On Friday, President Donald Trump announced his proposed budget cuts for FY2026, which include cuts to the USDA and research. Kam Quarles, CEO of the National Potato Council, said it’s too early for those in the specialty crop industry to be concerned.
“This is the president’s budget request,” he said. “For it to become reality, Congress has to agree with it. Part of our responsibility is to interact both with the administration who wrote these cuts up and also with Congress to explain to them the potential very significant negative impact that could come from if indeed vital ag research is lost in these programs.”
Quarles said that agriculture research is a vital lifeline for specialty crops.
“Agricultural Research is not something that you can just flip a switch and turn off and then a few months or a few years from now, turn that switch back on, like a factory, and everything runs again,” he said. “It does not work that way. The impact to the family farm that results from that type of chaotic, chaotic lurching from one direction to another is far more lost than gained.”
Quarles said, though, it’s still too early to truly understand the impact of these proposed cuts to the specialty crop industry. He also added he and his counterparts in similar roles will decipher the budget cut impacts in the very near future to better help Congress and the administration to understand its potential impacts.
“Agriculture research on a bipartisan basis is something that Capitol Hill can really value,” he said. “Truly, it is our American innovation, through this valuable research, that is going to be so competitive against a lot of up-and-coming developing nations, or more developed nations, who just flat out want to run us out of our own market, as well as export markets.”
But Quarles said it’s not a time to panic, noting “Freaking out is not really a strategy.”
He said focusing on the true value of research in future messaging will be a critical argument to make.
“I think it’s important that we get the numbers and understand what is truly being talked about, and then to the extent that we should have valuable research for agriculture impact, I think that our responsibility could really be to respond to the administration with a cost-benefit analysis,” he said. “It’s my feeling that in most of those instances, the cost of making these cuts will far and away overwhelm the minor benefits of slashing them. This agricultural research is of tremendous value, not just to the family farm but to consumers throughout the United States and around the world.”
Quarles also spoke about the likelihood of a new farm bill, noting it’s unlikely the agriculture industry will see a comprehensive farm bill soon. Instead, he sees the reconciliation bill as a potential avenue to add in some ag program resources, which would benefit the specialty crop industry.
“[Chairman Bozeman and Chairman Thompson] are looking at things like enhancing some of the program or updating some of the program resources,” he said.
