The Problem

The American food system is monopolized, unhealthy, environmentally destructive, and dependent on fossil fuels. At every level of the food chain, a few companies extract value from captive farmers and consumers. The result is food that is expensive, unhealthy, and produced under conditions that poison the water, deplete the soil, and fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Nineteen million Americans live in low-income neighborhoods with no supermarket within reach, more than a mile away in cities, more than 10 miles in rural areas. The most accessible options are often calorie-dense and nutrient-poor. As a result, diet-driven chronic disease is one of the largest cost drivers in American healthcare. The Rockefeller Foundation estimates that once the damage to health, the environment, and rural livelihoods is counted, the U.S. food system costs about $2.1 trillion a year more than Americans pay at the register, roughly three times the grocery bill.

Much of that damage comes from the way the country raises its meat, milk, and eggs. The vast majority of those animals now live in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, which pack thousands of animals and their manure into one place. Feeding antibiotics to animals just to make them grow faster has been banned since 2017, but many CAFOs, especially hog and cattle operations, still put antibiotics in feed and water routinely to keep animals from getting sick in that confinement. That routine use breeds drug-resistant bacteria, the same germs that then make human infections harder to cure. Their concentrated waste fouls rivers and the ocean. Iowa now has the second-highest cancer rate in the nation, and it is still climbing. A state and University of Iowa study released in September 2026 found that age, smoking, drinking, obesity, and other known risks explain about three-quarters of the excess in the state's most common cancers. Researchers are now investigating farm chemicals and nitrate in drinking water as possible contributors to the rest. In 2025, the Des Moines region's water utility imposed its first-ever ban on lawn watering because nitrate runoff from upstream crop farms and CAFOs had pushed nitrate in the rivers so high that treatment plants could barely keep drinking water under the federal limit.

The farmers inside this system are trapped. Total U.S. farm sector debt is forecast to reach $605.1 billion in 2026, the highest on record before adjusting for inflation, according to the USDA's September 2026 forecast. Contract farmers have it worst. A poultry grower borrows a million dollars to build chicken houses to Tyson's specifications, then has exactly one buyer for the product. If Tyson changes the terms or drops the contract, the farmer is left with specialized buildings, debt they cannot pay, and no alternative. The integrator, the big processor like Tyson that owns the birds and the feed and writes the contract, controls the price, the schedule, the inputs, and the exit. The farmer owns the risk. Federal efforts to fix this have stalled. The Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA) is the century-old law meant to protect farmers from exactly these abuses, and the USDA had finally written strong new rules to enforce it. The most important one, a rule protecting poultry growers finalized in January 2025, was frozen before it could take effect and shelved until at least the end of 2027. In July 2026 the USDA announced plans to repeal it along with the two farmer-protection rules already in effect. In 2025, federal grants for independent processing plants were frozen in the middle of construction, leaving small processors with half-built plants and unpaid bills.

On top of all of this, American farming is a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry, and one of the country's largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The nitrogen fertilizer that makes industrial crop yields possible is made from natural gas. When gas prices spike, fertilizer prices spike, and food prices follow. A Louisiana plant now captures and buries part of the carbon from its gas-based ammonia, but the country has no green ammonia, made with clean electricity, at anything close to national scale. As synthetic nitrogen fertilizer breaks down in soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 265 times more potent than CO₂ over a century. Livestock release methane at industrial scale, mostly from cattle digestion, with the giant manure lagoons of CAFOs adding more. Methane is a gas roughly 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years. Together, agriculture accounts for roughly 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, an entrenched subsidy regime dedicates roughly 8 to 10 percent of all U.S. cropland (about 30 million acres) to corn ethanol, producing a fraction of the country's transportation fuel on land that could be feeding people, raising livestock on pasture, or hosting clean energy infrastructure.

The Mission

America will build a food system that is affordable, abundant, healthy, clean-powered, and fair to the farmers and workers who feed the nation. The country will rebuild food production and distribution regionally, so the food Americans eat is grown, processed, and sold closer to home by farmers with real market power. It will produce clean fertilizer and end agriculture's dependence on global gas markets, buy out farmers trapped in predatory integrator debt, break the monopolies that have suppressed agricultural competition and workers' wages for decades, and make nutritious food affordable and accessible to every American. It will do it while putting the next generation of farmers on the land as the current one retires, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs in processing, clean energy production, food distribution, and agricultural science.

Today a handful of corporations tell farmers what to grow, what to charge, and who to sell to. This plan breaks that grip and gives those choices back to farmers. A new public American Food Corporation will open grocery stores, kitchens, and delivery routes in the neighborhoods the supermarkets abandoned, stocked by regional farmers.

Government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) processing plants across rural America will give farmers somewhere else to sell, and federal food purchasing will be redirected to independent producers, forcing the four meatpacking giants that dominate the market to compete for farmers' business.

The country will pay any farmer who wants it a second income for hosting clean energy and water projects on land they keep. And it will change the way America raises animals. As the government winds down the subsidies and mandates that pour a tenth of the nation's cropland into car fuel (a market already shrinking as cars get more efficient and drivers switch to electric), millions of acres come free for raising animals on open pasture, and cutting the country's enormous food waste frees millions more. On that land the Mission phases out the worst kinds of factory farms, the operations that flush hog and dairy waste into open manure lagoons, the cages that pack in laying hens, and the contracts that trap chicken farmers in debt. Cleaner standards for the pollution and drug residues those operations produce phase in exactly as fast as the land and financing to replace them arrive, so no farmer is ordered to change with no way to pay for it. And on the land that comes free, along with the eroded acres that never should have been farmed, the Mission will plant trees and work them into farmland, so that American agriculture pulls more carbon out of the air than it puts in.

Domestic clean ammonia plants, running on hydrogen made with clean electricity from renewables and nuclear power, will produce American fertilizer and break agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels. RFC financing and fixed-price purchase agreements will anchor demand and drive costs to parity within the decade.

The country will also rebuild the public research and extension service that carries better farming methods to every farm, release new crop varieties and seeds as open-source public goods that any farmer can plant and save, and back new proteins made without animals.

The Farm Bill stays, but what it pays for changes. Congress is supposed to rewrite the bill every five years, but the last one, from 2018, was extended three times and lapsed in September 2026. The USDA runs its programs. The Mission's version will tie the tens of billions in yearly subsidies and crop insurance to keeping soil and water clean, pay farmers for the work of meeting those conditions, restore the food assistance Congress cut in 2025, and fix the crop insurance rules that punish farmers for trying something new. Attaching those conditions to money the government already spends can start right away. The RFC will do the building. As the federal lending agency at the heart of the Mission for America, the RFC will provide patient, long-term money for the things that take years to finish and would not survive a yearly fight over appropriations, such as clean-fertilizer plants, processing plants, the American Food Corporation's stores and kitchens, buying out farmers' predatory debt, and moving land to new uses. A national food reserve will steady prices by buying up surplus in good years and releasing it in lean ones.

Solutions

Solution 1: Feed Every American

The Mission will charter the American Food Corporation, a publicly owned food system financed by the RFC, with a single mandate, to make affordable, nutritious food accessible to every American regardless of zip code. The American Food Corporation will be built as a set of competing regional food companies under a shared federal charter, each running the grocery hubs, processing facilities, Ready-Made kitchens, and delivery fleets in its own territory, and each measured against the others on price, freshness, and food-desert coverage. As with the American Building Corporation in the Homes and Buildings Mission, competition among the regionals keeps the whole system from running on one plan at one speed, the way a national monopoly would. The stores will be stocked from regional farmers and designed to displace the poverty premium paid where no supermarket operates.

Public grocery hubs. The American Food Corporation will establish grocery stores in underserved communities, providing direct access to fresh produce, whole ingredients, and healthy meals at affordable prices. They will be full grocery stores, stocked from the regional food hub network and run at cost. That undercuts the poverty premium. Where no supermarket operates, residents buy staples from corner stores and gas stations that studies find charge more for the same items, often 10 to 54 percent more depending on the staple, with less fresh food on the shelf. Every hub will be equipped with modular freezer units (plug-and-play cold storage containers that can be deployed and operational in weeks, far faster than custom-built cold chain infrastructure). The hub network is also the front line of the effort to cut food waste (Solution 4). Surplus from regional producers flows into the hubs and the Ready-Made kitchens before it can spoil, and anything unfit for sale goes to animal feed or energy recovery. And because fresh produce must be on the shelf in Cleveland in February, the RFC will finance sunlit greenhouses and other season-extension growing near the hubs, plus regional produce processing and freezing capacity, so regional sourcing works year-round.

