ANNVILLE, Pennsylvania — When Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made her first visit as a Cabinet official to Pennsylvania last month, the jury was still out on the effect of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on American agriculture.
Rollins cautioned people not to overreact as she visited Talview Dairy for a tour. This happened days before Trump raised tariffs on Chinese products to 145%, which led China to place a 125% tariff on U.S. goods.
Those concerns were alleviated when the White House announced a 90-day trade truce with China and the U.S. Department of Agriculture released an updated forecast projecting higher corn exports, which had farmers nationwide breathing a sigh of relief.
Rollins, who grew up on a family farm in Glen Rose, Texas, said she knows all too well the circumstances outside farmers’ control that affect them daily, including the weather, the fickleness of the consumer, trade deals, and politics.
Rollins said the farmers understood that Trump’s plan would disrupt the whole system to get them to a level playing field. They strongly believe Trump will get them there.
Rollins’s visit to Pennsylvania was significant because the state is a leader in agriculture, an industry that significantly contributes to the state’s economy. There are 50,000 farm families who are stewards of over 7.3 million acres of farmland across the state, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
In 2022, the market value of the crops grown in the state totaled nearly $3.5 billion, while the market value of livestock, poultry, and their products, including beef, pork, chicken, dairy, and eggs, came to almost $6.8 billion.
And no other state outproduces Pennsylvania in mushrooms. In 2022, Keystone State farmers grew more than 19 million square feet of mushrooms, making Pennsylvania the No. 1 mushroom producer in the nation.
The state’s robust agriculture business employs nearly 600,000 people, generating over $132.5 billion. Nationwide, agriculture’s impact is even bigger: The agriculture and food sectors employ over 22 million people, which represents 10.4% of total employment.
Rollins, 53, grew up participating in the Future Farmers of America, or FFA, and 4-H, and her four children have done the same. It is what brought her to where she is today.
“All of those experiences really led to this role. I grew up in a town of 1,200 people at the time, raised by a single mom who worked her tail off to support us, but she only made $5 an hour at the public library — this tiny little public library on the square of Glen Rose, Texas,” Rollins explained.
She had two younger twin sisters, and while they struggled financially, who they became had much to do with the work ethic that farming taught them. “It was really an idyllic childhood. [It] was on not a ton of acreage, but we had some land. We raised animals, we baled hay, and I was very involved in FFA and 4-H. We also raced barrels,” she said.
Rollins said both farm organizations, FFA and 4-H, were fundamental in forming her character, work ethic, and discipline. She said she understands that outside of agricultural life, many people don’t know how important those groups are to young farmers.
“Both are agriculture-based, rural-community organizations, with FFA going through the public schools, and 4-H is a USDA program. They are both very similar in that they’re looking to educate and find and train agriculture leaders of tomorrow,” she said of the former, which is a high school program. The latter starts in elementary school.
Rollins did 4-H all the way up until high school and then moved over to FFA, where she was a state public speaker and officer. “I worked for the national FFA organization through college. I went to Texas A&M on an FFA scholarship because, of course, we didn’t have any money to pay for school,” she said.
“All of those lessons of hard work and the ability to communicate certainly took me to Texas A&M, where I was the first female student body president, then to law school,” she said of the lessons she learned through those organizations.
Rollins graduated from law school near the top of her class. She then worked in a law firm and joined then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office. She said those lessons from FFA prepared her to run his policy shop.
“I had to be maybe the youngest policy director in Texas governor history. That was all thanks to FFA. Then [I] took a step back and decided it was time to raise a family,” she said, explaining she took a job working from home for the Texas Public Policy Foundation before working from home was really a thing.
“In those 15 years running the Texas Public Policy Foundation, we went from two employees to about 130 and became what I believe is the most effective think tank in the country,” she said.
Rollins said she had never planned to leave, but then the White House called. Based on what she had done in Texas, she was asked, “Would you consider joining the West Wing and helping us build a relentless, never-sleeping, always-on-offense policy apparatus for Trump?”
“This was towards the end of year one of Trump’s first administration, and of course, I said, ‘No, I can’t do that. I’ve got a third grader, fifth grader, sixth grader, and eighth grader,’” she explained, adding it wasn’t in her timeline.
“But obviously, sometimes God and the president have different plans for you,” Rollins said. “So eventually I said yes, and I’m so grateful. We moved to Washington and we homeschooled the kids up there, and I went in to begin to build a major policy apparatus for President Trump,” she noted of her role as the director of the Office of American Innovation.
As of late April, Rollins said she had visited over a dozen states, with many more on the schedule. Her goal is to have tough conversations about farmers and ranchers’ concerns regarding the uncertainty of the tariffs. She said she also wants to discuss what their future looks like five years from now, which is often how farmers and ranchers plan their future.
“My job is to ensure that first of all, they continue to understand they’ve got a seat at the table, that I’m talking to the president constantly about it on the front end. But then on the back end, that I am constantly talking to the president, Secretary Lutnick, Jamieson Greer, Secretary Bessent, and they’ve all been wonderful and understand and have been fighting for our farmers as well,” she explained of the commerce secretary, U.S. trade representative, and treasury secretary.
Rollins said some of the policies that have hurt ranchers and farmers in the past have been the Green New Deal and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the agriculture community. “So that’s the near term. Under Biden, we had the cost of input go up 30% for our farmers and our ranchers. You’re already operating on crazy thin margins of profitability if you’re profitable at all. Then you’ve got the trade deficit with our [agricultural] products that went from zero when we left four-plus years ago to almost $50 billion. And that’s just on the [agricultural] product side,” she explained.
“Think about what $50 billion less sold across the world in just four years, how that’s going to affect them,” she said of the deficit.
“While there are a lot of different factors, there is no doubt that the reason we’re in the straits we’re in today in our agriculture community and in our [agricultural] economy is certainly a product, for the most part, of policies of the last four years. But to the point of tariffs and trade, it goes back way further than that. And that’s what we’re trying to fix.”
Rollins said her other big challenge right out of the gate was the avian flu and the effect it has on consumers and farmers. “The avian flu first popped its head up 10 years ago and then sort of went away thanks to biosecurity measures put in place. It kind of beat itself. It’s a virus. So I think, for whatever reason, it wasn’t an issue again until two years ago. And now it has just come roaring back,” she said.
Rollins said the Biden administration took some steps to alleviate it, “but we’ve got documents showing that they knew that a year or so ago that it was perhaps going to be a much bigger deal than anyone had anticipated. But they didn’t really take any major steps to address it.”
The day Rollins was sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in February, she went straight over and walked right into an avian flu briefing: “Two weeks after that, we rolled out our major plan, which included significant funding for biosecurity measures and locking the barns down, obviously lifting some regulations.”
Rollins is also very hands-on. Her predecessor, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, had served two terms in the Obama administration and then returned to serve in the Biden administration. Rollins noted that Vilsack’s last visit to Pennsylvania was just ahead of Election Day and was for a Biden USDA green initiative, Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, or PCSC, which focused on giving grants for “climate-smart farming.” He encouraged producers to “use practices that cut down on carbon emissions.”
Three days before our interview, Rollins announced the cancellation of PCSC after completing a line-by-line review of the program. She said too much of the money went to administrative costs and not to farmers.
MIKE ROGERS IS READY TO RUN AGAIN
Rollins definitely fits the mold of the new administration.
“The trust the president has put in me is that we are going to do everything we can to save America. And no one realizes how important the farmers and ranchers and our [agricultural] producers are to that mission more than the president,” Rollins said.
Salena Zito is a national political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.