Sheep In Wolf’s Clothing?: Left-Wing Activist Running To Beat Tom Cotton By Acting Like A Farmer
'We were celebrating being gay'
Trump gives American farmers $12 billion boost to overcome inflation, trade wars
President Donald Trump will unveil a significant investment in America’s agricultural industry, the White House confirmed on Monday.
Trump will be joined by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and members of Congress at a roundtable event on Monday to announce $12 billion in economic assistance to United States farmers.
'Our farmers ... will have the support they need to bridge the gap between Biden’s failures and the president’s successful policies taking effect.'
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new Farmer Bridge Assistance program will receive up to $11 billion of the funds to provide one-time bridge payments to farmers of row crops, which include corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and cotton. These farmers have been impacted by market disruptions, including years of foreign trade actions and high inflation, a White House official noted.
The remaining $1 billion will be allocated toward crops not included in the FBA program, such as fruits, vegetables, and other specialty crops. However, the details of those allocations are still being evaluated based on market conditions.
At the earliest, farmers are reportedly set to begin receiving the funds in February.
A White House official stated that the program aims to provide farmers with certainty as they plan their crops for next year.
RELATED: Trump scores win for American farmers as China commits to ‘massive’ soybean purchases
“Farmers suffered for years under Joe Biden, who increased the United States’ trade deficit to over $1.2 trillion, raised input costs, pushed woke DEI agricultural policies, and more,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement provided to Blaze News.
"In contrast, President Trump is helping our agriculture industry by negotiating new trade deals to open new export markets for our farmers and boosting the farm safety net for the first time in a decade," Kelly continued. "Today’s announcement reflects the president’s commitment to helping our farmers, who will have the support they need to bridge the gap between Biden’s failures and the president’s successful policies taking effect."
RELATED: Trump 'shuts off' deadly fentanyl pipeline by securing 'historic' deal with China: Patel
China, the world’s largest soybean buyer, briefly boycotted American soybean farmers amid the ongoing trade war. In October, China agreed to resume purchases. Trump previously stated that China had plans to buy “tremendous amounts of soybeans and other farm products immediately.”
Last week, Rollins applauded Trump for reducing red tape for farmers.
“President Trump is cutting burdensome regulations and strengthening the farm safety net to ensure the future viability of American agriculture,” Rollins said. “Across the Trump administration, we are removing burdensome regulations that were strangling small businesses. For every new regulation, President Trump has eliminated a remarkable 48 — lifting a weighted blanket from the American economy.”
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'Farmer' George Clooney wouldn't last a minute with my family's sheep
George Clooney has it all. The villa on Lake Como, the Hollywood halo, the tequila fortune.
And now — apparently — a farm. He grows olives, you see. Presses them into artisanal oil. Talks lovingly about “the land.”
In Ireland, farmer suicide rates are among the highest in the country. In America, it’s even worse. Farming isn’t just lonely — it’s a daily battle against debt, drought, and despair.
It’s the sort of thing the lifestyle press laps up. The movie star who’s “gone back to nature,” barefoot among the groves, a rake in both senses of the word. But as someone raised on an actual farm in Ireland, I can’t help but laugh. Calling Clooney a farmer is like calling yourself a surgeon because you once removed a splinter with tweezers.
Knee-deep in muck
My father’s a real farmer. He’s the kind of man who measures days in chores, not hours. He’s out there in rain, shine, or two feet of snow, wrangling 100 cattle and 300 sheep with saintly patience. Starting at age 7, I spent 10 years doing the same thing. The man’s hands could sand a doorframe just by clapping. His back has carried more than hay bales. It’s borne the heavy burden of being taken for granted. Farmers feed everyone, yet everyone forgets them. They’re the engine of every economy and the punchline of every town.
The romantic idea of farming — what I call the “Clooney complex” — is built on Instagram filters and feckless fantasy. A celebrity buys a few acres, plants some lavender, adopts a goat named Aristotle, and suddenly it’s “sustainable living.” They wear linen shirts and wax lyrical about the “spiritual rhythm” of rural life, just before jetting back to L.A. in a jet that could single-handedly melt a glacier.
