Title: Trump's USDA, Organic Farmers and Climate Change

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. One of the things we're doing on this show during Trump's first 100 days at least is a health and climate Tuesday section of the show. This builds on and expands the climate story of the week that we had been doing on Tuesdays the last two years. Again, our thinking right now is that there are so many headlines coming from the new administration that are pretty monumental on a daily basis that health and climate ones risk getting lost in the shuffle.

We talked about the latest RFK and vaccines and measles news in the health section in part one. Now on climate, the new energy secretary Chris Wright just yesterday shrugged off climate change as a side effect of building the modern world and said the cure is worse than the disease. This as the Trump administration cuts back on permits and investment in renewable energy and other things.

Here's what we'll focus on now. They're wiping climate data from public view. They're wiping climate data from public view. For example, organic farmers depend on government resources for climate data, technical assistance, and some funding, but under the Trump administration, much of that information has now disappeared from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's website. The administration has now purged critical information from the USDA site related to climate change as well as sustainable farming practices and extreme weather resilience, among other topics.

Now, one of New York's largest organic farming organizations is fighting back, suing the USDA to restore this information and hold the agency accountable. Journalist Emily Atkin, founder and editor in chief of the climate newsletter HEATED, has been following this story closely. In her newsletter last week, she writes about the law suit and exposes what seems like a deeper contradiction at play. She wrote that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s rhetoric about making America healthy while aligning himself with a fossil-fuel-backed political agenda that actively undermines sustainable farming sure seems like a contradiction, so even this comes back to RFK in this respect.

Anyway, Emily Atkin joins us now to talk about what's at stake for organic farmers, the legal fight ahead, and what is this battle about actually wiping data from the public availability from federal websites. Emily, welcome back to WNYC.

Emily Atkin: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be back.

Brian Lehrer: You write about this lawsuit over the erasure of climate related farming resources. Can you walk us through what happened and what's been erased?

Emily Atkin: Yes, absolutely. I think it's important to just go back to the start where maybe 10 days after Trump was inaugurated, there was a order that came from one of the USDA's digital communications directors to identify and archive or unpublish any web pages focused on climate change and complete that within one business day. I don't know if you know how huge the USDA is or just how many programs the USDA has and how many web pages it spans, but that's a tall order. The order really resulted in a widespread and unprecedented information purge.

Thousands of websites, not only with general climate change information but of interactive data tools, funding resources, and not just related to climate change, but anything that mentioned climate change. That could be soil conservation, sustainable agriculture practices, extreme weather resilience, and a lot of funding mechanisms for dealing with those things.

After that happened, the Northeastern Organic Farming association of New York launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration saying, "Hey, you can't do that. You can't just delete all of these resources that farmers rely on," particularly small, young, independent farmers, which New York is awash in, organic farmers, at the start of the growing season. The lawsuit, which is being run by Earthjustice, is one of the country's leading environmental legal law firms. It essentially says that that's illegal to just do a widespread information purge like that. There are multiple administrative laws, the Administrative Procedure act, FOIA, the Freedom of Information act, the Paperwork Reduction Act.

These all require some level of transparency and reason for doing things that could have a huge impact on American health, American farmers, any of these things. They're hoping to get these web pages restored in a timeframe that might actually help some of these farmers, but the potential impact to these farmers, particularly small-scale farmers, organic farmers and young farmers, new farmers, are very real.

Brian Lehrer: Is the timing of this data purge, right at the start of the growing season, significant in any way?

Emily Atkin: Yes, absolutely. I spoke with Wes Gillingham. He's the president of the Northeastern Organic Farming Association of New York. He's a farmer himself. He told me that it was a double whammy because of the timing. It would be potentially catastrophic to remove resources about funding and resources about soil conservation, resources about extreme weather resilience at any point.

Farmers really rely on USDA information resources, but to do it at the beginning of the season, when farmers are making all of their plans, I mean, any even small scale gardener knows that right now, that January, February, March are critical time to plan your year. This is when it happens, so yes, that's huge.

Brian Lehrer: You referred there to a double whammy. You also highlight what you call the broader triple whammy for farmers under Trump not just losing online information, but also losing access to USDA staff and grant funding for sustainable farming. Can you expand on how those cuts are being implemented and affecting especially small farms?

Emily Atkin: Yes. It's all whammies, Brian, lots of whammies.

Brian Lehrer: All whammies, all the time.

Emily Atkin: Right. Well, it was the cherry on top, right? I think people have probably heard all of this before this. It's not just the information that is disappearing from the website. It is the people that are disappearing, the people that farmers used to call and talk to, like, "Hey, do you have any programs for this?" or, "How can I get funding for this?" or, "What are the resources or data available to me about fertilizer?" or whatever. These people that farmers would call for help at the USDA, they're gone. They're fired, so you've got nobody to talk to.

Also, funds are disappearing. There are thousands of grants that have been frozen for conservation programs, for technical assistance. One of the lead attorneys on this case told me that farmers are essentially dealing with this, again, triple whammy of having no information, no money, and no stuff to help them, and they're not sure that any of it is even legal.

