Draft MAHA Report Embraces Conservation Agriculture, Doesn’t Target Pesticides

By John Dobberstein, Senior Editor
Published August 25, 2025 on No-Till Farmer

A draft of the Make America Healthy Again Commission’s final report circulating around Washington doesn’t appear to target pesticides, which would spell a potentially big win for production agriculture.

But the “Making Children Healthy Again” report does direct the EPA, USDA and other federal agencies to clear the way for increased adoption of conservation agriculture as a means to reform the nation’s food system through reduced regulations, increased program funding and new partnerships with the private sector.

The final report is expected to be released soon. If the conclusions are the same as those contained in the draft report it will likely not please many environmental groups, but will be a relief to farm stakeholders who were concerned about draconian regulations that would burden producers

Four Major Concerns

The draft document, shared recently by Politico, identifies four core problems the MAHA Commission believes is driving childhood chronic disease: poor diet; lack of physical activity and chronic stress; over-medicalization; and “chemical exposure” — although pesticides aren’t specifically identified as the root cause.

The draft report doesn’t call for an outright ban on pesticides or mention specific products or technologies such as glyphosate or atrazine. It also doesn’t mandate farmers to shift to certain farming practices such as organic farming to accomplish a reduction in pesticide use.

The report does conclude children are, “exposed to an increasing number of synthetic chemicals,” some of which have been linked to developmental issues and chronic disease. “The current regulatory framework should be continually evaluated to ensure that chemicals and other exposures do not interact together to pose a threat to the health of our children.”

The Commission did direct the EPA, USDA and National Institutes of Health to develop a “research and evaluation framework” for cumulative exposure across chemical classes. EPA research will focus on using non-animal methods (NAMs) and computational tools to improve methods for evaluating human health and environmental risks of chemical contaminants.

EPA will focus on pesticides acting through a common mode of action to fulfill its statutory obligations under FIFRA. EPA will also partner with food and agricultural stakeholders to ensure the public, “has awareness and confidence in EPA’s robust pesticide review procedures and how that relates to the limiting of risk for users and the general public.”

The report also identifies farming technology and deregulation as a potential solution to reducing pesticide use.

More Precision Needed

The Commission directs the USDA and EPA to prioritize research and programs to help growers adopt precision agricultural techniques, including remote sensing and precision application technologies that will help growers further reduce pesticide usage.

“These research and programs should emphasize ways in which precision technology can help to decrease pesticide volumes and have a significant financial benefit for growers,” the report asserts.

The report further directs the USDA and EPA to launch a partnership with “private-sector innovators” to ensure continued investment in new approaches and technologies to allow even more targeted and precise pesticide applications.

“These partnerships should focus on precision application methods, including targeted drone applications, computer-assisted targeted spray technology, robotic monitoring and related innovations,” the report says.

The report also identifies “soil health and stewardship” as a solution to addressing childhood health issues, with the USDA and EPA working to, “promote and incentivize farming solutions that focus on soil health.”

To keep these solutions voluntary, the Commission calls for expansion of the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), while avoiding burdensome mandates and keeping decision making, “local and practical with solutions from the farm, not Washington, D.C.”

Better Soil Health Desired

The Commission wants to strengthen food security and production by prioritizing “shovel ready conservation projects” already planned by farmers, and prioritizing practices that farmers “want and trust” such as prescribed grazing, soil health systems and water management.

MAHA leaders also demanded reforms to the EPA’s approval processes, “for the full range of products to protects against weeds, pests and disease to increase the timely availability of more innovative growing solutions for farmers.”

For growers who have tried to eliminate the middleman in food distribution and partnered or purchased facilities could also see some relief. The Commission suggested increased categorical exclusions for, “low-volume meat processing operations” from water discharge and hazardous waste permitting.

The EPA would be directed to work with states to fast-track approvals to strengthen regional meat infrastructure and improve access to fresh protein in schools and communities.

The EPA would also, “ensure flexibility for farms to manage manure and process water without triggering industrial-grade permitting requirements and avoiding the forced mandates of costly technologies or practices that do not consider geography, weather, species, and operation size.”

