Philly-area farmers among hundreds impacted by Trump admin’s gutting of climate-friendly grants
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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.”