Meanwhile, the real farmer down the road is up at five, knee-deep in muck, coaxing a calf into the world in sideways sleet. The rhythm of real rural life sounds less like “peaceful simplicity” and more like an industrial power washer.
We don’t name our sheep. That’s something people who’ve never farmed don’t understand. When you’ve got 300 of the woolly little delinquents, sentimentality is a luxury you can’t afford. I’ve seen enough lambs die in winter to know why farmers are wary of names. We remember numbers. The birth tags. The weight. The cost of feed. The constant arithmetic of survival. Romanticizing farming is like romanticizing trench warfare — fine for those who've never experienced it firsthand.
Debt, drought, and despair
And yet, people love the image. The noble tiller of soil, weathered but wise, standing in a sunset, surrounded by his empire. They never show the invoices, broken fences, silage bills, oppressive environmental regulations, or the bank statements.
They don’t show the nights you lie awake wondering whether the mart price will rise or fall. They don’t show the hours spent alone, the silence broken only by the rattle of a gate or the cough of an animal on the way out. Farming is isolation dressed as independence. You’re your own boss, yes — but your employees are cows, and they never take a day off.
In Ireland, farmer suicide rates are among the highest in the country. In America, it’s even worse. Farming isn’t just lonely — it’s a daily battle against debt, drought, and despair.
Each season, costs climb higher: cement for sheds, grain for feed, diesel for tractors, even medicine for the herd. Profits shrink, pressure builds, and hope thins out like soil after too many harvests. American farmers are now three and a half times more likely to die by suicide than the average worker. The farm devours what it earns. It’s less a business than a benevolent parasite — you feed it in the hope it feeds you back.
RELATED: AI isn’t feeding you
Learning from the land
But to the celebrity farmer, it’s a lovely way of life. Clooney can pose with his olives, Chris Pratt with his chickens, or "Top Gear" legend Jeremy Clarkson with his camera crew and call it “a return to roots.” Fine, let them have their fun. But real farming isn’t less a return than a sentence. It’s 70-hour weeks, constant pressure, and the faint but familiar panic of wondering what happens if you get sick. No stand-in. No understudy. Just you and the land, locked in an ancient marriage of necessity.
Don’t get me wrong — I love the land. There’s a holiness to it that city life can’t touch. I understand why people are drawn to it, even why they imitate it. But farming isn’t a hobby. It’s not therapy. It’s work in its rawest form — bone-deep, back-breaking, Sisyphus-like labor. And while actors can play at being farmers, farmers can’t play at being actors. When a calf’s stuck halfway out, the only thing rolling is your sleeves. There are no retakes.
If George Clooney wants to plant crops, fine. Let him. But I’ll believe he’s a farmer when he’s up at dawn to dig a drain, when his hands smell permanently of disinfectant. I’ll believe it when his holidays depend on the lambing schedule and not the film schedule. Until then, he’s just a gardener with glorious lighting.
Farming is a philosophy in itself. It teaches humility, patience, and a genuine appreciation for the good times. You learn to solve problems with what’s at hand — wire, hope, and plenty of profanity. It’s not glamorous, but it’s brutally honest.
So when I read about Clooney's olives, I smile. Until he has scraped muck from his boots with a stick, yelled at a stubborn sheepdog that won’t listen, and worked from first light to last, I’ll save my applause for the real ones: the men and women who work the land not for show, but for the soil itself. Owning a field doesn’t make you a farmer any more than starring in "The Perfect Storm" makes you a fisherman.
Importing Argentinian Beef Will Destroy The American Ranchers Crucial For National Food Security
'Quite a few plywood Trump signs in flyover country might get turned over and used to patch up the loading chute.'Acorn Bluff Farms: Pampered pigs yield 'Kobe beef' of pork
You are what what you eat eats. Try saying that in a hurry.