The Ready-Made Revolution. The American Food Corporation will manage a network of industrial-scale, chef-led kitchens producing healthy, nutrient-dense ready-made meals, affordable and available for takeout, delivery, or institutional purchase. Americans buy pre-made food because they are busy. If a nutritious, regionally sourced ready-meal costs the same as a fast-food combo, people will buy it. The kitchens will employ local cooks, source exclusively from the regional hub's farmer network, and operate at cost.

The federal EV delivery fleet. For Americans who cannot get to a store (the elderly, the disabled, rural communities beyond driving distance), the American Food Corporation will operate a federal delivery fleet of electric vehicles providing subscription or a la carte delivery of meals and fresh ingredients directly to homes. The fleet will double as a showcase for the EV chapter. Every delivery van will be American-built, zero-emission, and operated by an American Food Corporation employee earning the security wage (the Mission's federal wage floor, with stable pay and full benefits, pegged to competitive entry-level rates).

Restore the purchasing power. The Mission will restore the SNAP funding the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) cut, and every hub and delivery route will accept SNAP and WIC from the day it opens, with a produce match. Every benefit dollar spent on fruits and vegetables from the regional network will be matched by a second dollar, so families can afford more fresh food. The hubs are the supply side of food security. Nutrition assistance is the demand side, and restoring it turns the benefit into anchor demand for the regional food system. The same goes for produce prescriptions. When a doctor or health plan prescribes fresh food for diabetes or another diet-related condition, the benefit will be spendable at any hub.

A strategic food reserve. The American Food Corporation will hold a national reserve of storable staples, from grain to frozen protein and produce kept in the cold-chain network built above. In bumper years the reserve buys surplus from regional producers at a fair floor price, taking it off the market before the glut drives prices below the cost of growing the food; in short years it releases stock to keep prices affordable on the shelf. This is how the Mission steadies farm and food prices, by buying and selling actual food on both sides of the market. The reserve doubles as the nation's food-security buffer against drought, supply shocks, and the climate-driven harvest failures the Water mission is built to blunt.

The Mission Kitchen Retrofit. Many institutional kitchens, especially in schools, were built or stripped down over the past 30 years to heat and serve the pre-processed food that Sysco and its competitors sell. The RFC will finance the retrofit of every federal institutional kitchen for scratch cooking. To avoid years of construction delays, the RFC will mass-deploy modular kitchen inserts, pre-fabricated kitchen suites that drop into existing buildings, providing the equipment to process whole, fresh, regional ingredients. The retrofit will extend past the federal fence line. Private and nonprofit kitchens (hospitals, nursing homes, day cares, restaurants, and church and community kitchens) can apply for the same RFC financing to convert to scratch cooking, and those that take it will get favorable terms and a supply contract with their local American Food Corporation, so a kitchen that switches to cooking from scratch also gains a dependable source for the ingredients.

National PR campaign. The American Food Corporation will run a sustained national marketing campaign to build demand for what the Mission produces. The campaign will promote the food hub network and its regional products and reframe how Americans think about where their food comes from. Federal media buys, earned media from the president's bully pulpit, and partnerships with chefs and public figures will carry the campaign. The goal is to shift consumer expectations so that affordable, nutritious, regionally sourced food becomes the default choice. Following the model of the reality shows the Homes and Buildings Mission puts on the air, the campaign will back a small corps of celebrity chefs with their own cooking and food-travel shows, cooking the Mission's regional ingredients, visiting the farms and hubs that grow them, and making affordable, healthy, American-grown food something to aspire to.

What this delivers: A national network of public grocery hubs eliminating food deserts. Industrial kitchens producing affordable, nutritious ready-made meals from regional ingredients. Home delivery for every American who cannot reach a hub. Restored nutrition assistance, spendable at every hub from day one, paired with produce-prescription programs that turn fresh food into preventive medicine. Modernized kitchens at every military base, VA hospital, and federal facility, and at the schools, hospitals, and other institutions that opt in, enabling the procurement shift from Sysco to regional producers. A national marketing campaign building consumer demand for regional food. A national strategic food reserve that steadies prices for farmers and consumers alike and guards the food supply against drought and shortage.

Solution 2: Break the Monopolies

The food system is choked by monopoly at every layer. A handful of meatpackers control processing. Walmart and Costco dominate retail, with Walmart taking about 21 percent of American grocery spending and Costco about 8 percent. A few seed companies and a few fertilizer companies control the inputs that every American farmer is forced to buy each season. And increasingly, the same conglomerates span all of those layers at once. JBS is a meatpacker that has grown into a vertically integrated protein empire stretching into feed, leather, and logistics. Costco backward-integrated into chicken production. Walmart now runs its own milk processing plants and has moved into its own beef processing. Those conglomerates are what enforcement has to target. A narrow antitrust action against the Big Four packers, without simultaneously breaking the seed and fertilizer input monopolies and the retail giants that are the only buyer many farmers have (a monopsony, the buyer-side twin of a monopoly), just relocates the extraction to whatever layer is left standing.

Enforce the law, restore the rules, and extend them. The Packers and Stockyards Act is a century-old law that gives the USDA unusually strong power to police the meat industry, including the power to order a company to stop an abusive practice directly, without first having to win a lawsuit. On Day One, the president will direct the USDA to enforce whichever of these farmer-protection rules are still on the books, restore any that have been repealed or shelved, including the poultry payment rule finalized in January 2025, and rewrite the withdrawn rule that would have spelled out which practices count as unfair. The first targets are the four giant meatpackers, the poultry companies whose grower protections were shelved, Costco's chicken operation, and Walmart's beef business (its own cutting plant in Kansas and its minority stake in a Nebraska slaughter plant), all of which the law reaches. For poultry, where the USDA still has to go to court to act, the legislative package will give it the same direct authority it already has over the beef and pork packers. And because the law does not reach the seed and chemical companies, the grain traders, or the giant retailers that are often a farmer's only buyer, the president will direct the Justice Department and the FTC to bring antitrust cases against them, and Congress will extend the same fair-dealing standards across the whole food chain.

Make the cattle market visible. Ranchers today often cannot see what their own cattle are worth. As recently as 2005 more than half of fed cattle still sold in open, negotiated cash trades with reported prices. Last year only about 18 percent did. Most cattle now move under private formula contracts that set no price of their own and borrow it from a cash market too thin to set a reliable price, which hands pricing power to the four packers who buy and strips it from the farmers who sell. The Mission will force the price back into the open. Legislation will require the big packers to buy a set share of their weekly cattle on the competitive cash market, and stand up a public electronic exchange where large cattle purchases are posted at transparent prices. The same package will bar meatpackers from owning cattle more than a few days before slaughter, ending the captive supply that lets them starve the open market when it suits them, and it will ban the "tournament" pay system in poultry, under which a grower's paycheck is set by ranking the grower against neighboring growers on feed and chicks the company itself hands out.

End the checkoff racket. Farmers are compelled by law to pay into federal "checkoff" programs, nearly $1 billion a year in mandatory fees skimmed from the sale of milk, soybeans, hogs, cattle, and dozens of other products and meant to promote those products. In practice the programs are run by boards and contractors close to the biggest industry groups, and the record of misspending and self-dealing is long. The beef checkoff's main contractor had to repay misspent funds, the pork checkoff sent $60 million to the industry's lobbying arm for an old ad slogan, and the egg board was caught campaigning against a plant-based competitor. The Mission will make participation voluntary, bar checkoff funds from flowing to lobbying groups, and require a public accounting of where every dollar goes, so no farmer is taxed to bankroll the giants squeezing them.

