Small New York Farms Suffer as Federal Funds Freeze

A federal climate-smart fund was a boon for farmers seeking to update their businesses with sustainable approaches—until the Trump administration suspended the money flow.

Hannah Smith-Brubaker runs a farmer-led nonprofit that, for over 30 years, has focused on teaching climate-resilient agricultural practices across the Northeast. 

Since 2023, Smith-Brubaker has expanded from hosting 50 educational workshops and a regional conference every year to providing direct financial and technical assistance to farmers seeking on-the-ground change. Her organization, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, has counseled 143 farmers as they applied for federal climate funds to improve their land, crops and livestock. 

But in January, multiple executive orders from President Donald Trump upended those funds and, more importantly, the budget and staffing for Smith-Brubaker’s organization, preventing her from helping more farmers.

Across New York, growers are awaiting word on grant applications from the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities fund, and the nonprofits that guide them are unsure how to help. Smith-Brubaker says she has no idea when or if the money her organization was promised—$3 million—will ever be disbursed.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has told her that the administration has placed a temporary suspension on the grant. For weeks, Smith-Brubaker has not received any reimbursements.

“I don’t anticipate that we will be able to pay [staff] beyond more than a month or so if they were involved in climate-smart at this rate,” Smith-Brubaker said in early March. “At that point, all of our services provided through that program would likely come to an end.”

She plans to furlough 60 staff members if the money doesn’t come through by then.

According to a 2021 government survey, New York has 1,407 certified organic farms and is one of four states in the country with more than 1,000 organic farms. Many of them are family-run and sell their products at local farmers markets. Finding money for infrastructure projects for small farms is often limited by their slim profit margins. The grants, several farmers said, were pivotal for growth and investment.

“It’s typical in business to assume that businesses have access to capital, either through a bank or other means,” said Eric Shatt, who owns a 35-acre organic farm in the Finger Lakes. “But a lot of times with agriculture, since we engage in such a risky business, it’s not easy to get a loan, even if there’s guaranteed payback with some kind of a grant. Getting the money up front is a game changer.”

Shatt was slated to receive up to $30,000 to integrate alley cropping into his sheep pasture. This practice involves planting rows of trees on crop fields and pastures to make the soil healthier and provide habitats for wildlife. Through the climate-smart fund, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture was poised to send Shatt 75 percent of his requested money.

Shatt had placed a down payment of $1,400 on the fruit trees he wanted for the project. Now, he believes that he is unlikely to see any federal help and will have to eat the cost of the deposit. 

“It hurts, especially for a small family farm,” Shatt said. “It’s a missed opportunity, and it’s a setback in an industry that’s already struggling.”

On March 19, Pasa Sustainable Agriculture signed onto a lawsuit filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Public Rights Project to restore federal farming funds. Multiple cities including Columbus, Ohio, and Nashville, Tenn., have joined the lawsuit as well as nonprofits like the Bronx River Alliance and the Sustainability Institute in South Carolina.

Initial Hope for the Farming Community

In 2022, the Biden-Harris Administration allocated $3.1 billion to the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. The funds were to help farmers pursue climate-smart practices and to allow them access to new markets. There was also funding for researchers exploring sustainable practices.

Pasa Sustainable Agriculture counseled the farmers and contracted with the New York chapter of the Northeast Organic Farmer Association for technical advisers. Before the freeze, Smith-Brubaker said her nonprofit received timely reimbursements as well as advance payments in anticipation of quarterly fiscal costs, including salaries.

The technical support was crucial for farmers, she said. Staff could evaluate farms and advise on conservation practices.

Sustainable farming requires growers to consider the natural world when making decisions. This includes allowing crop lands to lie fallow or pursuing innovations such as, in some cases, adding nutrient-rich rock dust from nearby mining operations to the soil. Benjamin Houlton, the dean of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, researches soil resiliency and knows that farmers are eager to enhance the vitality of their fields.

“I came to the community four and a half years ago,” Houlton said. “I have never been around a more dedicated group of farmers and producers who want to make sure we have a clean and healthy environment.”

Cornell’s agricultural school received $10.5 million in federal funds that were distributed through the New York Climate Connects program. Houlton said no funds have been paused—yet—though his institution is waiting with some apprehension. 

“It’s a wait-and-see kind of situation, because it seems like things are changing day by day,” Houlton said. “We’re just hopeful because these programs are so important for our farmers and our rural communities, that they will continue.”

Shatt, the farmer in the Finger Lakes, had already received some money for smaller projects, including mulching and rotational grazing—the periodic movement of livestock to different pastures to ensure vegetation regrowth. Shatt said he received around $5,000 for these projects, which required extensive fencing and labor. 

“Any grant program that assists farming in this country is money well spent,” Shatt said. “From the angle of national food security, from the angle of water purification through land filtration, from the angle of carbon sequestration—there’s so many different ways that building up agriculture in this country is a win-win for everybody.”

Reeling from the Freeze

Kia-Beth Bennett comes from a family of organic farmers in St. Lawrence County. Bennett operates a 116-acre farm with sheep, pigs, chickens and cows as well as fields of potatoes. For Bennett, the natural world is a priority—so much so that the farm, called the Bittersweet-Milkweed Collective, adapts its planting schedule to accommodate bird migrations.

