The National Mission for American Farming

A handful of corporations decide what Americans eat and what farmers earn. Nineteen million Americans live with no supermarket within reach, more than a mile away in the cities and more than 10 miles out in the country. The farmers who feed everyone else carry the highest debt on record, much of it borrowed to build to the specifications of the processors who set the prices they are paid. Most of the country's meat, milk, and eggs come from factory farms whose routine antibiotic use breeds drug-resistant germs and whose waste fouls the water. And the fertilizer that grows the nation's food is made from natural gas, so every spike in the gas market becomes a spike at the grocery store. The Mission for American Farming will rebuild the food system end to end, with affordable, healthy food within every family's reach, buyers and fair prices for the farmers who grow it, and clean American fertilizer to replace the kind made from natural gas.

This mission will:

• Feed every American through the American Food Corporation, a publicly owned network of regional food companies that opens real grocery stores in the neighborhoods the supermarkets abandoned, cooks affordable ready-made meals from regional ingredients, delivers to anyone who cannot reach a store, accepts SNAP and WIC at every hub from the day it opens, restores the food assistance Congress cut in 2025, and holds a national food reserve that steadies prices in good years and lean ones.
• Break the monopolies that control meat, seeds, fertilizer, and grocery shelves, with antitrust enforcement across the food chain and a network of publicly owned processing plants that give independent farmers an alternative buyer for the first time in a generation.
• Buy out the farmers trapped in the predatory debt that ties them to a single processor, tie the subsidies farmers already receive to protecting their soil and water while paying for the work it takes, and pay any farmer who wants it a second income for hosting clean energy and water infrastructure on land they keep and still farm, and, in the West, buy water from farmers who choose to sell.
• End the worst forms of factory farming, and the routine antibiotic use that keeps them running, by changing the economics of land and feed. Corn-ethanol and stranded export acreage, plus the land freed by halving food waste, will go to pasture and regional food, trees will be planted on eroded ground, and the farm runoff that has fouled drinking water across farm country will be cleaned up.
• Build America's first green fertilizer industry at national scale, producing ammonia from clean power and water and breaking agriculture's dependence on natural gas and the fossil fuel market.
• Fund the next generation of American food and the public science behind it, including advanced proteins grown without animals, gene-edited crops and public seed banks released as open-source public goods that break the corporate seed monopoly, and a rebuilt agricultural research and extension service that carries better practices to every farm.

The food system stays rigged because it is monopolized at every layer at once, and because the Farm Bill pays farmers to keep polluting. When one administration writes rules to protect contract farmers, the next freezes them. The poultry payment rule finalized in early 2025 was shelved before it could take effect, and in 2026 the USDA moved to repeal it and two other farmer protections. Federal grants for independent processing were frozen mid-construction. A narrow fix at one layer just moves the extraction to the next.

The Mission's answer works on two fronts. Congress will keep the Farm Bill but tie the tens of billions in yearly subsidies and crop insurance to keeping soil and water clean, with public money covering the cost of every standard it sets. And the Reconstruction Finance Corporation will provide the patient public capital no single budget cycle can freeze, financing the debt buyouts, the processing plants, the clean-ammonia industry, the land transition, and the American Food Corporation. Farmland becomes a platform that pays several times over, with food, clean power, and water storage from the same working acres.

The payoff is a food economy that is competitive, independent, clean-powered, and abundant, with hundreds of thousands of jobs across processing, clean energy, distribution, and agricultural science; the next generation of farmers put on the land as the current one retires; drinking water in farm country made safe again; and nutritious food within every American's reach and every family's budget. The country already grows enough to feed everyone well. The Mission makes sure the food reaches them.