Shift federal food procurement. The president will direct the federal government's own food purchasers (the military, the Bureau of Prisons, VA hospitals, and the USDA's commodity purchasing for school meals) to shift their food procurement to independent, regional, and RFC-backed processors over a five-year timeline. The legislative package will write the preference into procurement statute and add the incentives that pull non-federal institutional buyers along, such as higher school-meal reimbursements for districts that source regionally, and matching terms for universities and hospitals. Institutional procurement is the single most powerful near-term lever, because universities, prisons, and military bases buy enormous quantities of food on predictable schedules. Redirecting that demand to regional producers creates immediate revenue for independent farmers while breaking the integrators' lock on institutional markets.

GOCO processing plants. The RFC will build a distributed network of government-owned, contractor-operated meatpacking and processing plants in regions where independent farmers currently have no alternative to the Big Four. The plants will be sized for their regions, with large-scale GOCO facilities in major cattle and hog country, and smaller, simpler processing in communities where a massive industrial plant would be overkill, including mobile and modular units that can serve multiple small communities without the cost of permanent facilities. The RFC will finance all scales. Each GOCO plant will offer transparent, published pricing. Farmers will be able to sell to the GOCO plant or to the private market. But the existence of the GOCO option will force private packers to compete on price and fair treatment. None of these plants can open without federal meat inspectors on site, and the inspector shortage is already a major constraint on small processors. The Mission will fund a Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) hiring and training surge sized to the GOCO and cooperative rollout, with inspector staffing guaranteed in every RFC financing package, and it will expand the Cooperative Interstate Shipment program, which already lets state-inspected plants sell across state lines but only in 11 states and only for plants with 25 or fewer workers, by bringing in more states and raising the size limit.

Cooperative processor financing. When farmers band together to build their own processing plants, the RFC will back them with direct loans and equity. This deliberately replaces the old grant model, which failed them in two ways. Its matching requirements priced out the smallest processors, and the grants themselves could be frozen by a hostile administration, as they were in 2025, when reimbursements on already-awarded processing grants stopped mid-construction. The RFC will fund the cooperative; the cooperative will operate the facility; the farmers will own the result. This will build permanent, farmer-controlled infrastructure that no future administration can freeze or defund. The model is proven. Denmark built two of the world's most competitive food export sectors on farmer-owned cooperative processing (Arla, one of the largest dairy companies on earth, and Danish Crown, one of Europe's largest pork processors, both owned by the farmers who supply them), giving small producers the shared infrastructure and bargaining power that no individual farmer could afford alone.

What this delivers: PSA enforcement against the packers and poultry integrators, DOJ and FTC antitrust action against the input and retail monopolies, and legislation extending fair-dealing standards across the food chain. Cattle-market transparency through mandatory cash-market purchasing and a public price exchange, an end to captive supply and the poultry tournament system, and checkoff programs made voluntary and walled off from lobbying. A network of GOCO processing plants that gives independent farmers an alternative buyer at every scale, with the federal inspection workforce staffed so every new plant can open. Cooperative processing infrastructure financed without the bureaucratic failures of prior USDA programs.

Solution 3: Liberate the Farmers

Part of farmers' record debt is the structural debt of a contract system designed to extract. The USDA publishes no breakdown of how much of that debt belongs to contract farmers versus independent producers. But the trap is easy to see. Poultry and hog growers borrow heavily for buildings an integrator requires, and that debt ties them to a single buyer. Grain farmers face a version of the same squeeze, as heavy debt and thin margins push them to plant the same crop, usually corn or soybeans, across every acre, season after season, because it is the crop the lender, the insurer, and the elevator are set up for. When a farmer's only option is to borrow against a contract with a single integrator, the integrator controls every outcome. The Mission will get farmers out from under those contracts entirely.

The RFC Contractor Relief Facility. The RFC will establish a dedicated facility to refinance the crushing debt that locks contract farmers into a single integrator. In the dominant poultry model the grower's real burden is the mortgage on the specialized houses they built to the integrator's specifications, debt held by a commercial bank or a Farm Credit System lender, usually backed by an SBA or FSA loan guarantee, or lent directly by the FSA. The Facility will buy or refinance that debt directly from those lenders, often at a discount where it is distressed, and restructure it for the farmer with a lower interest rate, a longer term, and reduced principal where the original loan was inflated by integrator-mandated equipment specs and upgrades. Where the integrator does hold the paper directly (through input, equipment, or feed credit), the RFC will buy out that balance too. Refinancing the mortgage removes the fear that keeps growers silent, and the second half of the deal gives them somewhere else to sell. With the buyout comes a standing purchase agreement from the American Food Corporation (Solution 1), a guaranteed buyer at published fair prices for whatever the farmer chooses to sell into the regional food hub network, while the farmer stays free to sell to GOCO plants, cooperatives, or the private market. Sometimes a buyout will only pencil out if the farmer agrees to sell a set amount to the American Food Corporation for a few years, enough for the RFC to count on the revenue. Where that is needed, it will be a limited, time-bound agreement at published prices. The farmer keeps the land and the right to choose their buyers, with a debt they can actually carry, and the American Food Corporation gains a dependable supply.

The Transition Lease. The RFC will offer any farmer or rural landowner a long-term Transition Lease to host clean power infrastructure (solar arrays, wind turbines, and battery storage) on their land. Farmers coming out of the Contractor Relief Facility will get the first offers, because hosting income is the fastest way to make a restructured farm solvent, but the program is open to every farm. The farmer will remain the landowner. The RFC will install and maintain the equipment. The farmer will receive a guaranteed annual payment (a "Climate Dividend") for hosting the infrastructure. The lease gives farmers a steady second income that does not depend on commodity prices or integrator contracts, and gives the Clean Power mission access to rural land for grid expansion without the delays and political toxicity of eminent domain. The RFC will provide the capital to make the land productive for the 21st century. It is the kind of deal the oil and gas companies once dangled in front of rural landowners for drilling and fracking rights, except this one leaves the land and the water better off.

Leasing land for solar typically pays six to nine times what the same land earns in crop rent. USDA's average cash rent for cropland was $160 an acre in 2026, while solar leases now commonly run $1,000 an acre or more. A modern wind turbine typically pays its host $15,000 to $25,000 a year while the land around it stays in production. A grid-scale battery needs only a few acres, but because it must sit next to a power line, that corner can earn thousands of dollars an acre a year, more than almost anything else on the farm.

Agrivoltaics, farming practices combined with solar energy production on the same land, prove the concept already works. The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (renamed the National Laboratory of the Rockies in December 2025) counted nearly 600 agrivoltaic sites totaling about 10 gigawatts across 60,000 acres as of late 2024. Most are planted in pollinator habitat, more than 200 graze livestock, mostly sheep, and a few dozen grow crops beneath the panels. On the grazing sites, the animals maintain the vegetation beneath the panels, reducing maintenance costs while the land keeps producing food. The RFC will scale this model nationally.

Farmer-owned power. A farmer who wants to own the equipment can borrow from the RFC on the same long terms to build solar, wind, or batteries and sell the power to the grid. The RFC will also finance smaller systems a farm uses itself, solar panels and batteries that run its irrigation pumps, barns, and the electric machinery described below, so the farm cuts its own power bill.

Earn from water, too. Through the Water mission's Water Infrastructure Leases, the RFC will pay farmers a guaranteed annual sum to flood suitable fields in wet years so the water soaks into the aquifer below, and to host recharge basins, wells, pumps, and canals. In the over-promised Western basins, starting with the Colorado, the states' new compacts will cap each river at what it actually carries and convert every existing water right into shares of that cap. The farmer owns the shares, separate from the land, and can buy, sell, or lease them through a public exchange run by each basin's authority. Water a farmer does not use stays in their account for next year, which ends "use it or lose it." Conserving will never again put a right at risk. No farm will be forced to sell, but the RFC will stand ready to buy. It will purchase shares outright from farmers who want out and lease water from farmers who want to keep farming, for a dry year or for part of every season, irrigating in spring and leaving the late-summer water in the stream. A farmer can also keep farming on less water by switching to less thirsty crops or adopting deficit irrigation (deliberately watering less than the crop's full requirement, which costs little yield in orchards, vineyards, and late-season alfalfa), and lease out what they save. Only water the crop actually stops consuming counts as saved, because better irrigation hardware on its own rarely lowers what a farm consumes and often raises it. Every seller will have to keep retired ground covered and the dust down, and the RFC will pay farmers to go further by planting native grasses, restoring habitat, or running managed grazing. The farmers and towns that stay are protected too. An irrigation district can charge a departing seller an exit fee for their part of the canals left behind, and a community fund paid from every purchase will support the farmworkers and businesses that lose work. The Water chapter explains how the markets run.

