Rollins won’t promise to maintain crop insurance subsidies, releases conservation money

DENVER — At the Commodity Classic here on Sunday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollis declined to promise to maintain crop insurance premium subsidies at current levels, but said conservation funds blocked by the Trump administration will be released. 

Asked by a reporter at a news conference before she delivered her speech if she would promise to maintain current crop insurance premium levels, Rollins said, “Everything is on the table in terms of right-sizing our government.”

But she added that she is analyzing every aspect of federal government policy and “maybe this needs to be preserved.”

Under current law, the federal government pays two-thirds of the farmer’s cost of crop insurance premiums, but Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation report on the future of the federal government, said the subsidies should be cut along with other programs for commodity producers. 

Farmers and ag group leaders have repeatedly said subsidized crop insurance is the most important part of the farm program. 

To reporters, Rollins also described the state of American agriculture as “dire” and said she is committed to achieving a new age of prosperity. 

In her speech, Rollins said the state of the farm income, especially for crop farmers, is “perhaps the worst in a century.”

Rollins also announced in her speech that USDA has completed its review of conservation funding and is releasing the funds for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program and  the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. 

Farmers around the country have complained that they had signed contracts with USDA for projects and that the Trump administration has not been honoring them. 

Rollins said she realizes that farmers did not know whether the conservation money came from the farm bill or from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has said he wants to dismantle. She added that other USDA programs are still under review. 

One reporter asked Rollins what she says to a Cabinet officer who maintains that current farm practices “poison” the soil and consumers. 

Rollins acknowledged that the reporter was referring to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but said she and Kennedy “have already begun building a strong relationship” that she hopes will become a “partnership.”

Rollins said she plans to tell Kennedy that some of the things he has been told about farm production methods are not totally accurate. 

In her speech, Rollins told the assembled corn, soybean, wheat and sorghum farmers that she is “working with Bobby Kennedy to make America healthy again,” but that she is “certain we will do it in a way that does not compromise you, your farms and your farming practices.”

On trade, Rollins assured the farmers that if the tariffs Trump imposes on foreign countries reduce their incomes, USDA will provide aid as it did during the first Trump administration, when then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue took $23 billion from the Commodity Credit Corporation, USDA’s line of credit at the Treasury, to make payments to farmers. 

In a thinly veiled reference to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Rollins said, “I think it is no surprise to anyone in this room that the pace with which President Trump is meeting with world leaders — some go better than others — you hopefully are encouraged [that] while we are entering some intense trade negotiation moments, the place of President Trump and Vice President Vance are in the world is strengthening every day.”

“That is going to give us some real opportunities to strike some of these deals expanding market access,” she said.

Rollins said that “with President Trump’s permission” she will soon start traveling around the world with the goal of increasing U.S. export sales. 

Rollins acknowledged that by moving in “Trump time,” some mistakes were made in laying off USDA employees. She said that Kailee Buller, her chief of staff, had moved quickly last week to rehire the scientists who had been working on avian influenza. 

She also said she visited Texas A&M University in College Station on Friday and learned that some researchers got pink slips, but that “they were brought back.”

Rollins said all 106,000 USDA employees are back in the office and “will be there to take your calls.”

But if they are not available, she said, farmers should give her their names because “we are doing a bit of reduction in force across the federal government.”

Speaking to an almost entirely white audience, Rollins repeatedly said USDA is getting rid of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and repurposing the money. 

The distribution of the $30 billion in weather and economic disaster relief Congress passed at the end of 2024 will be called the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program or ECAP.

On the $10 billion in economic assistance, Rollins said that in cases where USDA has information on file, farmers will get a prefilled application sent to them, and in other cases they will have to get an application and return it.

No payments will be made based “on your skin color or geographic location,” a thinly veiled reference to the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure small and minority farmers got assistance under USDA programs. 

Rollins said she would work with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on a massive campaign of deregulation. 

Rollins also promised to work toward repeal of the “death tax,” as Republicans call the estate tax, and to get a farm bill passed this year. 

Rollins said, “you deserve that and I believe Congress will deliver.”