Senator Marshall: Year-Round E15 is My Top Priority

Senator Marshall Questions USDA Secretary Rollins at Senate Ag Hearing

Washington - On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-Kansas), questioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins at the Senate Agriculture Committee, focused on the USDA's work in the ag sector nationwide.

Senator Marshall's questions focused on the importance of passing year-round E15 to boost corn demand, as well as the significance of the 45Z tax credit. He also praised President Trump's commitment to supporting agriculture and expanding trade agreements and commended the USDA's response to the New World screwworm and its eradication strategy.

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Highlights from the hearing include:

Senator Marshall: "All right, Chairman, thank you and welcome, Secretary. E15, E15, E15 - those are my top three priorities, but I'm preaching to the choir. Thank you for your support of this. Why is year-round E15 important? It would mean another 2 billion bushels of corn consumption per year. Prior to President Trump, maybe we were exporting 2.3 billion, so it's almost like doubling our export market, that's why it's important. But I want to talk about 45Z, which I think actually has a 10x opportunity compared to ethanol. Maybe you could just update us - we need to get this across the finish line as far as the rules, and I know it's out in different agencies. Any update on the 45Z rules?"

Secretary Rollins: "Obviously, there's multiple hands in the proverbial 'rule pot' in the administration, but it is a top priority for me personally. And certainly, my partners around the cabinet understand that. So, it is imminent and forthcoming - I don't want to give you an exact date, but it is coming, hopefully very quickly, and it is really, really important. The regenerative side of that - the MAHA side - there are just so many wins for so many Americans in that."

Senator Marshall: "Right. So, from a regenerative standpoint - to your point - the ethanol companies making the ethanol can pass on 10, 20, 30, or 50 cents a bushel if they're doing this regenerative agriculture, which is good for the soil and better for the nutrient health. So, I do appreciate this all-of-government approach on that as well. We address fertilizer, which would probably be my third biggest issue. On trade, I want to emphasize that value-add is when the American farmer makes money. When we turn corn into beef, when we turn soybeans into diesel, that's when the American farmer makes money. And I'm sure you're constantly communicating that to USTR. What are the opportunities do you think are going forward with these 19 trade deals on the value-add part of this?"

Secretary Rollins: "I think they are unlimited. As I traveled a little bit of the world last year and talked to some of these other countries - I sat down with some ethanol buyers in England. And as so many of these countries - whether we agree with them or not - have put themselves into a certain category of reaching certain numbers on carbon, et cetera, it is our farmers in America that will, I believe, be the most benefited from those rules around the world. So now my job at USDA, and our other wonderful trade negotiators - Lutnick, Greer, and Bessent - have this at the top of their list wherever they go. Again, we're already going to break records this year on corn exports, ethanol exports are going to break records, but I think it's just the beginning of the opportunity."

Senator Marshall: "Okay. I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit more about the CCC needs. And the background to me is this: no one has done more for the American farmer in rural America than President Trump has done these last two years. We added $65 billion to crop insurance and crop protection, he signed 40-some billion dollars of farm aid and a $50 billion rural health transformation fund, we doubled the death tax exemption. The 199A permanent pass-through was so important to American farmers, and bonus depreciation, and interest deductibility, I'm not sure what I'm missing - we doubled the death tax exemption. So, we did a lot, and we're increasing trade. And yet we're struggling, I think mainly due to input costs, and we do need some more help, I'm afraid - we need to help more. What does that look like to you? Whether it's more fertilizer - like Senator Klobuchar pointed out - or some monies towards those projects, tell me a little bit more about what you feel the need is and what we need to do to replace the CCC."

Secretary Rollins: "Well, I want to be careful because I don't want to get ahead of our entire team, OMB, et cetera. Just know that those conversations are absolutely ongoing. And again, that $30 billion limit was six or seven decades ago, I think, and was not tied to inflation. If it had just been tied to inflation when it was first enacted, we'd be at $90 billion for the CCC - this loan authority that allows us to move into important, urgent issues. So, I really look forward to working with you. I know across the aisle everyone is very focused on this, at least in this room, but let's keep working together on that and seeing what we can get done."

Senator Marshall: "Let's probably finish on this screwworm. First of all, I think it's important Americans realize there's no threat to the food supply and trying to explain this to people is a little tough, but you and I grew up on ranches. First of all, no rancher would take an animal with this big, ugly, fleshy wound to the locker plant, first of all. Second of all, even if a human ate it - let's say you shot a deer and you're eating this, and it happened to have this screwworm on it - that our own digestive system would destroy that. I think that's important to point out. I think it's important to point out that we saw this coming under the previous administration, and they refused to respond. When you let millions of people migrate through Central America this way, we saw the screwworm just come with them - whether it was on their pets or maybe they were bringing livestock. And unfortunately, in visiting the border before, I saw so many of these people with open flesh wounds themselves; that could have been one way to get it across the border. We saw it happening, and we were down to basically a male screwworm fly being sterilized in Panama. So, we sat on it, we prayed about it, and we tried to monitor it, but you also invested money in the laboratory in Mexico. Like within days after you took office, we talked about this. So, take us through that process of what we've done in Mexico again - you had a time to touch on it, so the second you get into office, you're on this. So just run us through that again."

Secretary Rollins: "Yeah, Senator, thank you. We saw it coming - the fact that it had been out of America since 1966, had been out of South-Central America and down past the Darien Gap for more than 30 or 40 years. As it began to make its way north starting in 2021, 2022 it gets into Central America, 2023 it gets into south Mexico, and of course, in 2024, it begins to make its way through Mexico. Again, you need about 500 million sterile flies to eradicate it. Once it was pushed past the Darien Gap back in the '60s and '70s, people just stopped - we stopped making the sterile flies, we got down to 100 million in Panama. Within a matter of days, we got approval from the President. I was sort of shocked that the last USDA really had no plans and hadn't really done anything. I said we've said we've got to build our own facility in America that will produce between 300 and 400 million flies per week so that we never let this happen again. Understanding that it is an irradiated facility, it normally takes a couple of years for permitting. Pete Hegseth, God bless him, and our Army Corps of Engineers permitted that facility in just 60 days, I believe, and then we broke ground and contracted within another month or so. So, we have shaved years off of that timeline. But in the meantime, the Metapa facility was a fruit fly facility in Mexico that Mexico agreed to let us pay for and let us outfit. We started that last summer, and it is ready this month. That will be another 100 million flies that are coming online. So, there's a lot of movement and a lot of money that has been invested to prepare for this moment."

Senator Marshall: "Great, thank you, Chairman. And I'd love to come back and talk about the life cycle of the screwworm. The poor females only get to mate one time, and then they die.

Secretary Rollins: "This is true. The males, its unlimited."

Senator Marshall: "And that's why these sterile males are so important and why it works. So, the science is there. We don't need to study it - we've got cures, we've got this."

Secretary Rollins: "That's right, thank you, sir. And the food supply is 100% safe. This is not a disease, it's not a virus-it's a fly, so that's right."

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