Axed program designed to help with climate change
Local farmers, racing to figure out how to adapt to a rapidly changing climate that has buoyed pests and led to both droughts and flooding, thought help was on the way from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But a major source of funding looks like it is about to disappear.
The Hudson Valley is one of four regions in the country to receive a Climate Smart Commodities Grant through a USDA pilot program to make farms more resilient while improving air and water quality. Contracts had been signed, and planning was underway on eight local farms when the program was cut following the re-election of President Donald Trump.
“We have partners who received letters out of the blue telling them that their government contracts — contracts that have been signed and that they were already doing work toward — have been canceled,” said Megan Larmer of the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming in Philipstown, which was overseeing the program. “Your government contract should be the most secure type of funding you could have.”
The Climate Smart Commodities Grant is one of many sources of funding for local farms that has been frozen or canceled in the past six weeks. Rocksteady Farms in Millerton had over $400,000 cut for projects such as farmer training, food access and water mitigation. A $2.5 million grant from the USDA to help Rocksteady and a dozen other farms build a food hub with barns and processing facilities is on hold.
Farming is, by nature, a famously unpredictable undertaking, even without climate change. But financial cuts and freezes at the beginning of the growing season have added another layer of uncertainty, leading farmers to downgrade their plans and projections. It’s also giving younger farmers second thoughts about the profession.
“The fact that all this is sowing fear amongst all these organizations that are dedicated to the public good is psychologically damaging, and the repercussions of it are going to be felt for a long time,” said Larmer.
Among those affected is Jackie Matza, a Hudson Valley native who was living in Germany and graduated from Kiel University with a degree in sustainability. Speaking with her classmates from around the world made her realize how much her talents were needed back home.
“The U.S. needs to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of climate change planning, resiliency planning, protecting land and protecting Indigenous communities,” she said. “All of these things are routine in a lot of European countries. They have such a clear plan. Even the general public takes things like ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ very seriously. Americans don’t. It was a wake-up call for me to come back to my own country and be a part of actual change for the people who need it.”
Matza was hired in the fall to help administer the Climate Smart Commodities Grant at Glynwood as part of the Working Lands Climate Corps, a Biden-era program partly inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps that helped build parks, plant trees and restore farms in the 1920s and ’30s. After the November election, the program changed its name to the Working Lands Conservation Corps because of a Trump directive to eliminate any program with the word climate in it.
That didn’t help. The program has been canceled and Matza is out of a job that she traveled thousands of miles to take. Finding a new one will be difficult. “Anything similar to what I was doing here has either been cut or has thousands of other government employees who were just fired applying for it,” she said. “The competition is quite fierce.”
Zach Wolf of EZ Farms in Columbia County is also out of a gig. He was helping to develop plans for the eight local farms taking part in the Climate Smart Commodities Grant, including his own. “It’s a lot of things that farmers would like to do but just don’t have the money,” he said. The practices included planting cover crops, as well as integrating more trees to act as a windbreak, improving soil, water and air quality, and providing perennial crops in the form of fruit.
“Traditionally, most small farms had a combination of some sort of annual crop, a livestock pasture and an orchard or other perennial production,” he explained. “That system of agriculture has stood the test of time. A lot of the regenerative agriculture movement is about trying to get back to diversification, keeping the farm as a whole system.”
Without the grant, Wolf won’t be able to undertake any of those projects at his farm. The same is true for Fishkill Farms, which was in the enviable position of adding land. “It’s unusual for a farm in the Hudson Valley to be expanding,” said Mark Doyle, the farm’s general manager. “It’s hard enough to just hold on to the land you have.” In this case, the farm is buying land owned by the Morgenthau family, the founders of Fishkill Farm.
The land had been neglected for decades and needs a lot of help. Doyle had planned to use the federal funds to build pollinator gardens and plant trees to store more carbon from the atmosphere and stop the rapid erosion on its slopes.
The farm had been experimenting with spreading mulch around its apple trees to help them in droughts and was working with Cornell Cooperative Extension to see if the practice could be replicated on other farms. “I’m not saying that I won’t still try to do it, but it’s not going to be very thorough,” said Doyle. “The other things, like the pollinator gardens, I just won’t be able to get to.”
On Feb. 27, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand sent a letter to the USDA in response to the concerns of New York farmers whose funding has been frozen. “Farmers have taken on incredible financial risk due to the guarantees and signed contracts that were provided by the USDA,” she wrote. “Making America healthier starts and ends with New York farmers and rural communities, and they deserve the support Congress has already committed to giving them.”
The letter asks for a more detailed explanation of why the funds were frozen and what the USDA expects farmers to do instead.
“If you don’t have healthy soil and you don’t have healthy air, you don’t have healthy food,” Matza said. “It shouldn’t be political.”
We need local farms and dedicated farmers to sustain locally grown food and help interested people have smart food choices. We belong to three CSA [community supported agriculture] farms and the benefit to our health and choices of food is tremendous. We don’t need government opposition to healthy options, and cutting funding for farming is wrong. We will always support local farming in my household.
Thank you to Brian PJ Cronin for his excellent reporting on how the Trump administration’s funding freezes and Project 2025 policies are impacting our communities.
I’m afraid we are about to get a serious civics lesson on how the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration help our country run and keep us healthy and safe. We are going to experience the impacts on fish migration, water quality, cuts in school programs that teach children about the natural world, maintenance and restoration of important marshlands, weather forecasting, air quality and health issues because of climate change.
We’re going to see local farms struggle, too. As a gardener, I know of the increasing challenges of pest infestations and climate change. I can’t imagine dealing with these issues on the scale required by farming. Cutting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Climate Smart Commodities Grant program is cruel business. Farming is tough enough. I’d like our government to help these people, if only for selfish reasons: I like delicious, fresh food. The practices the farmers would have been able to implement with this program would have improved soil, water and air quality.
I don’t think it’s a good thing when our government breaks its promises and contracts with the American people. I hope more people will start paying attention to what we are losing.