It’s a simple maxim, but one that guides me in my nutritional choices and in the advice I give to other people about improving their diet. If the meat and animal products you eat come from animals that live unhealthy, unhappy lives — if they’re stuffed full of poor-quality food they shouldn’t even be eating and housed in an unnatural environment — then you’re not going to derive as much benefit from those products as you should.
If you feed animals badly, you get a bad product. It’s that simple.
And why would you want that?
Animal welfare matters
Animal welfare matters not only because it determines the quality of the food you eat, but also because animals are sentient, feeling creatures who deserve moral consideration.
This doesn’t get said enough, actually, and there’s been a rather depressing tendency for so-called conservatives to pay little heed to the suffering of livestock or animals. This is part of a broader Philistine tendency on the right, I think, that reduces everything to economics and lines on a graph.
But of course it’s more economical to immobilize 10,000 chickens in a strip-lit warehouse instead of pasturing them on grass, in rather the same way it might seem economical to import your nation’s birth rates and undercut native labour with cheap foreigners at half the price — and of course they don’t unionize either!
A two-way pact
Domestication, which created cows and chickens and sheep and pigs as we know them, was a two-way pact, and we shouldn’t forget it. We got reliable, high-quality nutrition that didn’t have to be hunted on the plains and in the forests, at great risk to ourselves, and the animals got care and protection — including from other animals like wolves and bears and big cats.
The terms of this pact, and of man’s proper relation to nature more broadly, were given their most solemn expression in the book of Genesis, when God granted man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
By “dominion,” God didn’t mean, “You can do anything you want to these animals.” He meant, “You are the lord of these animals, and like every lord and his subjects, you have obligations to them. They are in your care. They are not to be abused or misused.”
I didn’t really intend this piece to be a bit of Biblical exegesis, but oh well — here we are.
But as I was saying, if you feed animals badly, you get a bad product. It’s that simple.
Farmed salmon 'toxic'
Take farmed salmon, for example. I think we all know we’re supposed to eat more oily fish to get those important omega-3s in our diet, but the truth is, farmed salmon may be one of the most toxic foods on the planet, and it’s all to do with how the fish are raised and in particular what they’re fed.
RELATED: Cattle rancher’s STARK warning: You'll only have meat 'as a treat'
Research has linked regular consumption of farmed salmon to diabetes and obesity. Mice fed farmed salmon gain twice as much weight as mice fed other foods. Farmed salmon has been shown to carry an enormous payload of harmful chemicals, which probably explains its obesogenic effects.
A 2004 study showed at least 13 different persistent organic pollutants in the flesh of farmed salmon and that levels of polychlorinated biphenyls — chemicals known to be carcinogenic and to cause hormonal disruption — were eight times higher in farmed salmon than wild. Two other kinds of carcinogenic chemicals — dioxins and polybrominated diphenyl ethers — have also been found in high concentrations in farmed salmon.
One of the main foods given to farmed salmon is eel and other fatty fish, which are chosen because of their high protein and fat content. The problem is that fatty fish readily accumulate harmful substances, many of which are lipophilic (attracted to fat) and get stuck in their fat stores. A lot of the fatty fish that go into fish feed are taken from the Baltic, one of the most heavily polluted seas on the planet, concentrating the waste of nine industrial nations. (In Sweden, fishmongers are legally required to warn customers of the health risks of consuming fish caught in the Baltic. I bet you didn’t know that.)
Pigs under pressure
The same is true of pigs and pork. Apart from chickens, pigs bear the greatest burden of suffering in the modern industrial farming system. If you want any further reason to pray for the Three Gorges Dam to fail, look up China’s multi-story pig farms, which have the capacity to house and slaughter millions of pigs a year.
We in the West aren’t much better, though. For the most part, pigs here are just as unhappy: cramped, stressed, stuffed full of cheap corn and soy to fatten them up for slaughter as quickly and economically — there it is, that word again — as possible.
