RKF Jr. Announced $1 Billion For Regenerative Agriculture. That Sounds Like A Lot. It Isn’t.

On February 18, the Trump administration signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to protect the domestic supply of glyphosate. The order handed Bayer, the conglomerate that makes glyphosate, a potential liability shield and declared its product a matter of national security.

One week later, RFK Jr. re-announced roughly $1 billion for a regenerative agriculture pilot that includes cover crops, soil health, and reduced chemical inputs. Most of this money, $700 million of it, was initially announced in December.

This is what a cover story looks like. You protect the company, then you tout the program that makes it look like you’re doing the opposite.

And $1 billion dollars may seem like a lot. But when put in context of everything else the administration is doing to help Bayer and other agricultural conglomerates, $1 billion is nothing. It’s also ultimately a rearrangement of money that previous administrations had already allocated for this move. And it comes after this administration cut thousands of jobs at the same agencies they are now directing this money to.

What A Real Solution Would Look Like

Weaning American agriculture off glyphosate requires a sustained, multi-billion dollar, multi-decade commitment — restructuring crop insurance, reorienting commodity markets, rebuilding the soil science and technical assistance infrastructure, and being in genuine tension with the companies profiting from the status quo rather than simultaneously handing them liability shields, tax cuts, and preemption provisions.

That kind of commitment would be expensive but we’re already paying tens if not hundreds of billions to line the pockets of corporations that make us sick. Let’s take that money away from them and put it to use to protect our health and reshape our food system for the future.

Also, I’d like to put this $1 billion in context, to really hammer home how insignificant it is in the grand scheme of things. Here are other numbers to help you understand:

$11 billion — what Bayer has already paid out to roughly 100,000 people who say Roundup gave them cancer. This isn’t a projected number. This is what they’ve already paid out.

$7.25 billion — what Bayer has proposed to pay to make the remaining 60,000 cases go away. They want to pay this. It’s a good deal for them. The settlement, the executive order, the Supreme Court case, and the farm bill’s preemption provision are, in Bayer’s own words, “mutually reinforcing steps” in a strategy to contain the litigation. The $1 billion pilot is happening inside this same policy moment.

$1.8 billion — what Bayer spends annually on legal fees for glyphosate litigation alone. The $1 billion pilot costs less than seven months of their lawyers.

$24 billion — Bayer’s Crop Science revenue in 2024. The division that makes glyphosate and the seeds engineered to depend on it.

2.5 billion – the estimated corporate tax savings Bayer stands to receive from the One Big Beautiful Bill over the next decade, once the litigation settles and U.S. taxable income is no longer suppressed by legal costs.

$4 billion — the annual size of the North American glyphosate market.

$12 billion — the size of the North American pesticide market overall.

$2.5 billion — what the Inflation Reduction Act had projected to spend specifically on cover crops and integrated weed management through EQIP and CSP. The same practices this $1 billion pilot claims to promote. That funding was stripped. The climate-smart earmarks were eliminated, the savings redirected to commodity programs and crop insurance for large farms. Then a $1 billion pilot was announced for the same practices, rebranded from “climate-smart” to MAHA.

2,400 — the number of NRCS staff cut in 2025. These are the very same people who would need to process applications, conduct site visits, build farm plans, and verify outcomes to ensure this $1 billion pilot is successful.

Hundreds of billions — what federal commodity programs paid out in monocrop subsidies between 1995 and 2021. Subsidies that made glyphosate-dependent monoculture the economically rational choice for millions of farmers. You don’t subsidize a system for three decades and undo it with a one-year pilot.

$10.8 billion — the increase in farmer input costs from tariffs on Moroccan phosphate fertilizer imports. Those tariffs generated a $23 billion windfall for the domestic fertilizer industry that lobbied for them. The executive order that preceded this pilot invoked the Defense Production Act to protect phosphorus used in glyphosate manufacturing — which represents about 1.2% of U.S. phosphorus demand. It had nothing to say about phosphate fertilizer, which is what farmers actually need.

What We Should Be Doing

Keep putting pressure on RFK Jr. and the administration. The re-announcement of this pilot program after the executive order shows they’re worried. They’re worried about losing support from the people who care about this issue. That gives us power. But it’s only power if we keep up the pressure. Don’t stop talking about this. Don’t stop caring about this.

I know seeing things like the glyphosate executive order can be discouraging, but we are closer to reshaping our food system than we have been in decades. Bayer is scared. That’s why they’re putting so much pressure on the administration to do something. But we’re putting pressure on them too. Don’t let up.