MAHA: Make Agriculture Harder for All

How MAHA’s vision for farming would increase food prices, habitat loss, and emissions

By Dan Blaustein-Rejto

Earlier this spring, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked the rows of John Sawyer’s Texas farm, the young corn brushing against his waist. At that stage, the plants looked unimpressive, small enough to pull by hand. Yet each was a modern marvel, genetically engineered to resist insects and tolerate herbicides, allowing Sawyer to cut his insecticide use and control weeds without plowing each year. The fields had likely been sprayed with glyphosate just days or weeks before Kennedy’s visit, part of a farming system that produces more than triple what Sawyer’s grandfather once grew. It was a scene that illustrated the promise of agricultural innovation.

Kennedy, though, saw something else: a system to uproot. Since that trip, he has doubled down on a vision that would phase out many of the technologies Sawyer uses. He and other leaders of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have called for fewer pesticides and fertilizers and a large-scale shift to organic farming, including moving away from use of genetically modified crops. As the Trump administration’s nominee for Surgeon General, Casey Means put it, moving to organic and regenerative systems—away from “industrial agriculture that uses toxic synthetic pesticides”—is “the SINGLE most effective strategy that I believe can solve the pressing human health and environmental issues facing our globe.”

To be fair, RFK has tried to reassure farm interests that he is working with agriculture, not against it. After all, the federal government’s official MAHA Commission has limited itself to only calling for research on pesticides’ health impacts, not on banning them or establishing new limits.

And yet RFK continues to claim the U.S. food system is poisoning Americans, stoking fear around modern farm inputs. He went as far as saying in July that “We need to give off-ramps to farmers so that they can transition to biodynamic agriculture”—a pseudoscientific farming approach that prohibits synthetic inputs and urges farmers to bury cow horns stuffed with manure and pulverized crystals.

The MAHA movement’s goal of improving health and reducing agricultural pollution is laudable. But adopting the movement’s agricultural proposals at scale would undermine its goals, raising food prices, expanding agriculture’s land footprint, and worsening both environmental and human health.

The Organic Tradeoff

Organic production lowers certain chemical inputs but lowers yields as well. Across major U.S. field crops, organic yields are typically a third lower than conventional. If half of today’s corn, soy, wheat, and hay acres were converted to organic, U.S. farmers would need about 33 million additional acres to maintain current output—nearly the size of Iowa.

That additional land would likely come from grasslands and forests. Converting that much area in the U.S. would release over 1.5 billion tons CO₂e, about 4-times more than all annual emissions from crop cultivation, overwhelming any savings from avoiding synthetic fertilizers or using less pesticides. Converting all production to organic would have disproportionately greater impacts, requiring even more land to raise livestock for manure and to grow nitrogen-fixing crops that replace the nutrients that synthetic fertilizers normally provide.

A large-scale transition to organic farming would come with economic and health costs too. Lower yields mean higher per-unit costs, and organic systems rely on more labor-intensive weed and pest control. Growing organic corn, wheat, and soy often costs at least 50% more per bushel. Likewise, growing fruits and vegetables organically costs more. In California, it costs at least 15% more to grow strawberries organically than conventionally. Higher costs lead people to buy fewer fruits and vegetables—a 10% increase in produce prices leads to a roughly 6–7% drop in purchases. Americans already eat fewer fruits and vegetables than recommended. Higher production costs and market prices stemming from a large-scale organic shift can be expected to reduce consumption further.

In short, organic farming reduces the use of synthetic chemicals, but at the cost of more land, more emissions, and higher prices for consumers.

Without Glyphosate, Farmers Will Plow Again

The consequences of more narrow restrictions, such as banning or restricting the herbicide glyphosate, show the same pattern. While RFK Jr has softened his tone on glyphosate and EPA has made no moves to enact restrictions, many influential MAHA movement leaders, such as Vani Hari and Zen Honeycutt, continue to call for tighter pesticide regulations.

A report from Aimpoint Research (commissioned by Bayer but consistent with independent studies) estimated that banning glyphosate would increase farmers’ costs by $654 million per year for corn, $849 million for soybeans, $409 million for wheat, and $22 million for cotton. These figures rest on the assumption that farmers, without glyphosate available, would control weeds by tilling their soil more rather than switching to pricier herbicides. However, tilling more has a steep environmental cost: under a full glyphosate ban, farmers would burn about 84 million more gallons of diesel each year and accelerate erosion that decades of conservation efforts sought to slow.