Read the original article on No-Till Farmer »

The Impact of a Ghostwritten Paper on the Fate of Glyphosate

By Alexander Kauroy and Naomi Oreskes
Published August 15, 2025 on Undark Magazine

By October of 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency must release its decision on the use of America’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate. It will mark a milestone in the 15-year registration review cycle for pesticides (the umbrella legal term in the U.S. which includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and rodenticides) mandated under federal law. The deadline for the decision, originally scheduled for 2022, was extended to 2026 after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to reconsider its preliminary conclusion that glyphosate was “not likely” to cause cancer.

Fewer EPA Staffers Makes It Tougher

This time, however, the EPA heads into the review under dramatically reduced capacity. President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposes a 55 percent cut for the agency. In July 2025, the Trump administration began to dismantle the agency’s Office of Research and Development, with plans to lay off more than 3,700 employees — roughly three‑quarters of its research staff and about a fifth of its total workforce. Former EPA administrators warn that this will strip the agency of its in‑house toxicologists, chemists, and epidemiologists — the experts who generate much of the primary data that undergird almost every rule the agency writes.

Besides increasing the possibility that glyphosate and reviews of other pesticides will be further delayed, what else can we expect from this situation? Already, we’ve seen numerous reversals of policy and cancellations of data collection projects under the new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect more antiregulatory moves.

Limiting the agency’s internal scientific capacity increases its reliance on external expertise and scientific literature, so the agency will have to trust the robustness of published research. But is the scientific record robust enough?

Peer review is supposed to safeguard the accuracy of published science, including keeping it clean from contamination by paper mills, undisclosed conflicts of interest, manipulated data, corporate misconduct, and other forms of malpractice. Unfortunately, the scientific literature has proven far too easy to compromise.

No Risk to Humans

Consider a single review paper published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology in 2000 about Roundup, the trade name for Monsanto’s widely used glyphosate-based herbicide. Authored by three researchers — Gary M. Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian C. Munro — who disclosed no conflicts of interest, the paper concluded that “under present and expected conditions of use, Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans.”

In 2017, internal corporate emails released during federal litigation against Monsanto revealed that the paper was largely conceived and drafted by Monsanto employees. (The company denies this, but the evidence is overwhelming.) In these communications, employees praised one another for contributing to the manuscript, including “writing” it — despite not being listed as authors and only thanked in the acknowledgements for providing “scientific support.”

In short, the paper was ghostwritten — a clear violation of any imaginable standard of scientific ethics.

A Monsanto employee expressed hope that the review would become “‘the’ reference on Roundup and glyphosate safety,” and it did. In our recent research published in Environmental Science and Policy, we show that this paper is in the top 0.1 percent of cited academic literature on glyphosate. The vast majority of papers that cite it offer no acknowledgment of its questionable origins. This fraudulent paper has become deeply integrated into and influential in the scientific record.

Written by Monsanto?

In 2017, internal corporate emails released during federal litigation against Monsanto revealed that the paper was largely conceived and drafted by Monsanto employees.

The paper’s influence has spread far beyond academia. Government documents from public health agencies around the world — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health New Zealand: Te Whatu Ora — cite this ghostwritten paper without caveats even after the 2017 revelations, affecting policy and shaping public perception of glyphosate’s safety. A 2011 Canadian Forest Service publication, for instance, answers a question about whether glyphosate causes cancer and is an endocrine disruptor with the following:

No. Based on the weight of available scientific evidence, several regulatory and independent scientific review panels conclude that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic, does not cause birth defects or genetic alterations, and does not act as an endocrine disruptor in whole animal systems under realistic exposure regimes.

The answer references the paper and continues, saying “Such reviews conducted by highly qualified professional toxicologists and risk assessment specialists provide the most credible and reliable sources of information.”

The public has also been influenced by this paper. Who among us hasn’t turned to Wikipedia for information? It is a frequent top Google search result, and now it is part of the training datasets for many artificial intelligence models. The paper is mentioned in popular Wikipedia articles about Roundup and glyphosate-based herbicides (though there are ongoing attempts to remove it). We analyzed the editing history of these entries and found that although several editors had attempted to note the review’s ghostwritten origins, these notes were systematically excluded by higher level editors.

On Wikipedia’s discussion pages, users report how influential these Wikipedia articles are in their local communities. One comment reads: “The content of this article is dangerous. I work in the agricultural sector in Southern France. I was at a meeting with some farmers discussing safety when a guy addressed the crowd and literally quoted this article stating that glyphosate does not cause cancer and is less dangerous than table salt.” It goes on to say, “This article is used by active farmers as an excuse not [to] bother with safety equipment and appropriate practices.”

