Authored by Mollie Englehart via The Epoch Times,
My phone started dinging almost all at once.
Text messages, links, alerts—people were telling me that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was about to make a major announcement on Dec. 10 related to regenerative agriculture. A YouTube link was circulating. The livestream was about to begin. There was a sense of anticipation in the air.
When the video came on, Rollins stood alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others. What stood out immediately was not the funding amount, but the language: soil health, human health, nutrient density, the microbiome, and microbiology. The living systems beneath our feet and within our bodies were finally being discussed as part of one connected reality.
That language matters.
Then the announcement itself came: $700 million allocated toward regenerative agriculture.
On paper, that sounds significant. In reality, when spread across acreage that is already regenerative, it comes out to roughly $16 per acre. My phone began lighting up again—this time with frustration and disappointment. Farmers were doing the math. Many compared it to the $12 billion recently allocated to soybean farmers to ease losses from China no longer buying at previous levels. The imbalance felt familiar.
I felt that disappointment myself. But I stopped.
Because the truth is, the government is not going to save us. It never was.
What matters is what was said on stage—out loud, at the highest levels of agricultural leadership. Years of pushing, educating, farming, and speaking have forced the mainstream to acknowledge that regenerative agriculture exists and that what many of us have been saying for years is not fringe, not experimental, and not untested. It is rooted in biological reality.
Unused soil remain on the side of squash plants at Reeves Family Farm in Princeton, Texas, on June 9, 2023. This farm is one of the farms in Collin County following regenerative agriculture farming. Shafkat Anowar/The Dallas Morning News/TNS
Not long ago, when regenerative agriculture was barely even a term, a simple Google search would return little more than my brother Ryland Engelhart’s small website and the work of Allan Savory. That was essentially it. Today, regenerative agriculture is discussed in policy rooms, media, and public health conversations. That shift did not happen by accident.
As someone who has spent years pounding the pavement on small stages, podcasts, newspaper articles, Instagram posts, and anywhere else someone might listen, hearing words that could have come straight from my own mouth—or from the mouths of so many friends—spoken by the Secretary of Agriculture was a real turning point.
It was not only agricultural language that shifted.
In the same period, advisers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held hearings on the hepatitis B vaccine and made recommendations to reconsider whether it should be universally mandatory in infancy. Hepatitis B is primarily transmitted through blood and bodily fluids, including sexual contact and needle exposure. These modes of transmission do not logically apply to newborn infants.
For decades, the trend has moved in only one direction, with more interventions introduced earlier and with less public debate. Seeing even one policy questioned openly represents a meaningful shift. It does not mean the system is fixed, but it does suggest that logic and discussion are beginning to reenter conversations where they have long been absent.
For years, soft language has been used to control public discourse. Conversations about vaccine efficacy, soil degradation, chemical agriculture, and the microbiome were not debated openly. They were often shut down through social pressure and professional risk.
That grip appears to be loosening.
Government leaders are now speaking openly about the microbiome, soil microbiology, and nutrient density. There is growing acknowledgment that chronic disease, metabolic dysfunction, and declining fertility do not exist in isolation from how our food is grown. Regenerative agriculture, once dismissed as niche, is now part of national policy discussions.
Regenerative farmer and business owner Mollie Engelhart in Fillmore, Calif., on Oct. 30, 2023. Engelhart says that unlike organic farming, which avoids synthetic inputs, regenerative agriculture focuses on restoring soil health, water resources, and biodiversity. Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times
Is this the sweeping reform some of us want? No.
Is it enough? No.
But it is movement. And movement matters.
I also want to acknowledge someone who has been pushing this work forward long before it was widely accepted. My brother, Ryland Engelhart, started Kiss the Ground as a small nonprofit in his garage at a time when regenerative agriculture was rarely discussed outside of farming circles. Through years of commitment, education, and personal sacrifice, he helped bring this conversation into the mainstream.
He has since stepped away from Kiss the Ground and is now focused on a new advocacy effort called American Regeneration, continuing his work to advance soil health, regenerative farming, and national policy conversations around land stewardship.
Today, Kiss the Ground has produced two documentaries—“Kiss the Ground” and “Common Ground”—available on Amazon Prime, introducing millions of people to the realities of soil regeneration and land stewardship. That progress did not happen because institutions embraced the message early. It happened because people refused to stop pushing.
The government still has a long way to go. I do not trust it to lead this transformation on its own, and neither should farmers, parents, or patients. Pressure matters. Accountability matters. Demanding more matters.
But so does recognizing when something has shifted.
Once certain truths are spoken publicly, they cannot be taken back. The connection between soil health and human health has been named. The role of microbiology in food and medicine has been acknowledged. Regenerative agriculture cannot be pushed back into obscurity once it has entered the national conversation.
We are not winning through sweeping victories. We are winning incrementally. And for those of us who have been pushing uphill for years, that matters.
Incremental wins are still wins. And the direction of the wind has finally changed.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
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