Switching to alternative pesticides could avoid the erosion, but would still increase farming’s impact on ecosystems and potentially human health. Glyphosate is not only the most widely used herbicide, but also one of the least toxic. RFK Jr. and others emphasize how glyphosate appears to contribute to oxidative stress in cells, which could plausibly contribute to cancer. While several small studies have found a link to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, cohort studies of tens of thousands of pesticide applicators in the U.S.—often considered the gold standard—have found no significant association between glyphosate use and cancer. Residues on food are also typically hundreds of times lower than levels considered concerning. Unlike many herbicides, glyphosate does not bioaccumulate in human tissue or the food chain, and it binds tightly to soil particles, breaking down relatively quickly through microbial activity. For these reasons, regulatory agencies in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the European Food Safety Authority have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate poses no human health risks of concern when used as directed. Likewise, regulators have found “no sufficient evidence” linking glyphosate to rising autism rates, which RFK has promised to address. Other herbicides that farmers would plausibly switch to if glyphosate were banned, like 2,4-D or dicamba, often drift to neighboring fields and pose higher risks to aquatic species and non-target plants. Some alternatives, such as paraquat or diquat, are also far more toxic than glyphosate and pose a significant human health risk.

Whether farmers switch tillage practices or herbicides, eliminating glyphosate would likely increase weed pressure as well, thereby reducing yields. Though few studies have projected the impact of a glyphosate ban on U.S. crop yields, studies in the EU and UK suggest that yields could fall as much as 6% for corn, 7% for soybeans, and 18% for wheat. Even if the yield reduction is on the lower end of estimates, millions of acres of additional farmland expansion would be needed to preserve production.

Banning atrazine, which faces similar calls for restriction, would have a similar, though smaller effect. Atrazine is used on about 70% of corn acres, often in a mixture with other herbicides. Eliminating atrazine would reduce yields on these farms by at least 3%. Maintaining current levels of corn production with this yield decline would require more than 1.5 million acres of additional farmland, increasing emissions and destroying habitat.

GMOs for GHGs

The same logic applies to restricting genetically modified or gene-edited crops. Genetically modified crops are designed to solve specific farm challenges. Bt corn and cotton express a protein from Bacillus thuringiensis that kills pests like the European corn borer but is safe for people and most wildlife. This trait cut insecticide applications sharply, lowering costs and risks to farmworkers while protecting beneficial insects. Soy and corn modified to be herbicide-tolerant allow farmers to effectively control weeds without repeated plowing, making no-till farming viable at scale.

The yield benefits of GMOs are substantial. In the U.S., genetically modified corn has increased yields up to 17%, Bt cotton by 9–11%, herbicide-tolerant soybeans by about 9%, and herbicide-tolerant canola by 3–7%. Removing these popular genetically modified crops would require ~14 million more acres to maintain output, producing over 665 million tons CO₂e from land conversion.

On safety, the conclusion is consistent across scientific bodies: approved GM foods are as safe as conventional foods. After three decades of global use, there is no credible evidence otherwise.

Just as important, the pipeline of new biotechnology traits is expanding. Gene-edited and next-generation genetically modified crops could reduce costs and improve health outcomes. Varieties in development aim to resist citrus greening, fire blight, and other diseases, reducing losses in fruit and vegetable production. Others extend the shelf life of tomatoes and potatoes, reducing waste, or enhance micronutrient content. These innovations would help make healthy foods cheaper, more nutritious, and more resilient—directly advancing the health goals that MAHA claims to prioritize—while also reducing reliance on pesticides, as Bt crops already have.

Innovation, Not Nostalgia

Taken together, these proposals illustrate how MAHA’s platform rests on the naturalistic fallacy: if a practice seems more “natural,” it must be healthier or more sustainable. But agriculture has never followed that logic. Farming itself is a profoundly human-developed system: people domesticated wild grasses into corn, wheat, and rice. The wild ancestors of crops were often barely edible or yielded little food, and only through deliberate breeding and technology have they become the staples we rely on. Shifting toward more “natural” farming methods typically means lower yields, higher prices, and more farmland expansion.

A better path is available. Investments in safer and more targeted pesticides, precision application, modern breeding, and gene editing—supported by strong public agricultural research and smart regulation—can deliver more food, at lower cost, with smaller land and carbon footprints.

MAHA’s vision for farming won’t make America healthier, but it will make agriculture harder for farmers. It will bring more plowing, more emissions, and more expensive food. If the goal is to protect both people and the planet, the future lies in continued innovation, not nostalgia.

For more information, please access our methodology. This article benefited from research support by Benjamin Goren, who assisted with data collection and analysis.