More Authorative Scientific Papers Exist

In 2018, after the revelations, some Wikipedia editors expressed frustration when the paper persisted as a reference: “I’m not sure why editors are pushing so hard for inclusion of this particular source when multiple non-controversial and more authoritative sources exist for this content.”

Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines encourage citing peer-reviewed literature, but the rules on which sources should be used are flexible. Its editors justify including the paper on the grounds that it was published in a peer-reviewed journal and has never been retracted.

The journal the paper appeared in had been previously implicated in scandals for publishing industry-friendly studies, specifically ones for the tobacco industry. One 2017 analysis showed that 96 percent of the tobacco or nicotine papers in this journal published between January 2013 and June 2015 had authors with tobacco industry ties, and none of the papers drew negative conclusions. Since then, the journal has changed editors and now states: “Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, as the journal serving developments for improvement of human health and environment, will not consider manuscripts that have been supported by tobacco companies.”

The paper is mentioned in popular Wikipedia articles about Roundup and glyphosate herbicides, though there are ongoing attempts to remove it).

But what about papers supported by other companies with an interest in promoting their products, even in the face of science that shows their harms? What about companies that are trying deliberately to manipulate science and regulatory decision-making?

Asking For a Retraction

We have formally submitted a retraction request for the Roundup paper to the current editors of the journal, and they have promised to review the case. But this is just one example among what seems to be a growing number of papers contaminating the scientific literature. And it’s doubtful that retractions alone can compensate for the sheer volume of questionable research now circulating.

Glyphosate, moreover, is just one of many herbicides and other pesticides for which the EPA is expected to make regulatory decisions in the near future. Even before the current dismantling of its scientific infrastructure, the EPA’s stance on glyphosate had drawn criticism for being out of step with the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, which classifies glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Adding further complexity is the involvement of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a central figure in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. He served as co-counsel in a 2017 lawsuit against Monsanto in state court in Alameda County, California, representing plaintiffs seeking damages for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma allegedly caused by exposure to Roundup. Regulation of agricultural chemicals also figured prominently in his presidential campaign. Some of his recent statements, however, raise questions about whether he still intends to prioritize the issue.

In the current environment, options for recourse may be limited. The public comment period on glyphosate is expected to open later this year or early next year. During the last round of consultation in 2019, the EPA received 283,300 comments across 12,000 individual submissions. Some studies suggest that public attention during these periods can influence regulatory decisions. Leaving a substantive comment can matter. But how is the public expected to write one when any attempt to “do your own research“ leads straight into a compromised literature, whether through search or AI conversation, both of which heavily rely on Wikipedia and the academic corpus?

Scientists Need to Step Forward

In the long run, the scientific community must step up to protect the integrity of science as an independent and objective enterprise. With governmental scientific capacity decimated, individual researchers, scientific unions, and professional associations must take a stronger stand to ensure that scientific literature remains a reliable foundation for critical decisions.

Alexander Kaurov is a Ph.D. astrophysicist and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington, specializing in computational analysis of scientific discourse.

Naomi Oreskes is a historian of science at Harvard University whose scholarship traces corporate influence on research and regulation, and author of the books “Merchants of Doubt” and “Why Trust Science?”

Read the original article on Undark Magazine »

Greenpeace Misleading People on Glyphosate

Published August 22, 2025 on Federated Farmers of New Zealand

Greenpeace is once again manufacturing outrage and trying to scare New Zealanders with alarmist headlines that have no basis in science, the Federated Farmers of New Lealand group says.

“This time, they’ve turned their attention to glyphosate, one of the most widely used and well-researched weedkillers in the world,” Federated Farmers arable chair David Birkett says.

“They claim a proposed change to New Zealand’s allowed glyphosate levels is a threat to public health, but it’s complete and utter nonsense that they’re peddling. 

Claims Have Nothing to Do with Food Safety

“Our food system is one of the safest in the world. Greenpeace knows that, but fear is more useful to them than facts.” 

Birkett says the latest campaign from Greenpeace is just another chapter in a long-running saga of scaremongering and political spin.

“For decades, Greenpeace has spread misinformation about dairy farmers – now they’ve shifted their attention to arable farmers. 

