David Buck got the good news late last month.
Federal funding he had been awarded for his Southbury goat and cow dairy —Guardians Farm — was being “unpaused.”
Buck had signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA, on January 17 to access just under $10,000 to set up a rotational grazing system, do seeding and run waterlines for three pastures. But like so many farmers around the state and the country, his promised funding was frozen by the Trump administration because its source was the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA.
After several weeks of defying court orders to release IRA and other pools of money, on February 20, the USDA released $20 million of its IRA funds, a tiny speck of what had been a $20 billion, five-year pot of funding for the department’s four most popular programs.
Buck was one of the very few lucky ones — no small irony that in 10 years of farming this was his first federal grant. “I am not losing sleep over this at all,” he had said only hours before the funding release was announced. “When the dust settles, I do think that things will even out and I do not think that farmers will be left behind.”
At the moment, tens of thousands of farmers — many long-time satisfied customers of USDA programs — might not be as confident.
It raises the question of whether consumers will end up paying more for food as a result.
The uncertainty over federal farm funding, as well as layoffs at the USDA that are slowing down work that isn’t frozen, come as farmers in this region are in their heaviest spending time of the year. Prepping for spring planting means buying seed and supplies; making repairs, upgrades and new purchases of equipment from tractors to greenhouses to irrigation lines to power; and starting to prepare land for planting. It can be a lot of money out the door that won’t come back in until crops are harvested.
“We’re fully run on credit this time of year,” said Dakota Rudloff-Eastman, who has her fingers crossed that funding for two new greenhouses will come through for her River Ridge Farm in Portland.
Funding from the longstanding alphabet soup of grant programs farmers have counted on for decades is part of her and many farmers’ calculations. Most USDA grants operate as reimbursements and may also require matching funds or other investments from producers, leaving them handwringing over whether to lay out their own money or get a loan without the usual guarantee the feds will live up to their part of the bargain.
“We have a pretty calculated cash flow plan so in terms of normal expenses, if the greenhouse reimbursement doesn’t happen, then yeah, that’s a different conversation,” Rudloff-Eastman said.
For more than a few Connecticut farmers, that uncertainty is just one more layer of concern on top of several years of severe weather that has frozen, fried, drowned and parched — sometimes all in one year — their crops.
The federal government has promised cash to pay for damage to the region in 2023 and 2024. But that was a Biden administration commitment of $220 million for New England, Hawaii and Alaska — housed in a supplemental package to the continuing budget resolution passed in December. Connecticut has requested nearly $84 million of that.
That the announcement about the money came only hours before the Trump administration instituted a spending freeze definitely worried U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd district.
“I would not trust Russell Vought as far as I can throw him,” Courtney said, referring to the Office of Management and Budget director who served in the same position at the end of the first Trump administration and was the chief architect of Project 2025. It was his office that issued the freeze. “These guys could easily use their theory of impoundment and grab it.”
Kaitlyn Kimball and her husband Lawrence Passeck’s seven-year old Sunset Farm in Naugatuck got 15 inches of rain in one day last August leaving a three-acre field under a foot of water. It resulted in a lot of crop loss they hope the disaster funds will help them recoup.
In the meantime they have active grants through three different federal programs. One — which uses IRA money — is for native tree plantings to help with wind breaks around a field. It is now paused one-third of the way through.
“It was supposed to be a three-year contract, and so we had built those payments into our cash flow for the next two years,” she said. “We had signed the contract last year and so it seems illegal to pause that.”
The other two are not IRA-funded. One is for a high tunnel — large plastic greenhouses widely used for better weather control and year-round farming by many Connecticut vegetable growers like Kimball. The other is for a well. Supposedly they are not paused, but the Natural Resources Conservation Service, NRCS, the USDA division that handles all three of the grant programs Kimball is using, is so strapped for staffing that many projects may not be done in time for the upcoming growing season. Under program rules, NRCS engineers must design many projects.
“It’s work that needs to happen before this farming season begins,” Kimball said. “The offices are telling us that they’re just extremely short staffed and we’re likely going to see more delays.
