Vilsack Officially Tapped to Return to USDA

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December 11, 2020

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by John Herath (Farm Journal AgWeb) Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack has been officially tapped by the Joe Biden transition to return to USDA as Secretary. Vilsack was listed as the USDA nominee on the Biden transition Website Thursday morning.

Vilsack, currently the CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, served as USDA Secretary through both terms of the Obama Administration.

The announcement drew immediate praise from a number of ag groups.

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“In his eight years leading the Department during the Obama administration corn farmers appreciated his willingness to listen to the input from growers across the country and his steadfast commitment to agriculture, renewable fuels, our environment and USDA’s food and nutrition programs,” added National Corn Growers Association President John Linder. “He’s been an outspoken advocate for rural America and we look forward to working together again, along with President-elect Biden, to build long-term demand for our product, mitigate the impact of climate change, seek new markets around the globe, and continue to feed and fuel the world.”

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House Agriculture Committee member Marcia Fudge (D-OH) had lobbied publicly for the position, seeking to be the first African-American woman to serve as USDA Secretary. She was instead tapped to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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“We congratulate Tom Vilsack on his nomination to once again lead USDA and know that he will hit the ground running. Secretary Vilsack was the most effective advocate the biofuels industry had in the Obama administration and we are excited about working with him again, particularly with helping get the RFS back on track, continued infrastructure support for higher ethanol blends, and making sure farmers and biofuel producers are part of the solution to future policies designed to tackle climate change.” – Brian Jennings American Coalition for Ethanol. READ MORE

Biofuels Groups Pleased with Vilsack Nomination (Energy.AgWired.com)

POSITIVE REACTIONS AFTER BIDEN NAMES VILSACK AS AG SECRETARY PICK (Brownfield Ag News)

Progressives grumble as establishment hails Vilsack's return (E&E News)

The uproar over Biden’s choice to run the USDA (Grist)

RFA Thanks President-Elect Biden, Congratulates Vilsack on USDA Nomination (Renewable Fuels Association)

Biden agriculture pick likely to reassure farmers, disappoint activists (Reuters)

We Need a Secretary of Food: Without food security for all, the United States will never fully recover from the pandemic. (New York Times/World Central Kitchen)

Iowa Biodiesel Board Applauds Biden Pick for Head of USDA (Iowa Biodiesel Board)

Biden’s pick for agriculture is a safe, solid choice. But U.S. farm policy needs fresh thinking. (Washington Post)

Ag Policy Blog: Rebooting Tom Vilsack (DTN Progressive Farmer)

Excerpt from Grist: These groups wanted Representative Marcia Fudge, Democrat from Ohio, who has served on the House Agriculture Committee for the past nine years, to get the job. Fudge would have been the first Black woman to run the Department of Agriculture, and pretty much everyone who wanted a decisive break with the status quo pinned their hopes on her. Instead, Biden opted for more of the same: Vilsack headed the department throughout Barack Obama’s presidency. Biden picked Fudge to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It raises a familiar question: Do you go for big structural change, or nudge the existing system? It’s unclear, however, that Fudge would have been as revolutionary as her supporters had hoped, and when it comes to climate-smart agriculture, many say Vilsack is a perfectly acceptable pick.

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First the complaints: Vilsack’s critics say he’s a Big Ag guy, that he failed to protect Black farmers, and a champion for biofuels which have a murky environmental record.

“Vilsack spent his time as Secretary of Agriculture under Obama sweet-talking Big Ag, directly harming Black farmers, and furthering the USDA’s discriminatory history,” said Natalie Mebane, associate director of policy for 350.org, in a statement.

Let’s unpack that. On Big Ag, it’s clear that Vilsack has always been a proponent of helping big modern farmers do their job better.

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“He is a standard ethanol, corn and beans, dairy and hogs, farm subsidy supporting sort of guy,” said Dan Sumner, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis.

Vilsack had long claimed to be making progress in resolving complaints about the kind of discrimination that leads to Black farmers losing their land. But an investigation last year by Nathan Rosenberg, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, found that the number of civil rights complaints rose under his leadership. Then there’s the case of Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official who lost her job after Andrew Breitbart published a deceptively edited speech of hers that made her comments appear racist, leading people across the political spectrum, from Bill O’Reilly to NAACP leader Ben Jealous, to condemn Sherrod. The unedited speech showed that Sherrod was really making a plea for racial harmony. Insiders say the pressure for her resignation came from above Vilsack.

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Vilsack is a fan of biofuels Midwestern farmers have made a lot of money turning corn into ethanol in recent years. And Vilsack has a vision of new farm products like biofuels turning into a bio-economy that brings prosperity to rural America. Biofuels are good in that they supplant fossil fuels, but bad in that they take up a lot of space — in some cases pushing farmers to cut down forests so they can expand cropland.

Sumner counts himself among the disappointed. He would have prefered to see Fudge get the job and thinks the USDA is due for a shakeup. But Sumner also said people would have eventually been disappointed by any pick, if they expected the USDA to revamp the food system so it was not dominated by big industrial farms. “I have seen no data or research that would suggest that there are any (realistic) government programs that could cause the share of food production from small farms to rise much,” he wrote in an email.

The truth is that there’s not much support for the conventional wisdom that big farms are bad and small farms are good for the environment. “I don’t know of any strong evidence — or even any weak evidence — of a relationship between crop farm size and the adoption of various sustainable farming practices,” said Jim McDonald, who has studied farm sizes at the USDA’s Economic Research Service.

As farms have grown bigger, they have become more efficient, producing a lot more food for every acre. Over the past 70 years, while the U.S. population doubled, farms have managed to keep feeding everyone without plowing up more land — a tremendous environmental win. Sure, today’s big farms still cause massive problems, but that doesn’t mean smaller is better.

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He’ll help fund studies to figure out how farmers can capture carbon in their fields. READ MORE