necessarily be blaming farmers or food companies, because essentially, they did what we asked them to do,” Vilsack said. “But the focus and spotlight on this is good.”

Under USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who grew up on a Texas farm, the Trump administration has swiftly moved to prioritize production agriculture, which the Biden administration drowned out, according to critics, inside the sprawling bureaucracy that touches everything from rural development to nutrition programs to the U.S. Forest Service.

Rollins said in a statement earlier this month the country has “made great strides in the last 100 days to Make America Healthy Again.”

Vilsack declined to directly weigh in on the current administration, other than: “Elections have consequences.”

The current downturn in commodity prices comes amid a widening income disparity between the top 10% of farms and the rest, Vilsack said. He wants to see more revenue streams made available for farmers, like carbon credits, on-site renewable energy and payments for regenerative practices.

“This requires a little bit of government support but not a lot,” he said, adding that the stakes for rural communities are too high to continue asking the majority of smaller farmers to hold jobs outside their farms when there is untapped income in the land.

“They’re working harder than just about anybody in the country because they’re working two jobs, which may explain why it’s harder to get the next generation enthused about working on a farm.”

Antonio Becker, a freshman from Little Falls studying poultry science at the U, said the challenges ahead actually embolden him, and he recognizes “it’s not one person that fixes a problem.”

Vilsack breathes a little easier seeing the energy coming from students despite the intensity of global issues.

“I’m optimistic in the long term.”