America’s farmers, who have not been in the best of shape financially, are now having to contend with the effect of retaliatory tariffs on their exports. A bailout is reportedly coming sooner or later.

One day, they may have to face a challenge to their livelihoods from RFK. Jr.

If nothing else, there is a consistent thread that runs through Kennedy’s ragbag of superstitions. He clearly has a profound faith in “Mother Nature,” that most indifferent of supposed “parents.”  Despite what science or the historical record may show—famines. epidemics, all that—Kennedy still prefers to give “Nature” the benefit of the doubt. “Mother” will see off those pesky viruses and keep everyone well fed too.

Dan Blaustein-Rejto, writing in The Ecomodernist:

Earlier this spring, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked the rows of John Sawyer’s Texas farm, the young corn brushing against his waist. At that stage, the plants looked unimpressive, small enough to pull by hand. Yet each was a modern marvel, genetically engineered to resist insects and tolerate herbicides, allowing Sawyer to cut his insecticide use and control weeds without plowing each year. The fields had likely been sprayed with glyphosate just days or weeks before Kennedy’s visit, part of a farming system that produces more than triple what Sawyer’s grandfather once grew. It was a scene that illustrated the promise of agricultural innovation.

Kennedy, though, saw something else: a system to uproot. Since that trip, he has doubled down on a vision that would phase out many of the technologies Sawyer uses. He and other leaders of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have called for fewer pesticides and fertilizers and a large-scale shift to organic farming, including moving away from use of genetically modified crops…

Blaustein-Rejto lists some of RFK Jr.’s ideas about agriculture. He draws attention to remarks Kennedy made in July in which he said that he would like to see farmers given “off-ramps”  (“without mandates, without coercion”) “so that they can transition to biodynamic agriculture, to regenerative agriculture, and do it in a way that is going to maintain the vibrancy of their farms and robust economies in rural communities across our country.” Let’s see how long the temptation to start adding a little coercion to the mix can be resisted.

“Biodynamic agriculture? That is a “scientific” approach as bogus as its name suggests. Its origins lie in the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, an early twentieth century Austrian esotericist, perhaps best known as the founder of Anthroposophy, a spiritual movement of sorts.

Biodynamic agriculture, which has attracted some “interesting” support in the past, is best seen these days as a more extreme version of “organic” farming, itself a dubious concept. In its beginnings, it mixed pseudoscientific and, essentially, magical elements. In many respects it still does, if more discreetly. Blaustein-Rejto refers to it as a “pseudoscientific farming approach that prohibits synthetic inputs and urges farmers to bury cow horns stuffed with manure and pulverized crystals.” Talk of cow-horns surprised me but, if so inclined, google around and see what you find.

Much of Blaustein-Rejto’s article is dedicated to examining what a large-scale switch to organic farming would lead to, including lower yields, more expensive food, and a dramatic expansion of the land needed to grow crops.

MAHA farming? It would do the opposite.