Robert F. Kennedy Jr. full presser on agriculture, food security at Texas farm

I want to welcome you here to Sawyer Farms today, and we're sure proud to have Secretary Rollins and Secretary Kennedy visiting with us about production agriculture here in Texas. We appreciate everyone who's attended, hope everybody has learned a little something about agriculture and not about the weather and not about the wind, which are involved in agriculture by the way, and that's my way of saying that almost everything is involved in agriculture. But we're certainly proud of these two people standing up here with me today in their service to our citizens and their industries, especially once again to my industry of agriculture. Thank you, Secretary Rollins for being here. Secretary Kennedy, thank you all so much for being here. Yeah, thank you. We just want to say how grateful we are to be here in Hillsborough, Texas with the incredible Sawyer family and John Sawyer and his wife and kids. This is a fourth generation production agriculture farm and they've done great work since the 1890s. So as Secretary Kennedy and I are working together with President Trump's vision and his basic task to us, which is not just to make agriculture great again, which we know there are many, many, many challenges today, fighting them every single day, working across the country and the world to open up markets, to bring down the cost of inputs, to make our farmers wealthy again, which President Trump would say, but also as Secretary Kennedy has brought to the table and to our entire movement in this country is making America healthy again. And I know we all know the numbers, but the chronic disease and the obesity epidemic to be the wealthiest country in the world, but also to be the country of the least amount of healthy outcomes, especially amongst the developed countries is no longer sustainable. It's not acceptable and we can do better as a society. So I'm so proud to partner with this incredible man who's been a warrior on this for many, many years and in the Trump administration. It is our 100th day today in office. Tomorrow we will celebrate Secretary Kennedy and I are both headed to Washington from here. We'll have a cabinet meeting tomorrow. But I personally am so honored and so proud to be a part of this legacy, to represent these incredible people, the Sawyers and others from this county, our state and the rest of the country, but also with the intent and the understanding of farmers are the solution to make America healthy again and working together to do that. So here is the amazing Bobby Kennedy and again, very glad to be here. I'm very, very happy to be here. Very grateful to the Sawyer family, John Sawyer, the Trump family. We also met and I'm very grateful for my partnership and friendship with Secretary Rollins. We understand that we cannot have a healthy America if we don't have a healthy agricultural economy. If the farmers of this country are our partners, we have to make sure that their lives are sustainable if they can have these farms and hand them to their families, that we can continue to feed our country and the world high quality food to make America healthy again. That's beautifully said. All right. We're happy to take any questions. Yes, ma'am. Secretary Kennedy. Could you talk about, are you aware of the situation in Johnson County and biosolids and the fact that over 50 cattle have died in Johnson County? A lot of rural ranchers are concerned about PFAS in the biosolids. Is your office doing more to address this issue of biosolids? We are, PFAS and PFOAs are a high priority for me. I brought the first case against PFOAs. We won a $633 million judgment. They made a movie about my trial called Dark Waters that was starring Mark Ruffalo. The waterkeeper movement, which I started, had also been kind of a primary driver for addressing the issues of PFAS contamination. We're very conscious that a lot of the biosolids that are produced, particularly on the East Coast, are being shipped out of here, spread on the farms, and that they're having devastating impacts on not only crops, but also animals, and we are focusing on that and we're looking for solutions. There will be maybe some regulations coming in. Also, in Johnson County, the county commissioner there declared it a disaster area, saying they need help cleaning up their ranches. Are there federal funds coming to the area? We are working on that. It's an area that's primarily regulated by EPA, and I know it's a deep concern to Lee Zeldin. I was over meeting with him on this issue a couple of weeks ago, and it's something of deep concern to him, too. He just, in the last hour, I think, announced, had a major announcement on PFAS. I have not had a chance to dig into it yet. I just saw it, like everybody else, as I was checking on the news, but I know he is very hyper-focused. We're all working together. Of course, my mom is the state representative for Johnson County, Helen Kerwin, and this is her number one issue, is to do everything she can in the Texas state legislature, and the states, of course, are the laboratories of democracy. A lot of other states around the country have been leading the way, and I think she's hoping that Texas will step up and lean in on that, but I have seen firsthand that devastation in Johnson County, and I think that Secretary Kennedy's leadership, alongside Administrator Zeldin, is going to be a real game-changer there. Yeah, the EPA says it is going to follow PFAS, or monitor PFAS, better, but one of the things that they didn't address is the water quality in the cities, taking PFAS out of the water that was made mandatory by the President Biden administration. Will you continue that? Because the EPA rolled back the rules, saying it might be too expensive for cities to clean the PFAS out of their water. Well, we want to get, we want to end the production of PFAS, and ultimately, I think that that's what we have to do. There's a lot of pressure now on the industry to stop using it, and a lot of the industry has pledged to stop using it. And that's really, you know, ultimately going to be the solution. And we are in Texas, and there has been a large measles outbreak. Can you talk more about what your office is doing to address vaccine hesitancy, because the majority of the people that are getting measles and children that have died have been infected? We are working with the Governor. We've sent teams down, CDC teams, down to Johnson County. We're doing better than any other country in controlling the measles outbreak. Although the cases continue to build day by day, the rate of growth of the measles outbreak has plateaued. In Canada, as of this morning, we had 842 measles cases in the country, I think in 22 states. In Canada, they have roughly the same number. They have one-eighth of our population. In Europe, they have almost ten times the number of measles cases that we had last year. Europe had 127,000 measles cases and 37 deaths. And, you know, we've had four measles deaths in 20 years in this country, and one of the things that I've tried to get the press to focus on is that we have a chronic disease epidemic at the same time. We have 100,000 autism cases diagnosed every year. We have now 38% of our children are diabetic or pre-diabetic. When I was a kid, there was virtually no diabetes among children. We should be giving headlines to that because those are much more devastating epidemics. We're doing everything that we can, not only with those populations, like the Mennonites in Gaines County, and I've been to Gaines County. I attended a funeral down there of one of the little girls who died not of measles, but she had had measles. They have religious objections to vaccination, and we need to be able to treat them, even though they're not vaccinated. There are many, many good ways to treat measles, and doctors need to know that and to know those methods, and we are developing now a worksheet for doctors to address the epidemic to address people who have it, not just with vaccination, but actually with budesonide, with clarithromycin, with vitamin A, and many, many other treatments that have been shown very effective.