On June 11, the USDA canceled over $1 billion of funding for conservation practices under the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP). This followed on the heels of the USDA’s April 14 cancellation of funding for the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities (PCSC) program. On July 17, USDA also terminated the Regional Food Business Centers (RFBC) program.
All of these programs were administered through non-government organizations (including non-profits, universities, commodity groups, and for-profit organizations), who wrote grant applications and recruited farmers into the programs. These organizations had already been awarded contracts for projects that included preserving farmland from development and mining in Michigan and Massachusetts and helping ranchers in Colorado purchase composting equipment.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins called the PCSC program a “Biden era climate slush fund,” “largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” She announced plans to rebrand the program as “Advancing Markets for Producers” (AMP), with new requirements that at least 65 percent of the federal funds must go directly to producers. Only organizations that had already enrolled and made payments to at least one farmer by December 31, 2024 will be eligible for funding under the revised program.
These funding cuts are only part of the Trump Administration’s campaign to weed out all federal funding for anything related to “climate change” research or mitigation. Since the PCSC program included modeling the effect supported conservation practices would have on greenhouse gas emissions, it fell under the anti-climate axe.
Unfortunately, this politically motivated attack on climate-related programs is not boding well for eco-agriculture. The “climate-friendly” practices that USDA is cutting funding for include cover crops, nutrient management, reduced tillage, prescribed grazing, conservation crop rotation, pasture and hay planting, composting, and mulching. All farmers, regardless of their political views on climate change policies, should agree that these practices are critical for improving soil health, increasing water infiltration, and providing resilience in droughts (whether or not they are “caused” by climate change).
These developments highlight the danger of tying soil health-improving practices to a political hot topic to get federal funding. Many non-profit organizations have seen a similar cut in funding for agricultural programs that included “DEI” language. Writing grant proposals to emphasize climate change or DEI was an effective strategy in the Biden era, but the Trump administration’s refusal to fund programs that use that language has caused the strategy to backfire, hurting nonprofits and farmers alike.
While the loss of this funding is disappointing, if eco-agriculture is going to succeed in the long run, farmers will have to be willing and able to adopt practices that improve soil health without an infusion of federal funds. This may mean a slower transition with less new equipment, but in the long run farmers who can keep their soil healthy regardless of which way the political winds blow will be the most successful.