‘If we’re seeing layoffs within the USDA and we’re seeing a pause to this funding, that hurts us as farmers.”
Nationally nearly 6,000 USDA probationary employees have lost their jobs in the mass federal worker firings. On Wednesday, the Merit System Protection Board, a quasi-judicial independent agency in the federal government, ordered they be rehired for 45 days while the matter is investigated. It’s not clear what that will mean in Connecticut, which was short-staffed even before the dismissals.
Steve Munno of Massaro Community Farm in Woodbridge considers himself lucky to have completed, and been reimbursed for, two high tunnels before the end of last year. But right now he’s stalled out on two erosion control projects because the NRCS engineers who did the measurements haven’t completed an actual plan yet.
“I have no idea who got fired. I don’t know who’s there, and I don’t really want to call up to ask who’s still in the office, who’s still there,” he said. “People need to be able to rely on existing contracts and their providers. That’s no way to do business.”
NRCS and the IRA
Federal funding for agriculture is critical to farming all over the U.S. It flows through a number of portals in a complex web of interconnected programs.
In Connecticut, funding for a half-dozen or so programs goes through the state agriculture department, which then distributes money to farmers. Some money goes directly to the department for its use. There are block grants to the University of Connecticut extension service that are used for programs to educate and assist farmers. But a lot of funding comes through several programs that are housed in the NRCS.
The money Buck is now receiving comes from a nearly 30-year-old program so ubiquitous U.S. farmers refer to it by its acronym, EQIP, which is pronounced EE-kwip. Many, if not most, don’t know or remember that it stands for Environmental Quality Incentives Program.
EQIP is so popular — including in Connecticut —that it consistently has more applicants than farm bill funding can cover. The IRA provided an additional nearly $20 billion over five years for EQIP and a few of the other most popular NRCS programs. EQIP got nearly half that funding. A program called the Conservation Stewardship Program, CSP, widely used in Connecticut, got more than $3 billion.
Farmers just apply for the programs — not the particular pot of money. Buck’s wound up in the IRA funding pool. Kimball’s high tunnel money is also EQIP, but she landed in the regular funding pool. Her paused tree money came through CSP and wound up in the IRA bucket. Her third grant came through yet another NRCS program —Agricultural Management Assistance, AMA, that did not receive supplemental IRA money.
Thomas Morgart, who heads the Connecticut NRCS office said that EQIP and CSP grants that were not funded by the IRA are being paid.
He said for fiscal 2025, Connecticut was awarded $13.2 million non-IRA money for EQIP, of which about $7.3 million has been obligated. For CSP the award was $1.09 million with about $46,000 obligated.
Morgart referred all questions regarding IRA funds, including how much of the recently released $20 million Connecticut would get, to a Washington D.C. spokesman who did not respond to an email.
Analysis by House Appropriations Democrats shows that nationwide, more than $800 million in EQIP IRA funds is being withheld. Connecticut accounts for more than $5 million of that, 85% of which is for farms in Courtney’s district, which spans all of eastern Connecticut, where most of the farms in the state are located.
Despite court rulings against Trump’s executive orders that froze program funding broadly and IRA money specifically, it remains unclear whether the administration will honor long-term funding commitments like those in many multi-year farm programs or even the rest of the farm bill money for fiscal 2025. And it is well-known that Trump not only wants to stop IRA funding in its tracks, but also is trying to take back funding that has already been obligated.
In the agriculture and environmental sectors, the administration has made no secret that it wants to eliminate funding for climate change work, which arguably almost every program does as farmers struggle to grow products and raise animals in the face of climate change-exacerbated extremes.
The administration has also been clear that it wants to get rid of anything designed to promote diversity and help the most at-risk populations.
Sweating it out
That leaves Hector “Freedom” Gerardo with both targets — climate and diversity — on his back.
Gerardo has a $10,000 EQIP contract for work on his 3.5-acre family farm, Seamarron, in Danbury. He’s supposed to get reimbursed in September and has already used the money to purchased a hoop house he intends to erect this spring, among other things. So he checked with NRCS.