RFC direct lending for rural producers. Beyond the Contractor Relief Facility's direct buyouts, the RFC will channel capital to small and independent producers through Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and rural community banks that already know and serve their borrowers, backing their lending with RFC loan-loss reserves and guarantees so every federal dollar leverages several more in private credit, and lending directly for the larger projects local institutions cannot carry alone.

Machinery electrification. The RFC will fund a production scale-up for American-made electric tractors and heavy farm machinery, and the USDA will manage a national trade-in program to swap diesel equipment for zero-emission alternatives over the decade. Electric farm equipment will eliminate diesel costs, reduce maintenance (electric motors have far fewer moving parts than diesel engines), and end the exhaust emissions that farmworkers breathe every day. The trade-in program will provide fair value for the old equipment and financing terms that make the switch affordable. Some of the heaviest equipment (the largest tractors and combines that run long days under heavy load) cannot yet match diesel on battery power alone, and for that work diesel will stay in service longer. But the same battery and heavy-vehicle research driving the Trucking and EV missions will narrow that gap over the course of the Mission, and the trade-in program will move each class of equipment over as soon as an electric version can do the job.

The people who work the land. More than 2 million people work for hire on American farms in a given year, doing the daily work this plan depends on, and the pasture systems, processing plants, kitchens, and regional produce the Mission builds will need even more of them. Every RFC financing package and every American Food Corporation supply contract will carry the security wage, enforceable heat and safety protection, and decent housing where employers provide it, the same conditions the delivery fleet already carries. The procurement lever that breaks the monopolies also raises the floor for the people the food system has underpaid longest. Farmworker training and benefits will run through the Workforce mission's hubs.

Who farms the land next. The average American producer is 58, and a large share of the country's farmland will change hands over the next two decades, at the same time this Mission frees tens of millions of acres and adds new per-acre income to rural land. Without a plan, that land and that income flow to the investor buyers already assembling farmland portfolios. The RFC will run a beginning-farmer land facility offering long-term, low-interest purchase financing, a land-link program matching retiring owners with entering farmers, and a right of first refusal for working farmers on land the RFC has financed or restructured. Title-clearing assistance for heirs' property will open every program in this chapter to the families tangled titles have locked out. Heirs' property is family land passed down without formal wills, and the USDA calls it the leading cause of involuntary Black land loss. Black families owned about 16 million acres around 1910 and have since lost about 90 percent of it. Transition Lease terms will favor owner-operators, so that hosting income goes to farm families. And tribal nations and tribal producers will be eligible on equal terms for every program in this chapter, with the RFC working through tribal governments and Native CDFIs to clear the federal trust-land and leasing barriers that keep tribal land from being farmed by tribal producers.

Crop insurance reform. Most farmers rely on federally subsidized crop insurance to survive a bad year, but the program has grown into a maze that quietly punishes anyone who tries to farm differently. A grower's coverage is based on the grower's own past harvests, so a farmer who tries a new crop or an unfamiliar rotation and takes a smaller yield for a season or two watches their future coverage shrink, a powerful reason never to change anything. The insurance is written crop by crop, so a farmer who diversifies has to buy and document a separate policy for every product, and the one plan built for diversified farms, Whole Farm Revenue Protection, is buried in so much paperwork that almost no one uses it. The USDA has fixed part of the problem already. Since 2019, farmers who plant cover crops keep their coverage as long as they follow USDA's guidelines for ending the cover crop, and since 2023 the full set of standard conservation practices is formally protected too. The Mission will finish the job and make the whole system uniform and sensible. Coverage will be figured on longer averages that reward the steadier yields healthy soil produces, so a single off year counts for less. That plan already insures an entire farm under one policy, underwritten from the tax returns the farmer already files, but only about 2,000 farms use it. The Mission will make it simple enough that farmers actually use it, with the extra forms stripped out and the revenue caps lifted, so it becomes the default for any diversified farm. The protection will extend to new and diversified operations. Ranchers on pasture can already buy drought coverage, but it pays on rainfall measured at a distant weather grid, which can differ widely from what the rancher actually lost, and no insurance covers a herd against a killing heat wave. The Mission will fix both. And it will close the loophole that lets growers in some counties erase years of bad harvests from their records to inflate their payouts, a quirk that today rewards planting crops the land cannot really support.

Attach strings to the subsidies we already pay. The government hands farmers tens of billions of dollars a year, and most of it comes with almost no conditions. The fastest way to clean up American farming is to change that. If you want the check, you have to farm in a way that protects the soil and the water. Since 1985, a rule called conservation compliance has required farmers to protect their most erosion-prone land and stop draining wetlands in order to stay eligible for federal support, and since 2014 that requirement has covered crop insurance subsidies too. The problem is that the bar is low and barely enforced. The Mission will raise it and mean it. To keep getting federal money, a farm will have to keep its soil covered through the winter, keep strips of grass and trees along its streams and ditches, and use no more fertilizer than the crop can actually take up. The Mission will pay most or all of the cost of meeting the standard and phase it in on a clear schedule, so it rises without driving anyone off the land. The same holds for every standard in this chapter, from runoff limits to the end of the worst factory farms. None will take effect without generous public money to meet it. It needs no new program, because it is simply a condition on money already being spent, and it does right away what the RFC's financing does over time. It stops paying farmers to farm in the ways that are poisoning the water in their own towns.

Commodity subsidy reform. Federal farm support pours most of its money into a handful of commodity crops, chiefly corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, and peanuts. Crop insurance subsidies grow with every acre planted, so the system rewards planting more of the same crops whether or not markets need the supply or the land can sustain the output. The OBBBA added about $66 billion in farm spending over ten years, most of it higher commodity payments and crop insurance subsidies, while cutting about $186 billion from SNAP, taking food from the people who need it to subsidize production of crops the country does not need more of. Congress will shift that money toward sustainable practices and diversified production, open to any farmer and any crop, and the RFC will lend for the cooperative infrastructure and equipment those farms need. A farmer who wants to grow vegetables, raise pastured livestock, plant cover crops, or transition to a diversified operation will finally have the financing to do it. Some farm advocates would go the other way and set federal price floors, paying farmers to idle their acres until prices rise. That approach was tried for decades. The mid-twentieth-century regime of price-support loans and production controls produced chronic surpluses, mounting storage costs, and benefits that flowed mostly to the largest operations, and Congress spent a generation dismantling most of it. The Mission pays for the transition to things worth growing, and steadies prices through the strategic food reserve and the guaranteed American Food Corporation purchasing in Solution 1.

Pay for what the public gets back. Other countries have already made this shift. England is phasing out its old payments for simply owning farmland, cutting them to zero by 2027, and paying farmers for specific work such as cover crops, hedgerows, and land set aside for wildlife. More than 50,000 farm businesses signed up, covering over half of England's farmland. It also shows what to avoid. The program ran through its budget and closed to new applicants without warning in 2025, and it reopened in 2026 only with a cap on each farm. Switzerland has paid this way since the 1990s, and every payment depends on the whole farm meeting an environmental standard, including keeping at least 7 percent of its land as habitat for wildlife. The Mission will follow the Swiss approach, with payments tied to measured results on each farm and a budget Congress sets in advance, so a farmer who signs up is not left stranded.

What a farm can host and earn. One farm can host clean power, store water, and earn conservation payments all at once. A farmer can lease a corner of the land to the RFC for solar panels, a wind turbine, or a battery and keep farming the rest, or borrow from the RFC to own them outright. In wet years the same farm can flood its fields or host a recharge basin under a Water Infrastructure Lease, and in the Western basins it can sell or lease the water shares it holds. On the land that stays in production, the RFC will pay for cover crops, no-till planting, prairie strips, grass and tree strips along streams, restored wetlands, fertilizer plans and precision equipment, and natural pest control. It will pay for the fencing, water lines, and shade that move animals onto pasture, for windbreaks and trees on worn-out ground, and for digesters that turn manure into biogas and fertilizer, all laid out in Solution 4. Electric tractors come through the trade-in program. The conditions on federal subsidies set the floor every farm has to meet, the Mission pays most or all of the cost of meeting it, and the payments for measured results reward the farms that go further. A farm can combine as many of these as it likes.

