Funding aimed at making a struggling Williamstown farm more resilient has been paused. A program that distributes local, free food has been canceled. The Department of Environmental Conservation is missing $10.7 million for clean water quality projects.
In the last few months, the new administration of President Donald Trump has pulled back federal funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, climate change and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed in 2022 by his predecessor Joe Biden.
Around Vermont, those funding changes are affecting farmers and the organizations that support them, prompting alarm and confusion. Altogether, the federal government has paused or canceled tens of millions of dollars in funding for agricultural programs across the state.
“Farmers thrive on predictability,” said Anson Tebbetts, secretary of the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. “But we’re not in that space right now. So I think everyone is taking it day to day.”
The most recent axe fell last Friday on two U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that support local farms by paying them to provide food for specific local markets.
One supported 80 local farms, which in turn produced food that was distributed to people experiencing poverty in 13 Vermont counties through free CSA programs, pop-up markets and food shelves, according to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture. The other focused on getting more local food into schools and child care centers.
The state agency learned on March 7 that the two programs — the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program and the Local Food for Schools and Child Care Cooperative Agreement, respectively — would be canceled in 60 days.
Nationally, the programs cost about $1 billion, and in Vermont, the USDA will no longer award roughly $1.7 million that it had previously pledged, the agency said.
“It was a successful program, because it was essentially doing two things,” Tebbetts said. “It was supporting farmers. They were growing or producing something, and that was being distributed to cafeterias, homes, etc. So it was a great program because it was helping our farmers, but it was also getting that local product to a bigger audience.”
The Intervale Center in Burlington distributed about $45,000 of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program funding to around 700 families, according to Kristen McDowell, food hub manager at the Intervale.
The people who receive the benefits are often Black, Indigenous, people of color, single-family households and elderly people who “don’t have access to federal benefits, like Snap or EBT, so they’re technically on the benefits cliff,” she said.
While the organization already distributed free food for people in need before the assistance program started, the federal funding allowed them to continue it in the winter months. Without the funding, the program will likely be restricted to only summer months, McDowell said.
Kayla Strom, the Farm to School Program manager at Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, or NOFA, said in an email the organization was “devastated” to hear that the Local Food for Schools and Child Care program was canceled. Vermont had worked to convene “dozens of partners to determine the most effective use of these funds.”
The cancellation comes at a time “when food costs are expected to rise, and the funding would have expanded local purchasing, supported Vermont farmers, and strengthened our farm to school programs,” Strom said.
Plug pulled
After Bear Roots Farm, located in Williamstown and Barre, experienced floods and prolonged wet weather in 2023, farmers Jon Wagner and Karin Bellemare were looking for financial resources to recover.
Before the flood, they had borrowed money to grow crops, only to have those crops wiped out by a torrent of water. The pandemic, flooding and rising expenses have contributed to unmanageable costs for the farm, and debt that’s becoming increasingly unwieldy.
“Almost every year there’s some extreme thing that’s going on,” Wagner said.
Last spring, the farmers sat down with staff at NOFA to develop a new business model “that would help us rebuild, and sustain us through future environmental impacts, like flooding,” Wagner said in an interview.
They planned to construct a nursery, which would be more weather resilient, and put up a fence to keep deer out.
After helping the farmers think through big-picture questions about the future of their business, NOFA assisted in putting Bear Roots Farm on a path to receive roughly $60,000 through a program called Climate Smart Farming and Marketing.
The program is funded directly through the federal Inflation Reduction Act and distributed through the Agricultural Marketing Service, which is part of the United States Department of Agriculture.
The program was intended to help “farms mitigate the risks of climate change” and
“analyze the vulnerabilities in their business,” said Eric Boatti, who manages the program for NOFA.
“The verbal communication was, ‘We don’t have the funds until April 1. They need to be signed off on.’ But the plants are all on sale in the winter. You have to buy them now,” Wagner said.
They bought the plants, which put the farm in a tight financial position. They expected to be reimbursed, and they needed the money.
Then, Wagner received notice from Pasa — an organization that doles out the funds to farms from Maine to South Carolina — that the federal government had paused the program. While there hasn’t explicitly been a stop-work order, Pasa has been filing reimbursement requests that haven’t been fulfilled.
“I’ve got a long list of expenses coming up, and I’m kind of scratching my head and saying, ‘Well, I guess I can put it on a credit card,’” Wagner said.
Some contracts with Vermont farms had already been finalized when the freeze started, and those farmers have been able to move forward with projects, Boatti said. But around 40 to 50 farms needed an environmental review, a process that takes more time, and now they’re stuck in limbo, he said. In addition, the federal government has terminated a contract with the company that performed the environmental reviews, the Clark Group.
