Spokane wheat farmer advocates for herbicide targeted by RFK Jr.’s ‘MAHA’ report

WASHINGTON – A wheat grower from Spokane County visited the Capitol this week to drum up support for glyphosate, a widely used weed killer that was targeted in a May report commissioned by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Gil Crosby, who farms near Fairfield and serves as vice president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, spent Wednesday and Thursday in D.C. meeting with congressional staff to warn against restricting the use of glyphosate. The MAHA Report – taking its name from Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative – identified the herbicide, which wheat growers rely on to control weeds, as potentially harmful to children.

“As a farmer, we’re not out to put anything out there that’s not safe for public consumption or to harm our soil, because that’s our livelihood,” Crosby said in an interview on Wednesday. “We’re trying to be good stewards of the land, so we can keep farming the ground and so generations can keep farming the ground.”

Crosby and other farmers from across the country were part of a visit organized by the Modern Ag Alliance, a lobbying group founded by the German biotechnology company Bayer. In 2018, Bayer acquired Monsanto, which began marketing glyphosate under the brand name Roundup in 1974.

The biotech industry’s funding of research on the safety and effectiveness of glyphosate has contributed to suspicion from Kennedy and others about the legitimacy of that research, as the report notes. While the report doesn’t explicitly say the chemical is unsafe, it raises questions that have unnerved farmers who rely on the product in a business that’s already facing pressure from rising input costs, tariffs and more.

“The worst-case scenario is that we lose that tool and we have to go back to farming conventional,” Crosby said. “And we’d increase our costs tremendously if we lose that tool.”

Not using glyphosate, he said, would force farmers to use more costly alternatives and potentially tilling their fields, which removes nutrients from the soil.

“It just adds more costs to a very shrinking margin,” Crosby said. “All of us farmers are trying to be great stewards, because if we lose our dirt, I mean, we’re not farming.”

Ian Burke, a professor in Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, said the introduction of glyphosate was “transformative” for the Northwest when it was introduced in the 1970s.

“It would probably cost farmers three times as much to get the same end result that they’re currently getting with glyphosate,” Burke said. “It’s a very well known, well understood product. Farmers are very reliant on it.”

Burke said there’s an ongoing debate among scientists about whether all weeds need to be eliminated, but it’s uncontested that they take up valuable moisture, which is especially harmful to nonirrigated, dryland wheat farming in the Inland Northwest. Not controlling weeds would be “catastrophic” for certain farmers in the region, he said, estimating that it could reduce yields by half.

“Any additional cost is a stress, and any individual farmer has their own set of special circumstances that might lead them to bankruptcy,” he said, “but this is a complicating factor among many that they face.”

Burke said Bayer, Corteva Agriscience and other biotech companies, along with the Washington Grain Commission, have funded some of his research into the efficacy of herbicides in the Northwest.

Crosby has allies among Northwest Republicans – including Reps. Dan Newhouse and Michael Baumgartner of Washington, Reps. Russ Fulcher and Mike Simpson of Idaho and Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch of Idaho – who signed a letter to Trump on Monday warning that “anti-agriculture interest groups seem to have influenced” the MAHA report.

“The Assessment employed reports and rhetoric mischaracterizing proven-safe chemistries and ingredients,” the lawmakers wrote, referring to the MAHA report. “The Assessment questions the safety of critical crop protection tools. However, the Assessment’s cited evidence found the opposite conclusion. The cited study found chemistries, like glyphosate, are safe.”

Kennedy, a former environmental attorney who entered the 2024 presidential campaign as a Democrat before becoming an independent and eventually endorsing Trump, has suggested that glyphosate and other chemicals may be responsible for increasing rates of asthma, diabetes and other diseases among Americans.

The Environmental Protection Agency has said there are “no risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate” and “no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans.”

But in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The two organizations reviewed different sets of studies, underscoring the ongoing controversy into which the Trump administration is now wading.