What this delivers: A debt buyout facility that frees farmers from the debt tying them to predatory integrators. A Transition Lease program, open to every farmer, that turns farmland into a platform for the clean energy buildout while keeping farmers on their land with guaranteed income. Payments for storing water, and income from leasing or selling it, that add more checks from the same land. Distributed lending through rural banks that reaches every corner of the farm economy. Electrified farm machinery eliminating diesel costs and ending the exhaust farmworkers breathe every day. Crop insurance that stops punishing farmers for doing the right thing. Conservation conditions attached to the tens of billions in farm support the government already pays, so existing money rewards soil and water protection from day one. Commodity subsidies redirected from overproduction to sustainable, diversified farming. Labor standards and the security wage carried into every RFC-financed corner of the food economy. And a land pipeline that puts the next generation of farmers, including tribal producers and heirs'-property owners, on the land as the current generation retires.

Solution 4: Dismantle Toxic Factory Farming

Factory farming, the concentration of thousands of animals in CAFOs, exists because the economics of land and feed make it the cheapest way to produce meat at scale. The environmental damage is severe. Nutrient runoff from CAFOs and the fertilized grain acreage that feeds them helps drive the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, antibiotic overuse breeds resistant bacteria, and the facilities themselves are public health hazards for surrounding communities. The Mission will end the worst categories of factory farming outright, and dramatically shrink the rest. The four categories the Mission will phase out completely:

• Hog factories built on manure pits and lagoons. Operations that pack thousands of hogs indoors and flush their waste into open-air pits and ponds, like the Smithfield-style lagoon farms of eastern North Carolina and the under-barn pits that hold most of Iowa's nearly 25 million hogs. The pits leak, spray, and overflow into drinking water and nearby homes; in eastern North Carolina the neighbors are disproportionately Black, and in Iowa the harm falls on rural towns and their private wells.
• Contract chicken houses. The Tyson and Pilgrim's Pride model that buries farmers in million-dollar debt to a single buyer while cramming tens of thousands of birds into a shed thick with ammonia, under conditions the grower has no power to change.
• Cage egg farms. Hens kept in stacked wire cages with less room apiece than a sheet of paper, the confinement voters banned by wide margins in California and Massachusetts, and that about 10 states have moved to outlaw. Washington has done nothing for the hens. The Justice Department sued California in July 2025 to strike down its egg rules, a suit a federal judge dismissed in March 2026, and in April 2026 the House passed a farm bill that would void California's and Massachusetts' cage laws. The Senate's version leaves that provision out.
• Mega-dairies on manure lagoons. The 5,000-cow-and-up operations whose waste ponds have fouled groundwater across Idaho, Texas, New Mexico, and California's Central Valley.

Smaller-scale beef finishing, regional dairy at humane stocking densities, and family-scale poultry continue, regulated and improved. The Mission gets there by changing the economics of land and feed.

The ethanol and soybean land opportunity. Two transition shocks are about to land on the same Midwestern acreage at the same time. Corn ethanol consumes roughly 30 million acres gross (about 8 to 10 percent of all U.S. cropland, and about 20 million acres net after the one-third of each bushel that returns to livestock feed as distillers grains) to produce about 10 percent of the country's gasoline by volume and roughly 4 percent of total transportation energy. The USDA forecasts about 5.65 billion bushels of corn going to ethanol in the 2026/27 marketing year. That market rests mostly on mandate and subsidy (exports, a record 13 percent of production in 2025, are the exception), and the Mission will wind both down on a published schedule while more efficient cars and EV adoption steadily shrink the gasoline market ethanol is blended into. At the same time, the ground is shifting under American soybean farmers. China, by far the biggest buyer, now purchases in fits and starts tied to trade-war truces; tariffs keep steering its orders to Brazil instead; and Brazil plants more soybeans every year. The American share of that market is shrinking, and it is not coming back.

The Mission treats both shocks as one transition. As ethanol demand falls and the soybean export market contracts, the RFC will fund soil health transition payments for any farmer converting freed corn or soybean acreage to pasture-raised livestock systems, regional fruit and vegetable production, and other diversified food crops. The same RFC transition payments, the same agronomic support, the same guaranteed American Food Corporation purchase contracts will be available to corn farmers exiting ethanol and to soybean farmers losing ground in the China market. This is the land that makes the worst factory farming physically replaceable, because animals can exit lagoon-and-warehouse operations and move onto pasture without converting a single acre of non-agricultural land. The acreage adds up using only the changes the Mission itself makes. Winding down the ethanol mandate frees the roughly 20 million net acres described above. Cutting food waste in half will free even more. Uneaten food occupies about 16 percent of American cropland, roughly 60 million acres, so halving it recovers on the order of 30 million cropland-equivalent acres. A structurally shrinking soybean-export market to China (roughly a fifth of the crop today) will strand another 10 to 20 million acres looking for a new use. Against that supply, moving the animals out of the confinement systems this Mission phases out requires far less. At pasture densities already proven at commercial scale, the displaced hogs need roughly 6 to 25 million acres, the broilers about 18, laying hens under 2, and the dairy cows leaving mega-lagoon operations 3 to 8. That is a gross total near 30 to 50 million acres, comfortably inside the 60 to 70 million acres the ethanol, food-waste, and soybean transitions free together.

The real figure is lower still, because most of these animals are already fed from cropland. Every hog and chicken in confinement eats grain grown on land this transition would count twice unless the accounting is careful. As animals move to pasture, the feed-corn and feed-soy acreage that fed them comes free, and the food-waste-to-feed pipeline and lower-intensity pasture diets cut that dedicated feed demand further. For pasture dairy, where forage directly replaces feed grain, the net new land is close to a wash. So the new pasture actually needed is below the gross figure (on the order of 25 to 40 million acres), met by the freed cropland with margin to spare.

Two limits keep these numbers realistic. First, the Mission does not try to move American beef onto grass. A national grass-finished beef system would demand roughly 30 percent more cattle and more land than the freed cropland could ever supply (existing pasture can carry only about a quarter of current beef production), which is why beef finishing continues under this plan, regulated and improved. Second, where the freed acreage arrives more slowly than the animals need to move, the phase-out slows with it. The runoff standards, the confinement bans, and the RFC transition payments roll out on timelines matched to the pasture acreage actually available, so no farmer is ever handed a mandate without the land and the financing to meet it.

What pasture means here. Pasture livestock in this chapter means rotational pasture and silvopasture (grazing animals among trees on the same land) at stocking rates that USDA's conservation service and established pasture operators have already proven at commercial scale, roughly an eighth to a half acre for each hog being fattened for slaughter, 200 to 500 laying hens per acre, 500 meat chickens per acre per year, and one to two acres per pasture dairy cow. Pigs and chickens still eat grain out on pasture; the land savings come from feeding each animal a little less intensively, a modest dip in total volume, and the food-waste-to-feed pipeline described below. Small traditional farms that give each animal wide open room will keep serving niche premium markets, but the Mission's livestock economy runs on the same logic as the rest of the chapter, industrial-scale regional production.

Pasture infrastructure and a paired environmental backstop. The RFC will subsidize every step of the move from CAFO to pasture, including fencing, water systems, rotational grazing infrastructure, soil rebuilding, and the climate resilience the open range demands, from silvopasture shade and windbreaks to drought-year forage reserves and on-farm water storage for herds. Moving flocks outdoors also raises exposure to highly pathogenic avian influenza, which spreads through contact with wild birds, so the RFC will fund the biosecurity that decentralized poultry requires. That means covered feed and water, rapid on-farm testing, regional rapid-response capacity, and outbreak indemnity for farmers who lose a flock. As the freed acreage and the financing roll out together, the EPA will phase in zero-tolerance standards for nutrient runoff and antibiotic residues from animal feeding operations on the schedule set out above. On the same schedule, the FDA will end the routine use of medically important antibiotics in livestock, so the drugs are given only to treat sick animals. And because the humane, environmental, and labor standards this Mission requires raise the cost of producing food the right way, imported meat, dairy, and produce will have to meet those same standards to reach American shelves, with country-of-origin labeling restored, so the domestic transition is not undercut by goods made to lower standards abroad.