“They said to keep going,” he said. “Keep doing it. The contract is still viable. But we just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
But some of the other projects he’s involved with are in categories and include terminology that could mean big trouble. He is co-director with the UConn extension service of a project called the Venture Farming Institute that provides training for underserved BIPOC farmers in Connecticut and Rhode Island. The grant, for more than $600,000, is from the USDA’s Outreach and Assistance for Socially Disadvantaged and Veteran Farmers and Ranchers Program.
Co-director Jiff Martin, who is with Extension, said the program is about half-way through its funding, which can be accessed quarterly as advanced payments.
“So far, all is OK,” she said in an email.
As the funding freeze hit, Gerardo was about to finalize a $2.5 million grant from the Climate-Smart Commodities Partnership Program. It was part of a $90 million project the National Association of Conservation Districts was spearheading to partner with many local operations, including Gerardo’s. His portion was to help people grow hemp and in doing so, bring down green gas emissions and develop a new market for a commodity crop.
“We never signed the contract, which is a gift and a curse,” he said, noting that people who did sign contracts and spend money might now not get reimbursed. “We were already looking to get money from a bank to be able to fund some of the stuff. … And we didn’t do all of that.”
A reverse jackpot?
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said.
But it’s something he said he’s used to. “We’ve been dealing with this for a long time. We’ve been resilient. We will work together to create a community and unity amongst Black farmers throughout the Northeast and throughout the country.
“It’s nothing new for our communities — it’s nothing new.”
“I think that the real challenge for everybody right now is, what are the words that are going to put you in the category of ‘that’s climate,” said Bonnie Burr, department head for UConn extension. “We’ve been doing irrigation on farmland since the beginning of time. And is that going to be it seen as a response to climate, to drought, or is that still going to be a practice that’s accepted?”
Aside from that, extension faces its own potential funding crunch as it works with beginning farmers, underserved farmers and anyone else who needs farming assistance to address climate change and climate resilience.
“At this point, we’re continuing with our programming because it’s the right thing to do, but we’re waiting to see if funding continues to come in,” Burr said.
Extension receives so-called capacity funds that it uses for programs as well as money for competitive grants. That’s about half their funding. State block grants cover a lot of the rest.
“The funding that did come in, we’re going to use that right straight through to there’s nothing there,” Burr said. “Then the question becomes, will we begin to get shut down as we get to the end of the allocations.”
Another USDA program widely used in Connecticut goes by the acronym REAP — which stands for Rural Energy for America Program. It runs through USDA’s Rural Development division and in Connecticut is a funding component of the Farm Energy Program.
In its 15-year existence, Farm Energy has helped farms and agriculture-based rural small businesses obtain more than $7 million in grants and loans for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, according Amanda Fargo-Johnson, who has run the program since its inception through a non-governmental non-profit called Connecticut Resource Conservation and Development, or RC&D.
RC&D also works with other USDA divisions, including NRCS, and receives federal grants that cover more than 60% of its work.
REAP is now in a holding pattern because IRA funds had been provided to boost REAP grants from 25% of project costs to 50%. House Appropriations Committee Democrats have calculated that of the nearly $666.7 million in withheld IRA REAP funds, more than $4.1 million is owed to Connecticut.
As a result, in the current quarterly grant round which ends March 31, applicants are back to applying for only a 25% reimbursement. The round that ends in June has been cancelled.
Fargo-Johnson said this leaves seven farms who applied for REAP in 2024 still waiting for decisions and 21 farms who have open, approved REAP agreements wondering whether they’ll see all or even any of the money.
“We don’t know what this will all mean for the farms we assisted,” Fargo-Johnson said in an email. “We are considering how to best mitigate the situation, possible risk in continuing to work on federal grant funded contracts and managing cash flow. There is some concern that when bills are submitted to USDA they may not get reimbursed for work or projects completed.”
That is what has Jamie Jones trying to figure out what to do. As the sixth generation of his family to farm fields in Shelton — now with grapes and fruit for wine, and Christmas trees, he has seen just about every curve that nature and economics can throw at a farmer.
