February 12, 2026 – Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Wednesday announced a plan to address an issue the Trump administration is calling “agricultural lawfare.”
Rollins made the announcement at an event with officials from other federal agencies and a group of farmers and ranchers, coinciding with the release of the Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines agricultural lawfare as “the use of administrative, legal, and legislative government systems to adversely impact farmers, ranchers, and agricultural producers.”
Farmers at the event described a range of situations, including the use of eminent domain by states and utilities to seize farmland and one case in which former President Joe Biden’s USDA filed criminal charges against a farm over a fenceline dispute. (The Trump administration dropped those charges in April.)
At the event, Rollins called the problem “systemic,” but could not say how many farms may be impacted.“We are looking into it right now,” she said.
Under the plan, the USDA plan will establish a senior advisor on agricultural lawfare in the Office of the Secretary and previously launched a portal where farmers can report problems. The plan lists a variety of deregulation efforts already underway, including the rollback of environmental permitting and water pollution rules and the repeal of a rule that prohibits road construction on National Forest lands.
Rollins said that one of her top priorities is getting the Supreme Court to overturn a 2005 ruling that established that governments can seize private property if it’s in the public interest.
As part of the plan, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will speed up applications for conservation easements. The easements currently help farmers preserve farmland by permanently restricting development on the land, but Rollins did not say how they relate to lawfare.
Instead, Rollins suggested the lawfare agenda would dismantle the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts of the Biden administration. “Instead of us supporting the people that we need to support, we were supporting an ideology that had nothing to do with agriculture,” she said.
The grant contracts the USDA cancelled last year served Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized groups and included land stewardship workshops for ranchers, projects to link consumers to small farms, and training for young and beginning farmers.
Rollins also labeled a California equity task force report as an example of lawfare. The framework states that the USDA “will continue to conduct oversight on agricultural land redistributions in the name of ‘equity.’” (Link to this post.)
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