Stop the runoff at the source. The backstop extends beyond animal operations, because much of the nitrate in farm-country drinking water comes from synthetic fertilizer on row crops. Through the Agricultural Water Quality Program it runs with the Water mission, the RFC will finance the practices that keep nutrients on the field and out of the water, including nutrient management plans that match fertilizer application to what the crop actually takes up, buffer zones of grass and trees along streams and drainage ditches, cover crops that hold soil and nitrogen through the winter, and precision application equipment that puts fertilizer right where the plant needs it. It will also pay for no-till planting, which seeds the new crop straight into last year's unplowed stubble, so the soil stays in place and holds more water. It will pay for prairie strips, rows of native grasses and flowers planted through a crop field. In Iowa State field trials, turning a tenth of a field into prairie strips cut soil loss by about 95 percent and nitrogen and phosphorus losses by 70 percent or more. And it will pay farmers to restore wetlands on the wet corners and drained ground that rarely yield a good crop, where the plants and soil strip nitrate out of the water before it reaches a stream. The same cost-share will finance integrated pest management (controlling pests with crop rotation, beneficial insects, and targeted treatment) and biological alternatives to synthetic pesticides, on the phase-out schedules the Toxins mission's Investigative Branch sets for each pesticide. Grants and technical assistance will make the practices free for the farmer to adopt, and the crop insurance reform in Solution 3 removes the penalty for planting cover crops. As domestic clean ammonia (Solution 5) replaces gas-based fertilizer, the goal is cleaner fertilizer, less of it, applied better.

Cut food waste in half. About 30 percent of food produced in the United States goes unsold or uneaten, about 70 million tons a year, most of it in grocery stores, restaurants, and homes, the equivalent output of tens of millions of acres of cropland growing food no one eats. The American Food Corporation will absorb surplus from regional producers into the hub network and the Ready-Made kitchens before it can spoil, with the modular cold-storage and home-delivery infrastructure already built for Solution 1 doubling as a national surplus-recovery network. Federal procurement and FDA rules will standardize date labels, replacing the consumer-confusing patchwork of "best by," "sell by," and "use by" that drives household waste.

Recycle waste streams into feed and energy. Federal law already permits recycling food waste into pork production (the Swine Health Protection Act of 1980 requires a license and heat treatment), but the practice withered under state-level bans and thin margins, and today almost none of the food thrown out by stores, restaurants, and households returns to the feed chain. Japan shows what a modern version looks like. Licensed processors heat-treat food waste at certified temperatures under a national "Ecofeed" certification, and by 2007 Japan was recycling more than a third of its food-industry waste into animal feed. (South Korea had passed 40 percent by then, before restricting the practice for pigs after its 2019 African swine fever outbreak, the disease risk that makes strict heat treatment and inspection essential.) The Mission will scale the licensed model nationally, preempting the state bans, modernizing the inspection regime, and routing safely processed food scraps and the food-processing byproducts not already fed to animals (bakery and produce waste, vegetable scraps) into pasture animal feed. Crop residues currently burned or wasted will be redirected to ruminant grazing systems. The RFC will finance anaerobic digestion facilities (sealed tanks where microbes break down organic waste without oxygen) that turn unavoidable agricultural waste into biogas and concentrated organic fertilizer, substituting at the margin for both natural gas and synthetic nitrogen. Recycling waste back into the animal-feed chain reduces the dedicated feed-crop acreage the pasture transition has to displace; the digesters turn what is left into the energy and fertilizer the food system needs anyway.

Mine land agriculture. Pilot projects in West Virginia, such as one on a reclaimed mountaintop mine in Mingo County, are using rotational grazing (cycling hogs, goats, and chickens across the same land) to clear invasive brush and start building soil on compacted mine land. Because most livestock parasites stick to one kind of animal, grazing different species together also helps break parasite cycles. The aim is productive farmland on ground that now grows little but scrub. The RFC will finance mine land agricultural programs in Appalachia and other former coal regions as part of the broader land transition.

Plant trees where they pay their way. Cutting fertilizer and moving animals onto pasture lowers agriculture's emissions; planting trees is how the sector goes further and starts pulling carbon back out of the air. Two practices do most of the work. Agroforestry, which means working trees into farmland itself through silvopasture, alley cropping, windbreaks, and buffers of trees along streams, is rated among the highest-capacity ways to store carbon on working land, and it pays the farmer twice, in the shade and shelter that lift livestock and crop yields and in a second product to sell. Reforestation of land that never should have been cropped, the eroded, marginal, and abandoned acres, stores more still. The RFC will finance both as part of the land transition, and the two draw on different land, so neither competes with the pasture conversion. Agroforestry is woven into acres that stay in production, while reforestation takes the eroded and marginal ground. The legislative package will stand up regional agroforestry centers, as proposed in the Agriculture Resilience Act, to supply farmers the seedlings, the designs, and the know-how that agroforestry demands and that no seed company sells. Less fertilizer and more trees, taken together, are what move American agriculture from one of the country's largest sources of emissions toward a sector that stores more carbon than it releases. This chapter grows the trees on and around farms and raises the seedlings for the wider push. The larger national effort, replanting forests well beyond the farm gate and counting the carbon they draw down, runs through the Planetary Cooldown mission, which finances reforestation at scale and verifies every stored ton, including the tons stored on farmland.

What this delivers: The largest land-use transition in modern American agricultural history. Roughly 20 million net acres freed from corn ethanol, plus stranded soybean export acreage and the cropland freed by halving food waste, converted to pasture, regional produce, and diversified food production, with food waste recycled into feed and energy. The four worst forms of factory farming (open-lagoon and deep-pit hog CAFOs, broiler-house contract growing, battery-cage egg production, and mega-dairy lagoons) phased out by making pasture-based production economically superior. Environmental standards and source-control programs that protect farm-country drinking water from CAFO and row-crop runoff alike. Agroforestry and reforestation across freed and marginal acreage that carry the sector from a net source of emissions toward net carbon storage. Mine land agriculture creating food-producing farmland from industrial wastelands.

Solution 5: The Green Ammonia Sprint

The Green Ammonia Sprint will build America's first green fertilizer industry at national scale, making ammonia with clean electricity. Today a plant in Louisiana makes lower-carbon "blue" ammonia from gas by capturing and burying part of its carbon, but no plant makes ammonia with clean electricity at commercial scale. The biggest attempt, a 20-megawatt electrolyzer project at the same Louisiana site, was cancelled in 2025. The RFC will finance green ammonia plants across the agricultural heartland, producing the nitrogen fertilizer American farms depend on from clean electricity and water. Today, every bushel of corn and every loaf of bread traces back to a supply chain tied to global gas markets. When gas prices spike, fertilizer prices spike, food prices spike, and American farmers absorb the cost or pass it to consumers. Green ammonia (produced using hydrogen generated by splitting water with clean electricity, whether that electricity comes from renewables or nuclear plants) uses the same chemistry as fossil ammonia. The only difference is where the hydrogen comes from.

RFC-financed green ammonia plants. The RFC will finance the construction of domestic green ammonia production facilities in the agricultural heartland, close to the farms that use the product, integrated with the clean power and hydrogen infrastructure being built by the Energy, Hydrogen, and Nuclear chapters. The target is 34 gigawatts of dedicated electrolyzer capacity producing hydrogen for 18.3 million metric tons of clean ammonia annually, powered by roughly 180 terawatt-hours of clean electricity. The target is sized to replace all the ammonia the country uses. Counting domestic production and imports, minus exports, that is about 18 million metric tons a year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (about 15 million metric tons of contained nitrogen). That figure does not include the urea and UAN, nitrogen fertilizers made mostly from gas abroad, that the country imports already finished.

Fixed-price purchase agreements. The RFC will guarantee purchase of domestic green ammonia at a fixed price that bridges the cost premium, up to the 18.3 million metric ton annual target. The guaranteed demand will justify the capital investment, de-risk the project for private co-investors, and create the production volume needed to drive costs down the learning curve. As production scales and manufacturing improves, the RFC purchase price declines on a published schedule. The goal is cost parity within the decade, at which point the purchase guarantee is no longer needed and the RFC steps back.

