Palantir announced a $300 million deal with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which will utilize the tech company’s software to “modernize services for American farmers.”

“Palantir is proud to partner with the US Department of Agriculture to modernize services for American farmers, giving them the time and resources they need to secure our nation’s breadbasket,” Palantir stated.

“Protecting America’s farmland is protecting America itself, and this work gives USDA the visibility and speed needed to safeguard our food supply,” said USDA Chief Information Officer Sam Berry.

“Our farmers sustain this nation, and modern tools help us support them with greater precision. I look forward to working with Palantir as we continue serving the American farming community, which serves all of us every single day,” Berry added.

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Farm security is national security. Through this partnership, Palantir is empowering USDA with core capabilities that will enable it to secure American farmland, enhance supply chain resilience, and shield agricultural programs from fraud, abuse, and foreign adversary influence. In doing so, USDA will gain critical visibility into risks that can affect America’s agricultural production and food supply.

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This agreement also supports USDA’s ‘One Farmer, One File’ initiative, which is cutting the red tape farmers face when accessing USDA services, delivering digital-first tools they can use from home, reducing time-to-payment, and accelerating post-disaster recovery. This builds on existing work with USDA’s Landmark platform powered by Palantir, which backed the rollout of the $11 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance Program in February. Within 62 minutes of opening, the program broke all prior USDA records for online farmer sign-ups — allowing farmers to enroll without visiting a county office and delivering over $4.4 billion directly to farmers in the program’s first five days.

Landmark is also enabling USDA to transform how farmers report acreage through self-service digital tools. For farmers, every hour of daylight matters — they shouldn’t have to spend it sitting in field offices or driving far from their land. Landmark gives farmers more options, enabling them to utilize county offices or self-service online tools according to their preference. Palantir is similarly empowering USDA’s field staff with mobile digital tools that help them work efficiently, reduce administrative burdens, and accelerate services and payments to farmers.

Not everyone expressed optimism about Palantir being involved in the nation’s food supply.

“Palantir, a CIA front company, now has its tentacles in the food supply, our healthcare data, our growing autonomous weapons industry, the military, the entire US intelligence community, border patrol, Space Force and so on,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb commented.

“Seemingly, Palantir is soon to become the testrun for Yarvins ‘sov-corp’, a privatized version of govt that replaces the existing govt and is ruled by a CEO dictator. That is, unless we do something about it,” she added.

“USDA just handed Palantir — the company that built ICE’s deportation targeting system — a sole-source $300M contract to consolidate every farmer’s federal data into one profile. One Farmer, One File. One surveillance contractor. No competitive bid,” Beef Initiative wrote.

“The government knows your acreage, your loans, your conservation history — all in one Palantir database,” it added.

CNBC shared further:

U.S. farmers are grappling with rising supply costs and are getting squeezed by an ongoing trade war between the U.S. and its major trading partners. That includes China, a key soybean purchaser, which temporarily crippled the market late last year.

In December, President Donald Trump announced a $12 billion bailout aimed at helping farmers swept up in the trade war. But rising gas prices from the war in Iran amplified the pressure, causing fertilizer costs to spike due to shipping disruptions. That’s forced many farmers to rethink what they produce, putting supply chains at risk.

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China’s purchase of U.S. farmland in recent years has also drawn scrutiny from Washington and foreign policy experts.

A recent research note published by the Foundation of Defense Democracies recommended that the USDA reform reporting requirements “embedded within the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) to prevent China and other adversarial countries from exploiting commercial land transactions to gain a strategic edge over the United States.”

The USDA’s contract with Palantir signals its desire to address this issue by harnessing the company’s digital tools.

Palantir was founded in 2003 to scale U.S. defense capabilities in the wake of 9/11, and CEO Alex Karp has long touted the company’s commitment to supporting U.S. warfighters. The company has recently gained recognition for its AI-powered Maven Smart System platform, which was used by the U.S. military in Iran.

 

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