That means atrocious misery and poor-quality pork and lard to boot. There’s been a lot of talk of putting away seed and vegetable oils and returning to healthy traditional animal fats like butter and tallow and lard, but lard from industrially raised pigs is anything but healthy or traditional. Because pigs don’t have a rumen — those magical multiple stomachs possessed by cows and sheep — if they’re fed trash like soybean oil, they can’t convert the fats in it to saturated fat. As a result, the fat content of the pork comes to resemble soybean oil, and you’ve got seed oil but it’s called lard. So it goes.
Meet Acorn Bluff
Thank God, then, for Acorn Bluff Farms, a family farm in the rolling bluff country of Louisa County, Iowa. The farm has been in continuous use for nearly 200 years, but in the last five years its owners have converted the farm to focus on producing the highest quality pasture-raised pork, using one of the world’s most prestigious heritage breeds: the Hungarian Mangalitsa.
Mangalitsa pigs were originally bred for the Habsburgs, the royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. You can recognize them by their absurdly cute curly hair. Since they were bred for European royalty, you can bet Mangalitsa pigs taste good. Some call Mangalitsa the “Kobe beef” of pork, Kobe beef being one of the priciest and most prized kinds of beef in the world. The cows are fed beer and given massages. (Really: Look it up.)
The other red meat
At Acorn Bluff Farms, the pigs and piglets are allowed to roam and forage and wallow in the mud and chase one another through the fields and forest like pigs and piglets should. Follow the farm’s Twitter account (@acornblufffarms) for regular heartwarming videos.
In the middle of the 20th century, pork began to be marketed as “the other white meat,” but this was only really possible because modern farming methods were turning pork into an insipid, watered-down, pale shadow of the meat it really is.
If you buy some pork chops or a side of spare ribs from Acorn Bluff Farms, you’ll see pork in its true form: the other red meat. And what’s more, you can enjoy every single mouthful, without guilt — which is how it should be, because God said so.
If Trump Lets Farm Workers Evade Immigration Laws, Expect The Whole World To Claim ‘Farm Worker’ Status
'By saying we're going to tolerate illegal immigration, it destroys Trump's credibility, the credibility of enforcement, and takes what is a legal system and basically makes it meaningless.'Build back better? Then stop outsourcing our agricultural soul
Drive through our country’s heartland — past golden fields, cattle-speckled hills, and humming dairies — and you’ll see the soul of America at work. But look closer, and a bitter truth emerges: The hands harvesting our crops and milking our cows are too often foreign-born laborers here illegally or on a costly visa program.
In my state, the Idaho Dairymen’s Association admits a staggering 70% or more of dairy workers are using phony documents — illegal labor propping up Idaho’s top commodity and our country’s No. 3 milk-producing state.
Today, we’re fed a line that Americans have gone lazy, addicted to cubicles or city lights. Nonsense.
We’re told Americans won’t do these jobs. Really? From the 1880s through the 1940s, Americans built these very industries. So what changed? It’s not the workers. It’s the bosses who stopped believing in them.
American grit built our farms
Idaho’s dairies, ranches, and construction sites can thrive with American grit — if employers stop making excuses and start making offers.
Go back to the late 19th century, when Idaho’s Snake River Valley was raw desert. Local settlers — farmers, laborers, families — dug canals, built dams, and turned dust into fields of potatoes and alfalfa, as historian Mark Fiege shows in his 1999 book “Irrigated Eden.” These weren’t hired foreigners; they were Americans, mostly Western settlers, whose sweat and cooperation built an agricultural empire through the Depression and wartime into the 1940s.
Those were hard years. Yet, these people showed up, sleeves rolled, ready to work. They weren’t too soft for the sun on their necks or the ache of a long day.
Employers abandoned American workers
Today, we’re fed a line that Americans have gone lazy, addicted to cubicles or city lights. Nonsense. Some yes, but fewer than imagined. The problem isn’t our people; it’s an industry that’s forgotten how to call them home.
Don’t tell me Americans won’t work. Plenty of us still hunger for the kind of labor that smells of earth and steel — jobs that build calluses and communities. Idaho’s fields offer purpose: the roar of a tractor, the precision of robotic milkers, the quiet triumph of a harvest under wide skies.
