USDA axed seed competition team, then vowed reform

DAILY Bites

• Under Biden, the USDA hired a number of attorneys and economists focused on promoting fair markets. DOGE fired them.

• The DOJ and USDA announced an agreement with Bayer last month, but it appears to have no legal backing, a situation that one expert called “quite head-scratching.”

• In his first term, Trump approved multiple mergers in the seed industry, which spurred the kind of concentration officials in his second term now say must be reined in.

DAILY Discussion

Last month, when the Trump administration reached an agreement with Bayer to curb what officials lambasted as anticompetitive practices, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins hailed it as a win for farmers. But she cautioned the concentrated nature of the seed industry required continued antitrust vigilance.

“We must celebrate this great progress,” she said, “while acknowledging there’s much more work to be done!”

Rollins highlighted that the Bayer deal had grown out of cooperation between the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice. In late September, the departments announced a partnership focused on generating more competition in the seed industry.

What she did not mention, however, was the USDA had already eliminated — three weeks earlier — an initiative focused on just that.

Under the Biden-era initiative, the USDA hired a team of experts, with decades of experience between them, dedicated to increasing competition in the seed market. Among other duties, they fielded complaints from farmers, and one consulted with DOJ staff about the industry’s loyalty programs, which have been criticized for likely raising input costs for farmers and was at the heart of the Bayer deal.

Explaining the cancellation, the USDA told Investigate Midwest antitrust matters were “outside USDA’s authorities specific to seeds.” If it observed anticompetitive behavior, it would alert, “as appropriate,” the DOJ or the Federal Trade Commission, which also regulates antitrust laws, the USDA said.

The USDA has a clear role it can play in antitrust enforcement in the seed industry, said Peter Carstensen, a former DOJ antitrust attorney and a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. It has invaluable expertise given it maintains legal and economic data on the industry.

The Trump administration could have rebranded the seed initiative and continued its work, he said.

“If you really thought about keeping prices down, you needed to figure out how to relabel that seed project so it would become a Trump project,” he said. “Keeping the continuity but changing the label, and unfortunately they didn’t see it that way coming in the door. Now they’re having to reinvent the wheel.”

To be sure, both sides of the aisle have promised major antitrust enforcement only for the end result to be underwhelming. For instance, in 2010, the Obama administration held a series of hearings across the country focused on anticompetitive agricultural practices.

“People anticipated a lot more coming out of that,” said Mary Hendrickson, a longtime rural sociologist focused on the food system at the University of Missouri. “They were very disappointed. They were burned.”

When Biden was elected, he tried a “whole government approach” to tackling anticompetitive markets and brought “fresh thinking,” Hendrickson said. When she sees social media posts from her farmer friends now, though, she senses frustration.

“What I see is: ‘There’s talk, but not a lot of action,’” she said. “I don’t find this particularly surprising because farmers feel like the federal government has abandoned them time after time.”

The episode involving the seed experts captures the layers of cognitive dissonance with the second Trump administration and agricultural concentration. As president, Trump has largely shown leniency toward corporations accused of wrongdoing. But, as food prices continue to rise, his administration has publicly hammered agricultural market practices.

During Trump’s first term he approved multiple seed industry mergers — spurring further consolidation his officials now say must be tamed. Then, while publicly criticizing seed industry concentration, Trump’s second administration quietly ended the initiative, known as the Farmer Seed Liaison, that could have helped accomplish its stated goal.

It’s a similar story in the meat industry. The USDA has explicit authority to oversee anticompetitive behavior among meat processors, but the first Trump administration kneecapped that authority.

Under Biden, the USDA began investigating Tyson Foods over its chicken processing plant closures, which left many farmers with nowhere to sell their animals, but it’s unclear if the investigation has continued. In July 2025, the USDA appointed former Tyson executive, Justin Ransom, to head up the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, a move that prompted questions from ethics watchdogs and consumer advocates about potential conflicts of interest.

Sky Chadde has covered the agriculture industry for Investigate Midwest since 2019 and spent much of 2020 focused on the crisis of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants, which included collecting and analyzing data on case counts. This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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