Farmers Are Going Broke Amid Rising Gas Prices, While the Ag Secretary Profits Off Them

As farmers grapple with soaring diesel and fertilizer prices and the Department of Agriculture yanks support for cheaper, renewable forms of energy, the agency’s chief, Brooke Rollins, is carrying millions in highly profitable oil and gas investments.

In disclosure reports filed in July, Rollins indicated that she and her husband, Mark Rollins, an oil and gas industry executive, together hold as much as $2.5 million in fossil fuel investments. At least $1 million of that is in HKN II, a limited partnership with oil and gas interests in the Kurdistan region of Iraq; another $1 million, at least, is in Hillwood Energy New Ventures, which has interests in oil and gas operations in Texas, Rollins’ home state. Rollins also disclosed that she holds between $250,000 and $550,000 in investments in operating companies that own oil and gas assets in Texas.

Since the beginning of this year and President Donald Trump’s launch of the war in Iran, oil and gas prices have skyrocketed, and so have industry profits. Prices for diesel hit record highs this week, while prices of fertilizer, which are manufactured with natural gas and tied to the market, have also spiked this year, hitting an agriculture industry already battered by Trump’s tariffs and increasingly extreme weather events.

“Farmers have spent a billion and a half [dollars] just on additional costs for diesel because of the Iran war,” said former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former presidential candidate who campaigned on progressive climate policies. “American farmers are paying through the nose for this.”

Inslee is currently working with Climate Power, a strategy and communications group that’s working to push climate and clean energy policies. 

According to a Climate Power analysis, the only other top Trump administration official with significant fossil fuel investments is Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, who held as much as $320,000 in oil and gas stocks as of the end of 2025. 

Trump himself has been the biggest beneficiary of his own war.

A new report from the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee-Minority finds that since the war sent oil and gas prices skyrocketing, the president has potentially made around $15.5 million on the oil and gas holdings he held at the end of 2025. The report says Trump owned as much as $45.6 million in oil and gas company stocks, a sum that is now worth as much as $61.1 million.

The committee noted in its report that Trump promised the industry his administration would create favorable conditions for oil and gas businesses if they donated $1 billion to his campaign. Since the launch of the war, which choked off the Strait of Hormuz, a critical passage for oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, oil and gas companies have reported more than $125 billion in profits.

“This administration is a dumpster fire of corruption and self dealing,” Inslee said. “This is just typical of an administration that is costing Americans money while they feather their own nest.”

The committee did not calculate the increase in value of Rollins’ or Clayton’s fossil fuel holdings, but Climate Power analysts project they would be similarly profitable. 

Rollins is a climate skeptic who called for the repeal of the Obama administration’s landmark Clean Power Plan and for the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. She was a surprise pick to lead an agency that oversees a huge range of responsibilities, including nutrition policy, agricultural subsidies, conservation programs and forest management. Though she has a degree in agricultural development and roots in farming, Rollins spent her career as a lawyer.

When Trump tapped Rollins to head the USDA, she was leading the America First Policy Institute, a group that supported Trump’s bid for a second term.

During her tenure, the agency has worked to gut a range of climate-focused programs, including redirecting millions of dollars identified for climate programs under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. 

The agency has halted funds for wind and solar projects on American farmland and disqualified renewable energy projects from loans under the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). It also cancelled the Biden-era Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, designed to advance climate-focused practices on farms, calling it a “slush fund” for advocacy groups. And it has moved to cancel protections for millions of acres of national forest lands, which are under its purview. 

The USDA did not respond to a request for an interview with Rollins.

The American Farm Bureau Federation recently projected that inflation, low commodity prices, labor and high production costs, including for diesel and fertilizer, will cost American farmers $31 billion in 2026 and $32 billion in 2027. 

Farmers, as a block, have been among Trump’s most important supporters, voting overwhelmingly for him in the 2024 election. That support appears to be dissipating amid rising bankruptcies and crashing profits. 

An April survey found that 94 percent of farmers were concerned about rising production costs linked to the war in Iran. The same poll found that nearly 40 percent said they were “persuadable” in the upcoming midterm elections. 

Georgina Gustin

Reporter, Washington, D.C.

Georgina Gustin covers agriculture for Inside Climate News, and has reported on the intersections of farming, food systems and the environment for much of her journalism career. Her work has won numerous awards, including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and she was twice named the Glenn Cunningham Agricultural Journalist of the Year, once with ICN colleagues. She has worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Conn., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and CQ Roll Call, and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and National Geographic’s The Plate, among others. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

• @georginagustin.bsky.social
• @georgina_gustin
• [email protected]