The Trump administration recently pulled the plug on a program to help small farmers adopt climate-friendly practices. The program included a $59 million grant for an organic farmer’s nonprofit based in Harrisburg that would have helped hundreds of Mid-Atlantic farms plant cover crops that help with erosion and soil fertility, build wind breaks to secure against increasingly severe storms, and plant trees in pastures where hotter temperatures impact the health of livestock.
“It’s devastating because the season isn’t gonna wait and climate change isn’t gonna wait,” said Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, an organization that serves small farmers from Maine to South Carolina through peer-to-peer support and education.
The group’s grant funding came through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. In a release canceling the program, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, called it a “Biden-era climate slush fund.”
“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,” said Rollins in a statement.
The USDA said farmers could reapply for the grants if they met certain conditions, including having 65% of the funding go directly to farmers in the form of a financial payment, according to an agency spokesperson.
Smith-Brubaker said details of applying for the funds are unclear, and since all of her contacts at the USDA have either left voluntarily, been laid off or reassigned, she hasn’t been able to get any clarity. She has had to lay off 60 Pasa staff members, who had been providing technical support to the farmers.
“It’s been chaos since January,” Smith-Brubaker said. “So all these farmers who had plans for this spring, it’s really gone now until at least the fall or maybe next spring.”
Brubaker-Smith said the program was designed by farmers who have expressed concerns about adapting to warmer weather and stronger storms.
At the same time, she said consumers are seeking food that has a minimal carbon footprint.
“So we know that there’s a lot of consumer demand for products produced on farms that use climate-smart practices, so we were exploring that with them,” Brubaker-Smith said.
A USDA spokesperson wrote in an email that the new focus “is to ensure more of the project’s federal funding will flow directly to farmers.”
“We encourage partners who had their agreements terminated to reapply and align their agreement with the Administration’s Farmer First priorities,” said the spokesperson.
Smith-Brubaker said the whole purpose of the Climate-Smart Commodities grants was to help a group of small farmers typically left behind by the USDA, but now those farmers feel betrayed.
In the recent announcement, Sec. Rollins criticized both climate change initiatives and the nonprofits that were coordinating the programs.
“She seems to have this perception that because it was nonprofits that were awarded these funds, that somehow, nonprofits are getting rich off of this program, which is ridiculous,” said Smith-Brubaker. “We run a very lean, lean organization, over 90% of our revenue goes directly into supporting farmers. It’s absurd what she’s asserting.”
Funding for climate-friendly flax is also at risk
The USDA has also put a freeze on other programs that promote climate-friendly crops. The PA Flax Project was allocated $1.68 million through a separate USDA Organic Market Development grant to jump-start flax production in Pennsylvania, to be grown for the natural fiber linen.
Flax is easy to grow and climate-friendly — it doesn’t need fertilizer, irrigation, or chemical pesticides — and it restores soil health.
“It’s shocking,” said Heidi Barr, founder of the PA Flax Project, a cooperative of farmers and textile producers that planned to plant 12,000 acres of flax over three years. She said she had to lay off all of her seven staff members, and she cut her salary in half.
“It’s just really devastating to have earned a grant like this and to have spent a full year doing everything we said we would do and then just to be dropped for no reason,” Barr said.
She says she has enough funds to plant this year, but is not sure if she can raise enough to harvest the crop in July.
“Part of the issue is we just can’t even get any information,” Barr said. “You can’t plan for your business because [USDA employees] are like, ‘we don’t know.’ It’s horrible.”
Barr is driven to bring flax back to the state as a climate solution and alternative to the dominance of modern synthetic fabrics made from fossil fuels.
“It’s 100% plant-based natural fiber,” Barr said. “That automatically makes it better than a synthetic because it can be part of a regenerative agricultural cycle as opposed to an extractive system like drilling for oil. So as a plant-based fiber, it already has a leg up.”
She said she hopes to get private funding to harvest the flax in July.
A spokesperson for the USDA did not answer specific questions about the pause, but said in an email that the agency continues to review the programs that have been put on hold and hopes to make a decision quickly.
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