With hunger surging and farms in crisis, Biden’s controversial USDA nominee lays out his plans

“Then, a Great Recession challenged us. Today, the pandemic, racial justice and equity, and climate change must be our priorities,” Vilsack wrote.

Although the Iowa native is expected to enjoy a smooth confirmation process with broad bipartisan support, he has come under criticism from civil rights groups and Black farmers who say he didn’t go far enough last time to eradicate long-standing racial discrimination in farming and at the department.

“I will ensure all programming is equitable and work to root out generations of systemic racism that disproportionately affects Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people and other People of Color,” Vilsack said in his remarks.

Black farming advocates said they were pleased to see racial justice as one of three cornerstones of Vilsack’s Day 1 agenda but look forward to hearing more concrete plans.

“I was hopeful that he would go into more detail spelling that out,” says John Boyd, a Virginia farmer and founder of the National Black Farmers Association. “The president has already put out his broad statement on racial justice. I would hope that Vilsack would spell out what that justice looks like for Black farmers in the face of the lack of subsidy payments, the lack of loans, the lack of civil rights cases.”

Vilsack says he’s committed to building the most diverse team in the department’s history, a crucial aim, according to Boyd, who says that using local USDA offices for technical assistance and outreach programs has proved ineffective in the past.

“Black farmers aren’t going into these offices,” Boyd says, “because they don’t have any Black people working in them.”

Already the pace of Biden’s climate change executive orders signals a dramatic change in agenda, one echoed in Vilsack’s remarks. In addition to investing in renewable energy and local food systems, he promises to focus on regenerative agricultural practices and work “with farmers, ranchers and forest owners to create new sources of income tied to their good climate practices.”

At the center of this is the idea of paying farms to capture and store carbon so that companies could pay growers who demonstrate they have captured and stored carbon in soil, reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Kevin McNew, chief economist at Farmer’s Business Network, says farmers are already embracing these carbon-based solutions, “coming from consumers wanting to know how their food is grown and food companies starting to ask their suppliers” about best growing practices.

Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, cautions Vilsack and the Biden administration against rushing headlong into a carbon-credit market.

“The danger isn’t that we’ll spend billions of dollars on cover crops and better fertilizer and tilling practices — that’s all good — the danger is the government ratifying an offset market that can’t yet measure and verify the carbon benefits of those practices, and in doing so allows fossil energy sources to delay the transition to green energy,” Faber says, adding that we don’t yet have the scientific tools to measure and verify the climate benefits of particular farming practices.

Vilsack in his statement points to alarming hunger statistics: 30 million adults and as many as 17 million children are food insecure, with more than one in five Black and Latino households reporting they do not have enough food to eat. Kate Leone, senior vice president of government relations for Feeding America, a national network of 200 food banks, says Vilsack’s focus on hunger is crucial.

“Calling out food insecurity as an epidemic worthy of a coordinated national response is a really good way to think about the problem and a promising step forward,” Leone says. “Beyond the statement, if you look at what the Biden administration has already done through executive order, you’re seeing a sea change in terms of increased benefits and access to SNAP and Pandemic EBT [food assistance programs] right out of the gate. That’s exactly where we would focus our efforts.”

Jerry Mande, adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who worked with Vilsack at the USDA for eight years, says that he has a keen understanding of health and nutrition, but that he would also like to hear more on diet, health and the obesity crisis. Insufficient food is a crisis for Americans, but too much of the wrong food also is cataclysmic.

Andrew Novakovic, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at Cornell University, says Vilsack’s prepared remarks are “extensions of Tom Vilsack, Version One.”

“Although things are really different today, the statement reflects a lot of things that were valuable to him before,” Novakovic says. “Part of it is talking about prosperity to farmers, re-energizing opportunities for farmers.”

Novakovic says that a focus on nurturing and protecting the environment is not antithetical to this because Vilsack does not see farmers as the enemy of the environment.

“He’s going to be thinking about how [to] promote prosperity while at the same time achieving environmental goals.”