The U.S. Department of Agriculture is failing to prepare American farms for the pest and disease threats that come with a warming climate, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO analysis, released earlier this month, found that the federal government “has not adequately addressed climate-related risks of pests and disease for the forestry and agriculture sectors.” The agency is struggling to understand which threats are accelerating, where they’ll hit hardest, or how to help farmers and foresters respond.
For American agriculture, the stakes are concrete. Climate change is expanding the range of agricultural pests (armyworms moving north, new insect vectors) while creating conditions where crop diseases thrive (warmer winters mean fewer freeze-kill cycles for pathogens). Farmers already stretched by debt, consolidation, and volatile commodity prices face an accelerating threat they’ve had little federal help to anticipate.
The GAO flagged a central problem: the USDA lacks a comprehensive strategy to monitor and forecast these emerging threats. The department doesn’t have clear systems for tracking which pests and diseases are shifting because of warming, which crops and regions are most vulnerable, or what interventions actually work at scale. Without that baseline knowledge, the agency can’t guide the research, seed breeding, or crop-insurance reforms that farmers need.
This gap matters particularly for small and mid-size operations. Family farmers already face crushing debt amid volatile markets, and crop loss from an unforeseen pest or disease outbreak can be fatal to farm viability. A severe infestation or blight can wipe out a year’s income; repeated losses across multiple seasons force farmers off the land. Consolidated agribusinesses, by contrast, can absorb losses across thousands of acres and switch to resistant seed varieties faster than smaller operators.
The USDA’s failure to prepare also exposes a deeper equity problem. Rural food insecurity is already climbing, linked to chronic illness in communities like rural Texas, and climate-driven crop losses will widen that gap. Regions that lose productive capacity and farmer income become less able to support local food systems, widening the distance between rural communities and affordable, fresh food.
The report’s specific recommendations are practical: the USDA should establish a cross-agency task force to systematize pest and disease monitoring, fund research on climate-resilient crop varieties and management techniques, and update crop-insurance programs to account for climate-driven yield volatility. None of this is new thinking; land-grant universities and sustainable agriculture groups have been raising these alarms for years. The GAO simply confirmed that the federal machinery hasn’t moved.
The silence from USDA leadership is notable. A department supposedly dedicated to supporting American agriculture has let preparedness for one of the most consequential threats it will face fall behind. While efforts to block farmland grabs and protect farmworker wages lumber through courts, the climate-and-pest crisis unfolds with minimal federal strategy. Farmers are left to adapt alone, just as consolidation is shrinking their numbers and their resilience.
