February 12, 2026<\/b> \u2013 Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Wednesday announced a plan to address an issue the Trump administration is calling \u201cagricultural lawfare.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rollins made the announcement at an event with officials from other federal agencies and a group of farmers and ranchers, coinciding with the release of the Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework<\/a>. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines agricultural lawfare as \u201cthe use of administrative, legal, and legislative government systems to adversely impact farmers, ranchers, and agricultural producers.\u201d<\/p>\n Farmers at the event described a range of situations, including the use of eminent domain by states and utilities to seize farmland and one case<\/a> in which former President Joe Biden\u2019s USDA filed criminal charges against a farm over a fenceline dispute. (The Trump administration dropped those charges in April.)<\/p>\n At the event, Rollins called the problem \u201csystemic,\u201d but could not say how many farms may be impacted. \u201cWe are looking into it right now,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Under the plan, the USDA will establish a senior advisor on agricultural lawfare in the Office of the Secretary and previously launched a portal<\/a> where farmers can report problems. The plan lists a variety of deregulation efforts already underway, including the rollback of environmental permitting and water pollution rules and the repeal<\/a> of a rule that prohibits road construction on National Forest lands.<\/p>\n Rollins said that one of her top priorities is getting the Supreme Court to overturn a 2005 ruling<\/a> that established that governments can seize private property if it\u2019s in the public interest.<\/p>\n As part of the plan, the USDA\u2019s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will speed up applications for conservation easements. The easements currently help farmers preserve farmland by permanently restricting development on the land, but Rollins did not say how they relate to lawfare.<\/p>\n Instead, Rollins suggested the lawfare agenda would dismantle<\/a> the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts of the Biden administration. \u201cInstead of us supporting the people that we need to support, we were supporting an ideology that had nothing to do with agriculture,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The grant contracts<\/a> the USDA cancelled last year served Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized groups and included<\/a> land stewardship workshops for ranchers, projects to link consumers to small farms, and training for<\/a> young and beginning farmers.<\/p>\n Rollins also labeled a California equity task force report<\/a> as an example of lawfare. The framework states that the USDA \u201cwill continue to conduct oversight on agricultural land redistributions in the name of \u2018equity.\u2019\u201d (Link to this post<\/a>.)<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The post USDA Debuts Plan to End \u2018Agricultural Lawfare\u2019<\/a> appeared first on Civil Eats<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" February 12, 2026 \u2013 Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Wednesday announced a plan to address…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/authorwebsitepublishing.xyz\/demo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}