On Tuesday, September 9, 2025, the long-awaited Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy Report was finally released, nearly a month later than its originally scheduled date of August 12. The delay was likely caused by extensive lobbying by affected industries, including in agriculture. So how successful were they?
As far as pesticides go, the MAHA Strategy is a clear win for the chemical companies. It recommends that the EPA “work to reform the approval process for the full range of chemical and biologic products to protect against weeds, pests, and disease to increase the timely availability of more innovative growing solutions for farmers.” This means reducing regulations so companies can get new pesticides on the market faster, including “discarding animal testing requirements.”
Similarly, the report actually recommends funding more research on pesticide application, under the guise of “precision agriculture.” While precision agriculture may enable farmers to apply pesticides slightly more efficiently, it’s certainly not going to eliminate them or make them less toxic.
Finally, the report tasks the EPA with working “to ensure the public has awareness and confidence in EPA’s pesticide robust review procedures and how that relates to the limiting of risk for users and the general public and informs continual improvement.” It’s hard to see how approving new chemicals quicker with less rigorous testing is going to increase consumer confidence.
In addition to pesticide manufacturers, agricultural researchers and tech companies are the other clear winners in this strategy. Most of the recommendations are for more research, and most of that research includes using AI, databases, and computer modeling. The call for research on various chemicals will likely postpone any sort of regulation of those chemicals until the studies are completed, which is usually a multi-year process.
But the news may not be all bad for eco-ag. Under the deregulation section are recommendations to “eliminate unnecessary bureaucratic barriers for Community Supported Agriculture programs and direct-to-consumer sales” and “remove barriers preventing small dairy operations from processing and selling their own milk products locally.” These are reforms that small eco-farmers have been requesting for decades, and if properly implemented, they could increase the amount of healthy, locally produced food available to consumers.
USDA also plans to “streamline organic certification processes and reduce costs for small farms transitioning to organic practices.” Until USDA releases more details on what this “streamlining” will actually look like, it’s too early to say whether it will be good or bad for organic farmers who truly care about soil health.
Of course this is just a strategy document, and it’s far too early to tell which—if any—of these recommendations will actually be implemented. As expected, the MAHA Strategy Report demonstrates that true reforms in the American food system will only come from grassroots efforts by farmers and consumers to produce and consume healthy, whole foods—not from top-down government mandates.
