Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins visited the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa Tuesday to announce a new data collection plan for USDA and comment on recent actions taken by the administration on biofuels, fertilizer, and beef.
Rollins says USDA’s new Data Modernization Plan is designed to put Farmers First, reduce unnecessary burdens on producers, and improve the timeliness, accuracy, and usefulness of the agricultural data that informs decisions across American agriculture. “These changes will reduce the duplicative requests that you receive over and over and over again. It will limit the amount of time that our producers spend reporting information and get you back to what you do best, which is growing food and fuel for our country,” said Rollins.
For biofuel producers, Rollins touted the administration’s action to preserve the highest renewable volume obligations or RVOs in the history of the Renewable Fuel Standard by reallocating all volumes being exempted under the large number of small refinery waivers granted by EPA this week. “We’ve also issued summer waivers for E15 and continue to support E15 year around for our congressional leaders to finally get that done,” said Rollins.
Addressing high input costs for farmers, Rollins said, “We’ve got to drive down the cost of our inputs…Just last week, USDA broke ground on two fertilizer plants in Louisiana, one will be the largest ammonia plant in the world when it’s finished and the other will allow us to reshore 60% of our potash back to America phosphate back to America just in the next few years.”
Following up on last week’s action by the administration to import lean beef trimmings for ground beef, Sec. Rollins spoke about USDA’s Ranchers First Initiative announced Monday. “The fact that we are at the lowest herd in 75 years is not lost on anyone,” she said. The plan includes the Beef Retention and National Development (BRAND) endorsement for Livestock Risk Protection (LRP) that will allow producers to insure the economic value of retaining a heifer for breeding over a two-year period. The endorsement would establish a protected value based on the expected slaughter value of the heifer at the time of enrollment.
Listen to Rollins’ comments here:
FPS26 – Rollins remarks 39:46