Ammonia is the hydrogen mission's largest customer. The Hydrogen chapter has to build electrolyzers at national scale, and no one builds them at that scale without a buyer for the hydrogen. The ammonia plants will be the largest guaranteed buyer that mission has. The hydrogen producers will know they have a customer (the ammonia plants), and the ammonia plants will know they have financing (the RFC).

One molecule, two uses. Ammonia is also one of the most efficient industrial refrigerants, designated R717. The Mission will require natural refrigerants in all RFC-funded cold storage, with low-charge ammonia in the regional warehouses and processing plants and CO₂ in the small freezer units deployed to the American Food Corporation's grocery hubs (Solution 1). This will create a closed-loop domestic economy. American clean electricity will produce hydrogen, hydrogen will produce ammonia, ammonia will fertilize American farms and refrigerate American food. One molecule, manufactured domestically, will replace both natural gas (for fertilizer) and synthetic refrigerants (for cold storage).

What this delivers: A domestic green ammonia industry that frees American food production from fossil fuel volatility. 34 gigawatts of dedicated electrolyzer capacity, the anchor demand that makes the broader hydrogen buildout investable. A fertilizer supply chain that runs on American clean power. A closed-loop ammonia economy that fertilizes crops and refrigerates food with the same domestically produced molecule.

Solution 6: The Cornucopia Project

The Cornucopia Project is the Mission's investment in the food itself. The other solutions fix how food is grown, processed, and distributed. This one backs new kinds of food (proteins made in fermentation tanks without animals, seaweed farmed in the open ocean, and gene-edited crops released as open-source public goods), and it rebuilds the public science and extension service that carry every advance in this chapter to the farm.

Advanced proteins. The RFC will take equity stakes in domestic bio-manufacturing and cultured meat firms, and build GOCO fermentation facilities targeting price parity with conventional meat within the decade. Precision fermentation (using microorganisms in industrial tanks to produce specific proteins, fats, and other food components without animals) can supplement the pasture-based livestock system with protein production that requires a small fraction of the land and water, and less energy, than animal agriculture. The RFC's equity positions ensure that taxpayers share in the upside and that the technology is developed as an American industry.

Ocean agriculture. In coordination with the Oceans chapter, the RFC will back seaweed farming aimed at two products, a feed additive that cuts the methane cattle belch out, and kelp-based soil amendments that help crops take up nutrients. The methane additive comes from a red seaweed, Asparagopsis. Small amounts in cattle feed have cut digestive methane by 80 percent or more in feedlot trials, though grazing animals, which eat it less reliably, have seen cuts closer to 40 percent. The technology is promising, but it is still sold only in small volumes, mostly in Australia, and nowhere near enough to reach a national herd. The FDA has not approved it, and the one product sold in the United States rests on the company's own safety finding. At hundreds of dollars per animal a year, it does not yet pay its way without help. So the Mission treats it as a bet worth making. The RFC will fund the production and processing capacity and offer advance-purchase commitments to pull the additive across the gap between promising trials and reliable supply, and if it proves out, distribute it through the Solution 4 pasture packages. Kelp, the better-established product, needs no freshwater, fertilizer, or farmland, and the RFC will buy kelp amendments for the nutrient-management cost-share programs in Solution 4. None of the chapter's core targets depend on the methane additive succeeding; it is upside if it does.

CRISPR and open-source super-foods. The United States will deploy gene-editing technology (CRISPR, a tool that allows scientists to make precise changes to an organism's DNA) to engineer nutrient-dense crop varieties optimized for climate resilience, reduced water consumption, and higher nutritional value. These varieties will be developed as open-source public goods, with patents held by the government and licensed freely to any farmer. This will break the corporate seed monopoly that forces farmers to buy proprietary varieties every season. When the breakthroughs are public, the benefits will be universal. The same public-goods principle extends to seed itself. The Mission will fund public seed banks and a national germplasm collection (a living library of crop genetic diversity, the raw material every future variety is bred from) and rebuild the public plant-breeding programs that once developed most American crop varieties, and still breed most of the nation's wheat, before the work shifted to a handful of patent-holding companies. Public breeding capacity fell by roughly 30 percent between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s and has kept falling since. Farmers will be able to save, replant, and exchange public-variety seed without paying a license every season.

Public science and a farmer-first extension service. The breakthroughs in this solution, and the practice changes throughout this chapter, only matter if they reach the people working the land. For a century that was the job of the land-grant universities and the Cooperative Extension service, the public agronomists in nearly every farm county helping farmers put what works into practice. That system still exists, but federal extension funding has fallen sharply in real terms, by more than half since the 1970s, and the extension workforce has shrunk by about a quarter since its 1979 peak. Growing reliance on industry money has pulled its priorities toward the companies that sell farmers their inputs. The Mission will rebuild it with restored federal funding for public agricultural research at the land-grant universities, walled off from the input companies whose products that research is supposed to evaluate, and an extension corps re-staffed and retrained to carry cover crops, rotational grazing, nutrient management, and diversified rotations to every farm that wants them. Public research develops the better practice; public extension is how it gets to the field. Extension hiring and training will run through the Workforce mission's hubs.

What this delivers: A domestic advanced protein industry approaching price parity with conventional meat. Ocean agriculture supplying kelp soil amendments, and a funded bet on a methane-cutting feed additive. Gene-edited super-foods, public seed banks, and rebuilt public plant breeding, all released as open-source public goods that break the seed monopoly. A restored public agricultural research base and a farmer-first extension service that carries every better practice in this chapter to the field.

Presidential Leadership

During the campaign, the candidate will go to farm country and explain how political failure and corporate corruption broke the American food system. They will explain that the federal government has both the power and the obligation to fix it. The candidate will also start the long-lead work early, recruiting a respected independent-processing operator and a fertilizer-industry engineer to begin scouting GOCO plant sites and ammonia supply chains before the election.

During the transition, the president-elect's team will draft the full legislative package so it lands on the Hill in the first 100 days, starting with the RFC Contractor Relief Facility authorization, the American Food Corporation charter, and the green ammonia plant financing framework. The team will name the USDA Secretary and the heads of the RFC's agriculture division and the American Food Corporation. The RFC division will go to a proven cooperative or independent-processing operator. The founding executives who stand up the American Food Corporation's competing regional companies will be drawn from people who have run grocery or food-service logistics at scale. Conversations will begin with state attorneys general about coordinating environmental enforcement and with rural mayors and county commissioners about the first GOCO processing plant sites. And the deal-making will start before the inauguration. Volunteer mission leads will convene the cooperative federations, prospective GOCO contractor-operators, and electrolyzer and ammonia plant builders to pre-negotiate the first sites, the first plant deals, and contingent purchase commitments, so the Day One announcements follow from work already done. The team will identify the communities with the highest concentrations of contract farmers and the worst food desert coverage as the first wave of RFC intervention.

On Day One, the president will sign executive orders directing the USDA to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act rules still in effect, open expedited rulemaking to restore the ones repealed or shelved, and open PSA investigations into the Big Four packers, the poultry integrators whose grower protections were shelved, and the retail chains' poultry and beef operations. The DOJ and FTC will open coordinated antitrust action against the seed and chemical input firms, the grain traders, and the retail monopsonies the PSA cannot touch. Federal food buying will be directed toward independent, regional, and RFC-financed processors over five years. The USDA will be directed to tighten enforcement of the conservation compliance rules already on the books and open the rulemaking to raise the standard they set. The RFC will announce the first round of GOCO processing plant sites and green ammonia plant financing commitments, with named locations, published timelines, and capital committed, in communities that have been told for decades that nothing will change. The president will also use the Defense Production Act to prioritize and finance mass production of the modular processing units, freezer units, kitchen inserts, and electric delivery vans the American Food Corporation runs on, jump-starting its physical build-out while the RFC's longer-term financing fills in behind it.