Brian Lehrer: You bring RFK Jr. into this in your article, but the USDA is currently led by Brooke Rollins, Agriculture Secretary, not RFK Jr., so what's his relevance?

Emily Atkin: Yes, the relevance for me, because I saw this lawsuit covered from a few perspectives, but I particularly deal with an audience that really cares about health. I share that concern. It's just a lot of maybe hope that having RFK Jr. in the administration would mean that this administration wasn't as, I guess, for lack of a better word, bad for human health and the environment. I think that a lot of people have a lot of hope.

Brian Lehrer: Right, because whatever he is on vaccines, he's also been an environmentalist.

Emily Atkin: Right, and that was a huge thing that he really campaigned on that. He built coalition on that. He flipped a lot of voters, and I think a lot of voters in New York, too, to go for Trump because he made these videos asking for campaign donations, saying that when I'm in this government, I'm going to rid the food system of chemicals, herbicides, and insecticides. That's his words, not mine. That actually sounds good to me personally. I'm like, "Oh cool," like "Big ag, right?"

I really wanted to point out this contradiction, why it never really made sense to me as an environmental reporter because how can you take on big ag with a government that is essentially bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry? You mentioned Chris Wright at the beginning of this program, the Department of Energy secretary downplaying climate change. Chris Wright is a fracking CEO. So is the secretary of the Department of Interior. Well, he's not a fracking CEO, but he's a huge ally of the oil and gas industry.

The oil and gas industry poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this campaign directly through advertising and through dark money groups, so it never made sense to me that you could pursue a regenerative organic farming agenda while also meeting the needs of the oil and gas industry, where synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are made of fossil fuels. It's a massive market for the fossil fuel industry.

Brian Lehrer: Expand on that because that was one of the other--

Emily Atkin: It was just something I really wanted to point out.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, good, because that was one of the other things from your article that I really wanted to bring you on to explain to our listeners because I think a lot of people don't realize how agriculture, especially large scale industrial agriculture, is deeply tied to the fossil fuel industry. They think about methane emissions or whatever from agriculture as contributing to global warming, but they don't necessarily think about fossil fuels and raising our food. Tell us more about the connection.

Emily Atkin: I think one of the biggest things that people need to just realize that the vast majority of pesticides are made from petrochemicals, which are derived from fossil fuels. Then also, nitrate fertilizer, that is widely used on conventional farms, that is made with huge amounts of methane gas or natural gases. I call it methane gas because that's what it's primarily made of. That's a massive climate pollutant as well as just a human health hazard. Those are gas, and the fossil fuel industry views these pesticides and fertilizers as some of the greatest potential for petrochemical growth over the next few decades.

The fossil fuel industry also is really looking at petrochemicals as their primary growth market. It is in the primary best interest of the fossil fuel industry to continue conventional farming because it is so heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Of course, it's not just fertilizers and pesticides. I mean, fossil fuels are important to industrial farming in particular at every stage in the farming process, whether it's transport of crops or anything else. They're very important, but regenerative and organic farming relies a bit less on those programs. Oh, and a lot of the programs that were erased from the USDA websites are programs to transition farms away from fossil fuels.

It's not just adapting to climate change or dealing with climate change. It's having the farming industry as a whole mitigate climate change, like having solar and wind energy powering farms, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of that grant information and funding resources have been removed as well.

Brian Lehrer: I understand. Thank you for alerting our listeners to this aspect of what's going on that hasn't made the headlines because other things have just seemed bigger. I want to touch on one other thing that's related to data purges that I don't know if you've reported on, but I wanted to bring it up in our climate segment for this week. I'm reading an AP headline. I know there have been versions of this in other news organizations as well. They put it in their climate section in the AP. Scientists raise concerns as the US stops sharing air quality data from embassies worldwide.

It says the US government will stop sharing air quality data gathered from its embassies and consulates, worrying local scientists and experts who say the effort was vital to monitor global air quality and improve public health. You know, one of the things that struck me about that, Emily, was it wasn't just about climate related emissions. They were monitoring good old fashioned ground-level air pollution.

One of the articles that I read said a lot of these countries just don't have the resources to monitor on their own, and so we were helping with public health in a lot of countries around the world by having air quality monitors on our embassies and they won't share that data with the locals anymore.

Emily Atkin: You know, first of all, I hadn't heard that. Even when you're on this beat, it is so hard to keep up with all of the things that are happening, like the shock and awe. The shock and tactic is working, but you know what? It actually brings me back to what you brought up in the beginning of this program about the Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright saying that-- What did he say? The solution is worse than the problem for climate change?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the cure is worse than the disease. Yes.

Emily Atkin: At the same time, the administration is purging all information about how bad the disease is. That also seems like a massive contradiction, for me, to remove all this information, all this air quality and climate information about how bad things are getting and then having essentially a fossil fuel executive saying we shouldn't do anything about it because the problem isn't that bad. The contradiction is really shining there for me and it's very alarming. The conflict of interest is really shining there for me, and I hope that that's clear to people.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, that's our health and climate Tuesday section of the show for this week. Emily Atkin, editor in chief of the climate newsletter HEATED, I really appreciate your work. We'll keep having you on.

Emily Atkin: Same to you. Thank you so much.

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