The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative is making waves up and down the entire seed, ag, and food supply chains. Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has proposed wide-ranging and far-reaching changes to food, feed, fuel, and fiber production that could have significant impacts on seed companies and farmers. Many wonder if such transformational ideas are actual goals or just anchor points from which the administration will work toward more modest changes.
This uncertainty has companies and farmers uneasy.
Agriculture can struggle to pivot quickly. Farming, moving grain, crushing oilseeds, and handling billions of tons of commodity products requires huge capital investments that typically have low margins. These investments take years to complete and decades to pay off.
That explains why talking about eliminating seed oils or banning high-fructose corn syrup will get you thrown out of just about every small-town diner! Demand for billions of bushels of soybeans and corn would vanish overnight. Catastrophe.
The glass half-full perspective is intriguing, though. Producing undifferentiated commodities has led to farm consolidation, lower margins, and left US producers subject to global market price fluctuations…and political winds. Seed companies have been stuck in the middle between input suppliers looking to extract as much from farmers as possible and farmers looking to pay as little as possible. The squeeze is real.
Is there any reason to be optimistic, though?
As recently as 2006, U.S. corn acres were less than 80 million and only 64 million acres of soybeans were planted in 2007. Probably shocking numbers for most, but it’s important to remember just how short this acre run up in corn and soybeans has been.
A comment I heard at an ag reception in DC a couple weeks ago was, “You don’t have to ban HFCS to get rid of it. Just reduce crop insurance for corn or tweak the subsidies and cane sugar looks a lot better.” The current farm bill negotiations are all over the board and even small adjustments to how the government determines farmer support could have major impacts on commodity crop acreage in 2026.
My advice is worth about as much as you paid to read this article! But I would take a wait-and-see approach before making any major capital investments in commodity crops. Also, start having conversations with suppliers and breeders of smaller acre crops. If even only a few of the ideas being batted around come to fruition, having some bets placed on other market segments could pay nice dividends. In short, an industry that tends to plan in 10-15 cycles might have to get a lot more nimble.