The Trump funding freeze is something else.
Jones has been awarded a REAP grant for a solar array on one of his barns, but hasn’t started it yet.
“Is the money going to be there?” he asks rhetorically. He knows the value from an earlier solar project completed through REAP. He said his electric bill went from around $1,200 a month down to less than $100 and the REAP money helped get the payback done sooner.
“Well, do I go through it, and if the money’s not there, then,” he trailed off. “These are the questions you have to ask. And I’m evaluating.”
He was also planning to put in EV chargers for winery customers — but may forgo that if he winds up paying for the whole solar project. He also has EQIP and CSP contracts and wonders if that money will be there.
“It’s uncomfortable and confusing, because there’s just unknowns,” he said. “As a farmer, we deal with weather events and, like any business, the marketplace to a degree is uncertain. But the one thing you want is stability from the government.”
Courtney called situations like Jones’ a double whammy. “You’re not only being disappointed that you’re not getting a grant, but you’re also taking the financial hit,” he said, calling the answer to whether farmers would get funding “very murky.”
“The risk is that people’s trust and belief in the program is really undermined seriously,” he said. “It’s a hot mess right now.”
Trying to plan for the future
Rudloff-Eastman of River Ridge isn’t likely to quibble with that assessment.
The high tunnel project she’s hoping she gets reimbursed for — to the tune of $48,000 — is one of four current grant contracts for her five-year-old operation. In addition to the farm, she and her husband Matthew Went have a brick-and-mortar market in Middletown, run Rose’s Berry Farm in Glastonbury and have expansion plans for more farming in Cheshire. Portland is operating year-round; the plan is for Cheshire to do the same.
All four grants come through NRCS. The biggest, approved last fall, is an EQIP for energy efficiency upgrades in the existing greenhouses. It’s now on hold. “It’s a six-year contract, so we haven’t started doing anything, thank goodness,” Rudloff-Eastman said. “It just amazes me — it’s a contract. A contract is a contract.”
If the $48,000 for the two new greenhouses doesn’t come through she said she’ll take out a loan to cover them. She’s in a similar situation for a big and much more costly irrigation project that’s supposed to get started in April. “But again, will we get paid? I don’t know,” she said.
She also has a grant to cover soil sampling. “Even if the money is still there, if there aren’t people to help you process the paperwork, good luck getting reimbursed,” she said. Trying to figure out what’s going on, she and other farmers have resorted to getting essentially crowd-sourced information on Reddit. “That’s crazy,” she said.
“I feel like, as farmers, we’re born with the we’ll-figure-it-out gene, but you know that if that reimbursement doesn’t come through, that’s a big deal.”
Loans, while Rudloff-Eastman holds them out as an option, tend not to be the funding option of choice for most farmers. They are, however, often used to cover early season expenses and paid back as grants are received and income comes in during harvest season.
Chris Laughton, director of knowledge exchange at Farm Credit East, a banking coop that handles much, if not most, of loan and financial services for Connecticut farmers, said he’s not seeing a higher loan uptake this season so far. And he’s uncertain whether the federal problems could drive more financial problems such as defaults.
“I hope not,” he said. “There may be some limited impact like that. I think for most producers, most farmers, the loss of a grant, hopefully, is not going to be enough to push them over the edge. But there may be a certain number of farms where that could be a factor.”
And in his 14 years at Farm Credit East and decades prior in his family’s agriculture business, he said this is probably the most uncertainty he’s ever seen.
“The pendulum has swung left and right at various times where politics have gotten more liberal or more conservative, but it’s never been this uncertain.”
Rudloff-Eastman said if the funding that farmers have counted on goes away, the rudest awakening may be for the public.
“People, consumers are really going to be forced to realize the real cost of food,” she said. “I think that’s going to hurt a lot of people that don’t realize we don’t pay the real cost of food in this country. And so when you take away the support network of farmers that’s helping offset the cost, what’s going to happen is that’s going to get passed on.
Economic viability of farms is pretty fundamental to being able to eat.”