The full legislative package will go to Congress within the first 100 days:

• The RFC Contractor Relief Facility authorization to begin buying out distressed farm debt
• The American Food Corporation charter with startup capital and operational authority
• Restoration of the SNAP funding the OBBBA cut, spendable at every hub
• The statutory procurement preference for independent and regional processors, with the school-meal incentives that pull non-federal buyers along
• The green ammonia plant financing framework with fixed-price purchase agreement authority
• The Transition Lease program and the beginning-farmer land facility codified into statute
• Amendments giving the USDA direct enforcement authority over poultry integrators and extending the Packers and Stockyards Act's fair-dealing standards across the food chain
• The cattle-market transparency rules mandating cash-market purchasing and a public price exchange, barring captive supply, and ending the poultry tournament system
• The checkoff-program overhaul making participation voluntary and walling the fees off from lobbying
• The Swine Health Protection Act modernization that scales licensed food-waste-to-feed processing nationally and preempts the state bans
• A higher, enforced conservation compliance standard, so the commodity payments, crop insurance subsidies, and disaster aid that already require protecting erodible land and wetlands also require basic soil and water practices on every acre
• The crop-insurance overhaul that figures coverage on longer averages, makes Whole Farm Revenue Protection simple enough for diversified farms to actually use, covers pasture livestock against heat losses, and closes the yield-exclusion loophole
• Authorization for the regional agroforestry centers that supply farmers the seedlings, designs, and technical help for working trees into farmland
• Authorization for the American Food Corporation to operate a national strategic food reserve
• Restored funding for public agricultural research at the land-grant universities and for the Cooperative Extension service
• A rewritten Farm Bill that carries the SNAP restoration, the higher conservation compliance standard, and the crop-insurance overhaul, and shifts commodity subsidies to support sustainable, independent, and diversified farming

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

Foundations by Year 1 (2030)

• Enabling legislation enacted; Biden-era PSA rules enforced where still in effect, with rulemaking underway to restore any that were repealed or shelved; USDA investigations opened into the Big Four and the poultry integrators; DOJ and FTC antitrust action launched against the seed and chemical input monopolies, grain traders, and retail monopsonies
• Cattle-market transparency and mandatory cash-purchase rules enacted, the poultry tournament system banned, captive supply barred, and checkoff programs made voluntary and barred from lobbying
• Federal food procurement transition underway; first RFC-financed institutional kitchen retrofits underway
• First GOCO processing plants sited and breaking ground in the highest-priority regions; FSIS inspector hiring surge funded and underway
• American Food Corporation chartered and capitalized; first regional food hubs piloting in highest-need food deserts, with the first Ready-Made kitchens and EV delivery pilots alongside them; SNAP restored and accepted at every hub, with the first produce-prescription programs running through the hubs
• Beginning-farmer land facility and heirs' property title-clearing assistance operating
• RFC Contractor Relief Facility stood up; first tranche of distressed farm mortgages purchased and restructured
• Transition Lease program launched, open to every farmer with first offers to Contractor Relief Facility participants; first agrivoltaic installations breaking ground on RFC-contracted farmland, with the Climate Dividend payment structure published
• Water Infrastructure Lease enrollment opening; "use it or lose it" ended for farmers on federal water projects and the RFC's first leases of farm water signed under existing state law; Agricultural Water Quality Program cost-share launching, all jointly with the Water mission
• RFC direct lending to small and independent farmers operating through CDFIs and rural banks across the first wave of farm states
• First green ammonia plants sited and breaking ground in the agricultural heartland; RFC fixed-price purchase agreements published
• Soil health transition payments flowing to the first farmers converting corn ethanol acreage to pasture; first agroforestry and reforestation financing flowing to freed and marginal acreage, and regional agroforestry centers established
• National agricultural waste reduction program launched, with federal date-label standardization, food-waste-to-feed licensing scaled and modernized, RFC anaerobic digestion financing online
• Crop insurance reform enacted, with coverage figured on longer averages, Whole Farm Revenue Protection simplified so diversified farms can actually use it, the yield-exclusion loophole closed, and diversified farming no longer penalized
• Conservation compliance strengthened, with the higher standard phasing in and enforcement stepped up across federal farm support; first cover-crop, buffer-strip, and nutrient-plan requirements phased in with cost-share
• National strategic food reserve authorized; first grain and cold-storage stocks acquired
• Public agricultural research funding restored and firewalled from industry; Cooperative Extension corps rehiring and retraining begun
• Federal gene-editing research for public crop varieties expanded at USDA labs and land-grant universities; public seed banks and germplasm collection funded; first open-source crop varieties in development

Scale Up by Year 5 (2034)

• GOCO processing network operational in 15 to 20 regions; Big Four market share declining as independent farmers gain alternatives
• American Food Corporation operating food hubs and grocery outlets in 100+ food desert communities
• Contractor Relief Facility has restructured billions in farm debt; contract farmer default rates falling; RFC direct lending through CDFIs and rural banks now reaching small farmers nationwide
• Agrivoltaic installations on RFC-contracted farmland producing power at scale; Transition Leases generating Climate Dividend income for thousands of farm families; farms in priority basins earning payments for storing water, and income from leasing or selling it, alongside the energy income
• Roughly 34 GW of electrolyzers built and running for green ammonia, in step with the Hydrogen mission's Year 5 build; cost per ton declining along the learning curve
• Electric tractor trade-in program underway; first wave of diesel equipment replaced
• Ethanol acreage conversion accelerating as the mandate and subsidy wind-down bites and EV adoption cuts fuel demand; millions of acres transitioning to pasture, regional produce, and diversified food crops
• Agroforestry and reforestation scaling across freed and marginal acreage, with regional agroforestry centers supplying seedlings and designs at volume
• First CAFO environmental standards in effect on the worst categories (open-lagoon and deep-pit hog operations, mega-dairies); compliance pathways funded by RFC; agricultural waste reduction program operational at scale
• First commercial-scale RFC-backed protein fermentation plants running; kelp farming pilot operations in coordination with Oceans mission
• Higher conservation compliance standard in force and enforced across all federal farm support; strategic food reserve operating on both sides of the market to steady prices; rebuilt extension corps delivering practice change in the field
• Regional cold chain infrastructure expanding; food hub network growing; Ready-Made meals and EV delivery operating across the hub communities
• Mine land agriculture programs operational in Appalachian former coal regions

The Mission Delivered by Year 10 (2039)

• Big Four market share below 50 percent and falling; competitive processing market with GOCO plants, cooperatives, and reformed private processors competing on price and quality
• Farm sector debt at sustainable levels; Contractor Relief Facility loans performing and beginning to repay
• Transition Lease program covers millions of acres; energy and water income a standard part of farm income
• Green ammonia at cost parity with fossil ammonia; the ammonia American farms use made at home from clean power
• Most small and mid-size farm machinery electric; diesel left mainly in the heaviest tractors and combines
• Corn ethanol acreage largely converted; the hogs, poultry, and dairy cows leaving the worst operations raised on pasture at scale; the four worst forms of factory farming phased out; total CAFO population reduced by more than half
• National food waste cut by half; food-waste-to-feed pipeline operational; anaerobic digestion network producing biogas and organic fertilizer at scale
• Feed cropland no longer needed by the confinement operations converted to food-crop production, pasture, conservation, and clean energy infrastructure
• Environmental standards for nutrient runoff and antibiotics fully enforced
• Agroforestry and reforestation established across freed and marginal farmland; combined with the shift to clean, reduced-volume fertilizer, the agricultural sector has moved from emitting carbon toward storing it
• American Food Corporation operating in every state; food deserts substantially eliminated; home delivery available to every American who cannot reach a hub
• Advanced proteins approaching price parity with conventional meat; open-source CRISPR crop varieties and public-bred seed in commercial cultivation
• Commodity payments, crop insurance subsidies, and disaster aid all tied to soil and water protection through the higher conservation compliance standard; the strategic food reserve steadying prices and securing the supply against drought and shock; public research and extension restored as the delivery system for continuous practice improvement
• Hundreds of thousands employed across the new food economy, in GOCO plants, food hubs and kitchens, the delivery fleet, ammonia plants, and agrivoltaic installations
• Regional food system operational, with cold chain, aggregation, and distribution connecting local producers to local markets nationwide
• The American food system is competitive, independent, clean-powered, and abundant