U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, left, and flower farmer Nikita Vincent listen to Ben Verhoeven, president of the Oregon Association of Nurseries, on Thursday, March 20, 2025. (Photo by Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
In and around Oregon’s capital city, federal funding cuts, freezes and clawed-back grants since President Donald Trump came back into office are leading to less food for people in need, more pests gnawing on wine grapes and plant cuttings wilting in trucks at understaffed ports.
Those are some of the messages local business owners had for U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, a second-term Democrat whose 6th Congressional District includes Salem and the vineyards, farmland and forests of the northern Willamette Valley. She met with a small group of farmers and other community members in her Salem district office on Thursday to hear stories about how federal funding cuts and uncertainty are affecting people in the district.
“None of this is about programs,” Salinas said. “It’s not about saving a program. It’s about saving the work on the ground, people who are working and farming and feeding themselves and their families.”
Marion Polk Food Share Executive Director Rick Gaupo, whose nonprofit feeds thousands of people each month and operates Meals on Wheels in Salem and Keizer, said federal cuts are hitting as his agency and food banks throughout the country experience all-time high demand.
Before the COVID pandemic, the network of food pantries served by Marion Polk Food Share had an average of 10,000 visitors each month. Now, that number’s at 18,000.
Grocery prices and rent prices are both about 30% higher than they were pre-COVID, Gaupo said, while income and federal safety nets aren’t keeping up. That puts more pressure on food banks, which feed everyone they can.
Right now, a freeze on commodity purchases means that truckloads of food that would have gone to hungry families and seniors won’t feed them. And the Marion Polk Food Share had to stop accepting new seniors into its program to deliver food boxes to their homes.
“That’s less food on somebody’s table,” Gaupo said. “That’s just gone.”
The cuts come as he fears the number of food bank visitors will continue to rise, especially if cuts to Medicaid and Medicare lead to more people choosing between paying for groceries and medicine.
Most of the people Salinas spoke with had received grants under the prior presidential administration and made plans based on those grants, only to find the rug yanked out from under them.
That was the case for Todd Severson, chief executive officer of Chapul Farms in McMinnville. He raises black soldier flies, collecting food waste to feed their larva. Their frass, or droppings, then become fertilizer.
Chapul Farms received a $3.9 million grant after Russia invaded Ukraine as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s attempt to produce more fertilizer domestically instead of importing it from Russia. Severson is still waiting to hear whether he’ll receive the last 10% of that grant.
Another $1.9 million, part of a larger grant awarded in 2024 through the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, was intended for Chapul Farms to work with 16 small farms throughout the country to turn farm waste into fertilizer. Severson hired two employees and expected to be reimbursed through the grant, and now he doesn’t know if their jobs are safe.
“The people we talked to (in the federal agencies) have been let go,” he said. “Who do we talk to, who do we reach out to?”
Nikita Vincent, owner of Twig & Bloom Flower Farm, fears the $80,000 grant the Monmouth City Council accepted from the U.S. Economic Development Administration late last year to develop a year-round indoor farmers market run by farmers who are Black, Indigenous and people of color in the mid-Willamette Valley is gone for good.
Vincent, who lives in West Salem, organized other BIPOC farmers and artisans and worked with the city of Monmouth to create a popup market. She hoped they had momentum to create a permanent co-op market, but everything feels frozen with a federal administration opposed to anything related to diversity, equity or inclusion.
“My biggest scare is the fact that BIPOC is literally the first word for that feasibility study proposal,” Vincent said. “Being that it’s a BIPOC effort, I’m afraid that it might be cut due to just the fact that we’re looking to have people like the Grand Ronde tribe and Kalapuya and (the farmworkers union Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste) PCUN.”
The Yamhill Soil & Water Conservation District helps farmers, ranchers and other landowners implement voluntary practices to restore and preserve parts of the prairies and oak savannas that once covered Yamhill County, executive director Andy Bleckinger said.
It’s a popular program, in part because the wildlife supported by the native habitat is good for Oregon wine country: raptors drawn to the area by oak and prairie will keep rodents away. The natural landscape is also better for limiting fire — oak trees are typically fire-resistant and thinning out the non-native brush and blackberry brambles means that fire burns quickly and at a low intensity.
At least 20 landowners are on a waiting list for the soil district’s conservation help, and a $6.6 million federal grant announced in December through the USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service would have helped preserve more than 1,000 acres over the next five years. But the grant froze right after the district opened job applications to hire two new full-time employees to expand the conservation program.
“We were sending emails to various NRCS staff, trying to get communication on signing the contract agreement, and nothing,” Bleckinger said. “Just completely ghosted. We heard from somebody in Colorado that Colorado was technically saying that they were freezing theirs, but they couldn’t speak for Oregon, and we didn’t hear from anyone in Oregon until just last week.”
Ben Verhoeven, president of the Oregon Association of Nurseries, said the $1.2 billion nursery industry is already seeing impacts of tariffs, including cancellations from Canadian customers who buy about 10% of Oregon’s exported plants.
The industry also brings in a lot of plant cuttings from Canada and Mexico, and job cuts affecting USDA inspectors at ports of entry mean those cuttings are wilting in trucks.
“These come to us in boxes overnight, and if they get delayed, I can’t go right around the corner and get them,” Verhoeven said.
Employee cuts at the USDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are also troubling for farmers, who rely on those workers to test and research safe pesticides for specialty crops and provide reliable weather forecasts.
“As any farmer will tell you, the weather isn’t just small talk, it’s big business,” Verhoeven said. “And I look at my phone and check the weather, the long term forecasts, an embarrassing amount of times a day. And the website I use is NOAA. I would just really love your help, Congresswoman, making sure that that continues to be the gold standard for weather prediction, because it’s crucial to our industry.”
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