Vice President JD Vance nailed it when he sarcastically gave in to the notion that deporting tens of millions of illegal aliens will send us back to 1960 — when homes apparently couldn’t be built without illegal labor. Absurd! The same goes for agriculture.
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These aren’t dead-end gigs; they’re the backbone of our nation. But employers need to stop acting like foreign workers are the only option. If you are one of these employers who show up to the town parade waving Old Glory, singing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” — if you claim to be America First — then hire Americans first. Anything less is just talk.
Illegal workers cost more
Here’s where the elites squirm. As state Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen (R-Idaho) noted during a House debate, Idaho employers often admit that foreign labor isn’t even cheaper. Visas, travel, lodging, meals, and transportation add up — often rivaling what an American might earn in salary and benefits. Yet, they claim no amount of money will lure American workers.
Have they tried? Really tried? Take those bloated costs — every dime spent on foreign logistics — and pour them into wages, health plans, or housing for locals. Build training programs to teach kids how to run today’s high-tech rigs. If tech giants can sell college grads on coding in Silicon Valley, Idaho’s dairies can sell our youth on feeding America.
It’s not rocket science. It’s will.
The same elites twist unemployment numbers to prop up their narrative. They cite low jobless rates to argue that no one’s left to hire. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics excludes a key group: able-bodied men ages 25 to 54 who’ve dropped out of the workforce entirely. They’re not working, not looking, and not counted. That forgotten group alone includes an estimated seven million Americans.
Make American farming great again
Picture this: billboards across Idaho showing a young farmer steering a drone-guided planter, grinning like he owns the future. Community colleges partnering with ranchers to train veterans and high schoolers. County fairs where dairies hand out scholarships — not just milk samples. That’s not fantasy. That’s strategy. Businesses that want loyalty don’t wait for workers to show up — they go find them.
Right now, 70% of dairy workers rely on falsified papers. That’s not a workforce. It’s a failure of imagination. Legal, local labor builds trust, strengthens communities, and proves we take sovereignty seriously.
Idaho can lead the way. America’s watching.
Employers, quit hiding behind old excuses. Redirect your budgets, roll out campaigns, and watch Americans answer the call. Lawmakers, reduce or eliminate regulations that incentivize foreign labor.
Neighbors, cheer these jobs as the honorable work they are. Picture our fields alive with Americans, dairies humming with citizens who know this land as home.
That’s not just Idaho’s future, it’s America’s. We’ve done it before. We can do it again. All it takes is the guts to try.
Cattle rancher’s STARK warning: You'll only have meat 'as a treat'
American cattle rancher Shad Sullivan is sounding the alarm on the “war on beef” that the elites are waging against the American people, and Blaze media co-founder Glenn Beck is right there with him.
“This is all coming from elites,” Glenn tells Sullivan. “85% of elites and super elites — super elites are ones that went to Ivy League colleges and have a doctorate. Just the elite are making $150,000 a year, they’ve gone to college, have one postgraduate degree, and they’re involved in the companies or countries.”
“They just did a poll on those people. Eighty-plus percent say that Americans should not be allowed to eat beef or meat of any kind,” he continues.
“We have to remember what Klaus Schwab said in 2023 at Davos. He said, ‘You will enjoy meat as a treat, but not for sustenance,’” Sullivan agrees. “And we know beef is really the only animal that can provide total and 100% sustenance to human life.”
“These elite that you talk about, I hearken back to my dad. He’s gone now, but he was a self-made rancher. Started with nothing,” he continues. “I said, ‘Dad, what are we going to do?’ And he says, ‘Son, we’ll never change America until they sit in the dark, cold and hungry.’”
“And that’s the truth. And he came from a place of suffering, so he understood that,” he adds, noting that the elites will never understand the kind of suffering that makes them grow.
“I think about somebody on the side of the road with a flat tire. Those elites couldn’t even change a flat tire. They couldn’t do the most simple things that require real life, and here they are, demanding and dictating how we’re going to produce and consume, not only in America, but across the world,” Sullivan explains.
