Who Needs Glyphosate? – OpEd

March 12, 2026 
By Joel F. Salatin

President Donald Trump’s executive order of Feb. 18 invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to ensure US glyphosate production and availability is neither necessary nor helpful. HHS Secretary and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) founder Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s endorsement of the order has created a firestorm in that health-interested base.

On Feb. 22, Kennedy conducted triage explanations to his base with this statement:

“Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals.” He went on to post that “if these inputs disappeared overnight, crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms even beyond what we are witnessing today. The consequences would be disastrous.”

Kennedy then described the many weed control alternatives that are being developed. All of us farmers in the nonchemical community already use many of these innovative alternatives: lasers, AI-driven wipes, steam nozzles, cover crop crimping, and soil balancing. The grain farmers I patronize for our chicken and pig feeds do not use glyphosate or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We pay a slight premium, but these farmers have great yields and are certainly not going out of business like many more conventional operations.

This showdown has been a long time developing. On Apr. 14, 2025, The Wall Street Journal’s Patrick Thomas reported that “Bayer said it could stop producing the world’s most popular weed killer unless it gets court protection against lawsuits blaming the herbicide for causing cancer.” Bayer and friends tried to slip in liability protection in an appropriations bill earlier this year, but the effort failed.

With thousands of lawsuits, many of them winning, still scheduled for court hearings, and its multibillion-dollar war chest to fight them and/or settle them impacting profits, Bayer, manufacturer of the popular Roundup brand, is desperate to shed this liability. Most of the time, things like this executive order happen after long-term wrangling and cogitating behind the curtain, and I suspect that is the case now.

At the risk of irritating my MAHA friends, I take umbrage with this whole sordid affair because glyphosate is a deadly poison, is not needed, and certainly does not jeopardize American security. Its use is primarily on genetically modified corn and soybeans. But consider that nearly half of America’s corn production goes to ethanol fuel; it has nothing to do with food.

What about soybeans? Half of them are exported and not even used in America. Roughly 40 percent of glyphosate is made by Bayer in the United States, Belgium, and Argentina, which are all friendlies. If we eliminated half the corn and half the soybeans because they aren’t needed for food, we’d only need half the glyphosate, which is nearly all manufactured either domestically or in friendly nations.

That’s giving the benefit of the doubt to the inherent need for glyphosate, which is a dubious argument. It’s like demanding special concessions for cocaine because some addicts have an inherent need for cocaine. While they may be addicted, arguing that funding and fueling their continued addiction is necessary for their survival is dubious at best and erroneous at worst.

The real national security breach is that we have thousands of farmers producing unnecessary corn and soybeans and a federal government determined to keep them in business.

Herbivores don’t need grain; they were not built to eat grain any more than children were built to eat candy bars. If we drop the exports and drop the fuel, America’s need for corn and soybeans is only 30 percent of current production, which can easily be met by the glyphosate produced domestically and in friendly nations. The point is none of the scaremongering and none of the math adds up or makes sense.

Something else is going on here, and it has nothing to do with national defense. It has to do with offering a shield of protection to arguably the most egregious agricultural chemical on the planet. It’s also a financial windfall for Bayer.

The catastrophic predictions in this scenario have no basis in fact. First, China has not threatened to withhold glyphosate from the world market. Second, an immediate cutoff by any manufacturer is not imminent—except Bayer indicating it could terminate the herbicide due to lawsuits. But that has nothing to do with China. Third, neither RFK, Jr. nor President Trump offered a timeline of phaseout that would be acceptable.

In other words, if the real goal is a phaseout, which RFK, Jr.’s long X post indicates, then why not offer a timeline that would be acceptable? One year? Two years? How about three? But neither President Trump nor RFK, Jr. even mentions a time when glyphosate would not be used, which begs the question of whether the real agenda is a forever encouragement to use this horrid chemical on America’s food.

If the president wants to truly address the nation’s food security, he would issue a Food Emancipation Proclamation executive order freeing America’s homesteaders and small farmers from tyrannical, scale-prejudicial regulations. If two consenting adults want to exercise freedom of choice to engage in a voluntary food transaction, they should not need a bureaucrat’s permission to do so.

Unleashing neighbor-to-neighbor unregulated food commerce on the marketplace would show just how unnecessary half the corn and soybeans really are. Who will tell these farmers, destroying the soil and waterways, that their production is not needed and they could do better reverting to perennial prairie polycultures growing beef?

Well-managed and not overgrazed, to be sure, but financially profitable and necessary to meet the shortage of red meat in America.

Thousands of small farmers stand ready to serve their neighbors with food outside the industrial food oligarchy.

As a small farmer, I should not need a $500,000 facility to make one chicken pot pie to sell to a fellow church member mom to feed her kids something without artificial food additives. An army of clean-food entrepreneurial farmers stands ready to serve our nation with food; an army of government agents prohibits them from engaging the market. That, dear folks, is a national security problem.

This article appeared at Brownstone Institute and was republished from Epoch Times

Joel F. Salatin

Joel F. Salatin is an American farmer, lecturer, and author. Salatin raises livestock on his Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. Meat from the farm is sold by direct marketing to consumers and restaurants.