“When I go to prepare my ground and plant my crops, I look and make sure that I know when the killdeer are migrating, so that my garden has open ground for the killdeer,” Bennett said. “They can nest in my garden, and then I just work around them.”

Bennett also does not till the fields, which involves the creation of ditches and subsurface pipe networks to drain water from the land. Tilling can lead to erosion of the soil, and delivers large amounts of phosphorus and nitrate to local waterways, which degrades water quality. 

Instead, Bennett uses the historical streams and channels that have populated Bittersweet-Milkweed for decades, allowing the hydrology of the area to take its course. 

With Pasa Sustainable Agriculture’s help, Bennett was applying for a climate-smart grant to add fencing that would improve the rotational grazing of sheep and enhance a nearby stream to flow from protected wetlands into a farm pond.

With another grant from Rural Advancement Foundation International, Bennett was expecting a total of $56,500 over three years for work on her farm. Now Bennett does not think any of the money will arrive.

“Those projects…were on their second round of approval,” said Bennett, noting that Pasa Sustainable Agriculture had helped to file the paperwork. “I’d already done all of the steps to plan everything out, get the maps, get the budget, make sure I called my local hardware store to see that they would have the supplies that I need for the fencing projects I applied for.”

Like Shatt, Bennett had a lot of hope for the future of small farms when the climate-smart project funding was announced.

“Just having one or two solid bouts of funding can completely alter the way that you run your farm for that year,” said Bennett, who uses the “they” pronoun. “[The grants] really made me think that maybe things will change for the better. Maybe people who look like me and farms that look like mine, we’re going to get funded.”

Since January, the USDA has removed the original webpage for the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. The Department of Government Efficiency, a federal budget-slashing effort overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, has cancelled an $8.2 million government contract with a consultancy that provided environmental reviews of grant applications, including Shatt’s and Bennett’s proposals.

The New York Chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association has laid off one staff member, spokesperson Kemnah said, and more people could lose their jobs because of funding uncertainties. Kemnah said about three quarters of the organization’s budget relies on the USDA. 

“It funds our education initiatives, it funds our technical assistance,” Kemnah said. “We’re scrambling to try to find some private funding to help offset that.”

A Greener World, an Oregon-based nonprofit, was promised $4 million through the climate-smart grant for a three-year project to guide and finance farmers to earn certifications in regenerative practices. In January, the government stopped reimbursements.

“Some [farmers] have had to delay planting and are lacking the necessary equipment to implement the practices that they were planning to,” said Emily Moose, executive director of A Greener World. “Others were counting on this funding to do important infrastructure projects on their farm.”

According to Moose, 77 farmers are currently enrolled in the project. Her organization certified the first farm through this program in December, she said, and it had planned to certify 100 farms over the next two years.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the release of approximately $20 million in contracts for other environmental and farm funds, including the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. There was no mention of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities.

In response to questions from Inside Climate News, a USDA spokesperson wrote in an email that programs placed on hold are under review “to ensure they align with the Department’s goals and priorities.”

“Secretary Rollins understands that farmers and ranchers, and other grant-funded entities that serve them, have made decisions based on these funding opportunities and that some have been waiting on payments during this government-wide review,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “She is working to make determinations as quickly as possible, and we look forward to sharing more information in the coming weeks.” 

A Tight-Knit Community

Small organic farmers in New York belong to a tight-knit community. To survive, owners of small farms have to produce a high-quality product and market and distribute it locally. 

Bennett, whose parents were farmers, now teaches new farmers how to start businesses. Bennett’s instruction has helped at least four farms to open in the region, and many of their students are working in other sectors of agriculture. 

Cutting funding now to one small farm will undercut the prospects for new farms and farmers’ capacity to learn and share sustainable practices, Bennett said. 

“Generations of farmers might not be able to get their feet off the ground because we’re not around to teach them—and we don’t have the energy and the strength to,” Bennett said.

Brett Budde owns an apple orchard in Sullivan County, where he has lived for 17 years. Budde mentors new farmers through a program supported by the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and he has seen farming supply stores and facilities slowly disappear from the region. Today, there is only one feed mill nearby, and he has to drive over an hour to buy organic fertilizers. 

“We really need these young farmers in our area to be successful in order to maintain and build the infrastructure that needs to be available for people to farm here,” Budde said.

Budde considers the mentorship, a part of the Sullivan County Beginner Farmer Program Mentorship Cohort, a “great program for our communities” but that too seems to be vulnerable. A spokesperson for the program wrote in early March that the funding had been put on hold. 

The program, funded through the Department of Agriculture and the American Rescue Plan Act, has not received any money since January 20, the spokesperson wrote. It is currently owed $140,000 in reimbursements. 

 

Cover photo:  Al Krupski, owner of Krupski Farms in Peconic, N.Y., holds dry soil in one of his pumpkin fields on Nov. 19, 2024, as Long Island undergoes a three-month drought. Credit: Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images