However, there is one thing that keeps the elites from all-out rule over the American people.
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USDA exploring possibility of mass vaccinations for American poultry despite RFK Jr.'s warnings
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned earlier this year that vaccinating poultry against highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5) viruses might transform farms into incubators for mutant viruses — viruses that could potentially leap to humans.
"All of my agencies have advised against the vaccination of birds," Kennedy told Fox News' Sean Hannity, "because if you vaccinate with a leaky vaccine — in other words, a vaccine that does not provide sterilizing immunity, that does not absolutely protect against the disease — you turn those flocks into mutation factories."
"They're teaching the organism how to mutate," continued Kennedy. "And it's much more likely to jump to animals if you do that."
Despite Kennedy's concern — which is apparently shared by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration — the U.S. Department of Agriculture is looking seriously at mass vaccinations for American poultry.
A USDA spokesperson told Blaze News that the USDA "is exploring the viability of vaccinating poultry for HPAI" but noted that the "use of any vaccine has not been authorized at this time."
This vaccine exploration appears to have taken on greater energy in February when egg prices were reaching record highs.
After flying south of $3 between 1994 and 2022, the price for a dozen eggs began to rise dramatically during the second half of the Biden era, then even higher earlier this year, reaching an all-time average high of $6.22 in March.
RELATED: The 'cage-free' myth: Why everything you think you know about ethical eggs is wrong
Although there were multiple factors at play — including the shift in various states to cage-free hens and record consumer demand — the price spikes were largely driven by the mass exterminations of commercial and backyard bird populations ordered by the USDA in response to HPAI viruses.
Blaze News previously noted that between Feb. 8, 2022 — when the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service first confirmed bird flu belonging to the clade 2.3.4.4b in an American commercial flock — and March 2025, the USDA directed the extermination of over 166.41 million birds. Fewer egg-laying birds naturally means diminished supply and higher prices.
'Vaccination in any poultry sector — egg layers, turkeys, broilers, or ducks — will jeopardize the entire export market for all U.S. poultry products.'
In a Feb. 26 op-ed, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins outlined "five steps to tackle avian flu and bring down costs for American families."
In addition to dedicating up to $500 million to help American poultry producers implement "gold-standard" biosecurity measures, increasing financial relief to farms whose flocks are affected by avian flu, removing "unnecessary regulatory burdens on egg producers where possible," and considering temporary import options, Rollins said her agency would "provide up to $100 million in research and development of vaccines and therapeutics, to improve their efficacy and efficiency."
Although egg prices have returned to relatively normal levels, a USDA spokesperson told Blaze News that the agency continues "to evaluate the potential use of vaccines."
"Before making a determination, USDA, in consultation with federal partners, will solicit feedback from state officials, veterinarians, farmers, the public health system, and the American public," said the spokesperson. "USDA is working with federal and state officials and industry stakeholders to develop a potential plan for vaccine use in the United States."
Reuters indicated that industry members anticipate that the agency will complete its plan in July.
RELATED: Cleaning up Biden’s bird flu mess falls to Trump
There is some controversy over the potential mass vaccination of poultry on the business side of the equation.
Dr. John Clifford, a former USDA chief veterinary officer who advises the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council, told Reuters that chicken meat producers would be dealt a crushing blow if importers stopped importing U.S. poultry over concerns that vaccines were masking the presence of HPAI in flocks.
Some industry groups are, however, warming up to the idea.
Although the National Chicken Council previously suggested that "vaccination in any poultry sector — egg layers, turkeys, broilers, or ducks — will jeopardize the entire export market for all U.S. poultry products," they have since suggested they are on board with the program if exports go unaffected.
The United Egg Producers are apparently even more gung-ho, having helped hatch a plan suggesting an initial vaccination for baby chicks, a subsequent booster shot, then routine testing.
Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation, has suggested mass poultry vaccinations are unwise, telling Blaze News that Kennedy's "worries about mass animal H5N1 bird flu vaccination are fully grounded in robust science."
'Biosecurity remains the best and most prudent approach to mitigate the impact of the disease today.'
When asked about the possibility that the USDA might nevertheless proceed with the mass vaccination agenda, Hulscher said that "the USDA is ignoring the glaring risks of creating dangerous mutant strains with their plans to mass vaccinate poultry against bird flu amidst a bird flu animal pandemic."
Blaze News senior editor Daniel Horowitz drove home the point in a recent op-ed, noting that "leaky, waning vaccines that rely on suboptimal antibodies against rapidly mutating viruses can lead to immune tolerance and imprinting. This can cause the immune system to misfire, resulting in negative efficacy. Any short-term protection against severe disease often comes at a long-term cost as the viruses adapt and grow stronger."
Hulscher suggested that the best way forward when tackling HPAI in domestic flocks is better biosecurity: "Installing surface-air purification systems into farms, combined with iodine-based nasal/oral prophylaxis for farm workers, is a much less risky option than mass vaccination."
On this, it appears the USDA agrees.
The agency spokesperson told Blaze News that in the meantime, "because biosecurity remains the best and most prudent approach to mitigate the impact of the disease today, USDA also continues pursuing collaborative efforts with poultry farmers and companies on education, training, and implementation of comprehensive biosecurity measures."
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Glyphosate 101: What you need to know about America’s most popular pesticide
Glyphosate is a word that’s beginning to slip into public consciousness as the MAHA movement continues gaining momentum. For those unfamiliar with the term, glyphosate is a chemical used in weed killers, like Roundup, which is the most popular herbicide in the United States. Since its development in 1970, we’ve been told it’s safe for humans and the environment by its manufacturers and by several regulatory agencies.
But surprise, surprise — now that we’re in an era of being honest about the additives and chemicals involved in our food production, it turns out that glyphosate is carcinogenic.
To get the scoop on this harmful chemical, Nicole Shanahan, BlazeTV host of “Back to the People,” invited Harvard-educated agricultural economist Dr. Chuck Benbrook, who’s spent his entire career fighting against the use of pesticides, to the show.
“The evidence is strongest linking exposure to glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides … with non-Hodgkin lymphoma” — a type of cancer that attacks the lymphatic system, disrupting the body's ability to fight infections, says Dr. Benbrook. However, “there's a new study coming out in just a matter of days linking glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides to leukemia.”
Glyphosate, he explains, “[disrupts] DNA replication in people's bone marrow as their new blood cells are being formed,” which is exactly how “non-Hodgkin lymphoma and leukemia start.”
Despite the mounting evidence proving glyphosate is carcinogenic, farmers are highly motivated to protect it from stricter regulations and potential banning. Chemical pesticides, like glyphosate, are “very seductive for farmers,” as they are “a simple solution to dealing with weeds or insects or plant diseases,” says Dr. Benbrook.
Farmers’ “overreliance” on pest and weed killers has created a booming industry that pesticide companies will fiercely guard. Just like vaccine companies gained legal protection from lawsuits for vaccine injuries through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, “the pesticide industry is working very hard to to try to change federal and state laws so that pesticide companies can't be sued in state court over harms from pesticides,” say Dr. Benbrook.
Eating organically produced food seems like a logical option to avoid the harms of glyphosate, as the USDA National Organic Program prohibits the use of synthetic pesticides, including glyphosate, in organic farming.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
“I'm hearing from a lot of parents who are on all-organic diets [and] eat super clean, and their family members have really high levels of glyphosate coming back in their urine analysis,” says Nicole.
“It’s very difficult to avoid glyphosate completely through the American diet,” says Dr. Benbrook, noting that restaurant food, the water supply, and the very air we breathe can be contaminated with glyphosate. It “is so ubiquitous in the environment and in the food supply.”
To hear more of Nicole and Dr. Benbrook’s conversation on glyphosate, as well as genetically modified food and sustainable food production, watch the episode above.
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