30 Minutes With Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins In Her First Week On the Job

Since Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, Brooke Rollins has been focused on how to build the teams and the plans that impact the trajectory of agriculture and rural America. On that day, while en route with her husband and four teenagers in their motor home to Auburn, Ala., for the Texas A&M football game, she got a call from now President Donald Trump. The purpose of his call: She was his top choice to fill his final significant cabinet position, Secretary of Agriculture.

Obviously, she had to wait for confirmation, which came last week on Feb.13 when the Senate overwhelmingly confirmed her as the 33^rd Secretary of Agriculture, but since that Saturday before Thanksgiving, she’s been on the go with an accelerated enthusiasm to understand the significant challenges facing rural communities that lost 147,000 family farms between 2017 and 2022 and why the cost of inputs are up 30% as exports are down $37 billion this year and likely to fall further in the months to come.

“This is a crisis, and this is something that I understand inherently,” Rollins said to kick off Top Producer Summit in Kansas City on Tuesday. “My promise to you is this, and my commitment will never waver, that every minute of every day for the next four years I will do everything within my power, with hopefully God’s hand on all of us and our work, to ensure we are not just entering the golden age for America, as my boss, President Trump, likes to say, but we are entering the golden age for agriculture.”

What Has Rollins Been Up to the Past Four Years?
Secretary Rollins and President Trump have worked together for almost eight years. She was in the West Wing with him for years two, three and four of his first term running his domestic policy agenda.

“This real estate guy from New York City brought that vision to life, and then in the last term, was able to really do some remarkable things,” Rollins said in regard to President Trump returning power to the people who just want a chance at the American dream. “I call it the great pause, the four years in between term one and term two. But I think the great pause allowed very intentional planning. It allowed a courageous and bold leader in President Trump to become a fearless leader and to do everything he can to bring America back to greatness.”

In the “dark days of January 2021,” as she described, Secretary Rollins helped launch the America First Policy Institute, a think tank established by former Trump officials to promote conservative policies. The idea was that those policies that made America great in Trump’s first term would continue indefinitely, not just for a second term, but for four years, eight years or 36 years, Rollins described.

First Week On the Job
Since being confirmed last week, Secretary Rollins has been in the Washington, D.C., USDA office for a few hours, but most of her time has been spent in Kentucky at National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville and Gallrein Farms and in Kansas visiting Finney’s County Feeder, High Plains Ponderosa Dairy and the National Beef Packing Plant.

Describing herself as “a reader and a studier,” Rollins seems adamant to hear firsthand from farmers and ranchers. She referenced her visits to the dairy farm and National Beef facility as inspiring, in a good way but also in a way that helps her understand the real challenges at hand.

Speaking to the crowd at Top Producer Summit, she shared her appreciation for the “entrepreneurial American game changers” who are doing their part to feed the world.

“It is so inspiring and a reminder of the very beginning of our country.” Rollins said. “Our revolution was fought by farmers, our Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The backbone of the great American experiment is this community.”

Farmer Q&A
Watch and listen to what Secretary Rollins, as well as Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, had to say on stage at Top Producer Summit about these 7 topics:

• Trade and tariffs — “Let’s go barnstorm the world, and let’s go find some more trade partners and access [to market opportunities],” Rollins said.
• Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts and modernizing USDA — “DOGE is a very valid and important effort across all government. The stories of waste and abuse were really just, not USDA specific but across government, beginning,” Rollins said.
• Federal programs, such as CSP and EQIP — “Our commitment is that if there have been commitments made, those will be honored. Getting our arms around all of that right now is really, really, important. Again, going back to the President’s heart and commitment to our farmers, I feel confident we will be able to solve any issues that are in front of our ag community, that are potentially being compromised by the DOGE effort, while at the same time recognizing how very, very important it is,” Rollins said.
• Future of USDA — “There’s no question USDA needs some modernization. I’m just beginning to lean into that as well,” Rollins said. USDA has 106,000 employees and 29 departments. “The Secretary is taking over a department where only 6% of the [D.C.] people work in the office,” Marshall added.
• Renewable fuels — Prior to President Trump’s first term, he was “the first major candidate to support biofuels, and I think that carried him through Iowa in many ways. … We’ve got E15 year-round. I think that gives us some certainty as well. … The President is supporting that. I think we’re trying to figure out how to save 45Z, but we can’t let China benefit from it. Right now, China is benefiting more from [45Z] than my farmers and ranchers are, so we’ve got to fix that,” Marshall says.
• Immigration policies and availability of long-term labor — “I have a full-bodied understanding of the challenges within the labor market, and I believe the President does too. … I believe that we will very soon be talking about it again. Clearly, the H-2A program needs significant reform, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, she’s going through the [confirmation] process right now. … Hopefully she’ll get her vote very soon. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Rollins said.
• Trump’s cabinet members — “Our cabinet is comprised of people that have been working together and have been friends and colleagues for years, with a few exceptions. Bobby Kennedy is a new friend, but Lee Zeldin and I worked together in America First Works and America First Policy Institute for the last almost four years, Linda McMahon in education and John Brooks — these are our people,” Rollins said.