According to Pasa, 12 Vermont farmers have already received almost $117,00 in funding through the program. Over the next three years, the organization estimates that almost $1.5 million would be available through the program to Vermont farmers, the organization’s director, Hannah Smith-Brubaker, said in a memo about the funding freeze.
The technical assistance and business planning side of the Climate Smart Farming and Marketing program can still exist without the funding, Boatti said, but it won’t offer farms the same opportunities.
“We can go out and do risk assessments and help farms make adaptation plans, but this funding was allowing us to then pay them for the implementation of those adaptation practices, and that is now no longer an option, with this funding being pulled,” he said.
That has left Bear Roots Farm facing an even more precarious financial future.
If the grant hadn’t been available in the first place, Wagner said, the farmers would have figured something else out, or pointed their business in a different direction.
“But to set us up and then pull the plug, that’s put us in a much worse situation,” he said.
Support for farms
The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, too, recently received notice that a $10.7 million grant to assist farmers with installing often-expensive water quality projects, has been paused. It was also funded through the Inflation Reduction Act.
The program was set to deliver $8 million directly to farmers for water quality and flood resilience projects ranging from no-till practices to stream restoration to forest management plans that can help stop soil erosion, according to Marli Rupe, the agricultural water quality section chief at the Department of Environmental Conservation. Another $2.7 million was going to be directed toward technical assistance programs for the farmers.
While farmers had already applied for the funding, the money had not yet been awarded, Rupe said.
The projects are “also really good for their farm sustainability and their ability to be financially sound,” Rupe said. “Not having these funds is definitely going to have an impact on what they can do.”
The agriculture industry is the largest contributor to Lake Champlain’s water quality problems, but farmers have also been responsible for more success in water quality restoration than any other sector, according to a recent performance report from the Department of Environmental Conservation. Farmers are required to adhere to certain statewide water quality practices, and the resulting projects are often expensive and difficult for farmers to take on without financial assistance.
“The (loss of the) Inflation Reduction Act money is going to start seriously impacting the ability of organizations like Vermont Association of Conservation Districts, like the Department of Environmental Conservation, to actually help farmers get practices on the ground that protect water quality and that do this work,” said Michelle Monroe, executive director of the Vermont Association of Conservation Districts.
Her organization, too, is waiting for $500,000 in already-awarded funding through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal program that funds water quality projects on farms. That money, which partially comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, funds salaries for several Natural Resources Conservation Service employees whose responsibilities span both organizations, she said.
Previously paused
The federal government previously froze some money that is now thawed and flowing to farmers and supporting organizations.
Some money that was already contracted to farms through the Natural Resources Conservation Service for on-farm conservation programs was stopped, but is now flowing again, according to Monroe.
Some farms had invested “a lot of money” to employ practices on their farms that are “good for the environment and good for their farm,” Monroe said, while expecting to be reimbursed.
“For some farms that did a lot of projects, it was a real financial burden to have this money frozen,” she said. But now that the money is flowing again, the Natural Resources Conservation Service “has been approving those (reimbursement requests) as quickly as they can,” she said.
Separately, federal funding going to the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center — which pays for all six of the center’s staff members, along with their programs and contracts — had been paused, according to Laura Ginsburg, who leads the center. The paused money totaled more than $9.5 million, she said.
The center is funded through the USDA, and it stopped processing payments after Jan. 19, Ginsburg said. The center’s staff never received any communication from the federal government “about the funds being unavailable or frozen,” Ginsburg said.
“The only response we would get when we asked for a status update was, ‘We are awaiting further guidance,’” she said.
Four similar organizations exist across the country, all funded through the farm bill. They each represent a region, and though they all operate a bit differently, “the core” of the programming “is to provide grant funds to dairy businesses, and for us, that means farmers, processors and technical assistance providers,” Ginsburg said.
“We do lots of different kinds of grants, from processor expansion and modernization to food safety and marketing and branding to farm focused grants for farm modernization, for milk handling and storage and for technical assistance and research as well,” she said.
In early March, the center learned that the funding was unfrozen.
During the time the center could not access the funding, Ginsburg said farmers experienced “a lot of anxiety” and “a lot of uncertainty.”
“There were a few teary phone calls that we had with recipients who just didn’t know what they should do,” she said.
For many farmers, she said, this specific uncertainty came on top of many others: paused Natural Resources Conservation Service funding, a lack of communication from local USDA offices, questions about potential tariffs and the increased prices or supply chain issues that might arise as a result.
“It’s just a lot for one person to try to figure out how to navigate, especially when they have tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line,” she said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont agriculture community reels from federal funding changes .