“Once again, they’ve lied to the public, and it’s hardworking Kiwi farmers who pay the price.

“This is not a food safety issue – it’s a publicity stunt.” 

One of the central claims from Greenpeace is a possible increase to glyphosate levels will result in the chemical ending up in people’s cereal bowls. 

But Birkett says what’s completely missing from their messaging is that this change, even if it goes ahead, won’t affect what’s actually on Kiwi tables.

“Let me be very clear: New Zealand-grown grain for human food – like bread and breakfast cereal – is not treated with glyphosate. 

“Under strict contracts with local mills, our farmers aren’t allowed to use it on those crops,” he says.

Public’s Trust Slammed

“That’s not changing. Those contracts will remain in place, so even if rules shift on paper, your porridge and your sandwich bread if made from Kiwi grain are still free from glyphosate.”

Federated Farmers says the real insult here is that Greenpeace is painting a false picture of how New Zealand food is grown – damaging public trust and dragging honest farmers through the mud for the sake of a headline.

“It makes me wonder what the folks at Greenpeace have been putting in their porridge,” Birkett says. 

“Our growers are following the rules, and our food is safe, but Greenpeace would rather stoke fear than deal honestly in facts.”

He says the rules around glyphosate – like all food safety standards – are set by the Ministry for Primary Industries, based on science and expert risk assessments.

“These decisions are made by scientists, experts who dedicate their careers to keeping our food safe. 

“They would never approve anything that posed a real risk to human health,” Birkett says.

“We trust MPI, we follow the science, and if MPI changes the rules, farmers will comply – just like we always have.”

What makes Greenpeace’s outrage particularly hollow, Birkett says, is their silence on imported grain.

“Up to 70% of the wheat products eaten in New Zealand, like bread and biscuits, are made from imported milling wheat,” he says.

“Those imports are allowed to contain glyphosate residues at levels three times higher than what MPI is proposing for New Zealand grain.

“So, where’s the outrage about that?

“It’s not there – because it doesn’t fit Greenpeace’s narrative. They’d rather go after hardworking Kiwi farmers who are already doing the right thing.”

Federated Farmers says Kiwis can be confident their cereals are safe.

“Our food is safe, and it always has been,” Birkett says. 

“When it comes to questions about food safety, Kiwis should take advice from scientists and public health experts – not ranting Greenpeace activists trying to boost donations.”

Take Away Their Charitable Benefits

He says this latest stunt is further proof that Greenpeace no longer deserves charitable status in New Zealand.

“This is not a charity acting in the public good. It’s an extreme activist group waging a vicious misinformation campaign to score cheap political points and raise money,” Birkett says.

“That campaign is incredibly dangerous. It’s undermining confidence in the food system, scaring families, and they just don’t seem to care – as long as donations keep flowing.”

He says it’s time to hold the group accountable and strip them of their charitable status. 

“Greenpeace has crossed a line. If they want to campaign, fine – but do it honestly. Don’t spread misinformation about the hard-working farming families who feed this country.

“In the meantime, Kiwis can trust that our grains are safe, our farmers are doing the right thing, and the real food safety experts, not political activists, are making the rules.”

In April, Federated Farmers lodged a formal complaint with Charities Services requesting they open an inquiry into Greenpeace’s conduct and eligibility for charitable status.

Read the original article on Federated Farmers of New Zealand »

More Potential Cases of Glyphosate Resistance Found in Italian Ryegrass

By Jason Pole
Published August 21, 2025 on United Kingdom's Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB)

At the start of 2025, the Weed Resistance Action Group (WRAG) confirmed the first three cases of glyphosate resistance in the United Kingdom, which were all in Italian ryegrass populations.

These populations demonstrated significantly reduced control from appropriate doses of glyphosate. A fourth population also showed decreased glyphosate sensitivity.

Following widespread publicity, 10 more samples of Italian rye-grass (populations from eight farms) were identified for rapid screening, where live plant samples were potted up and sprayed with appropriate glyphosate doses.

A high risk of resistance was identified at three farms. Population offspring will now be tested to confirm the resistance status.

All resistance cases were from high-risk crop management situations and likely evolved from independent selections, so resistance was not physically spread.

In the spring 2026, scientists will screen more populations in work funded by Bayer Crop Science.

Read the original article on Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) »

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