On Thursday, the United States Department of Agriculture announced that it would launch the “first section” of funds arrested under the review of the administration of the inflation reduction law, for a total of $ 20 million.
“It’s a misery,” said Mike Lavender, policy director of the National Coalition for Sustainable Agriculture, an agricultural and food defense group. “There is a certain appearance that this is moving, but it is clearly not fast enough. The moment matters. “
Small farms can be especially vulnerable, since they tend to have more strict benefit margins and more limited access to credit than larger operations. They also constitute a great proportion of the farms that participate in some of the federal subsidies programs that have been frozen, according to a recent report of the USDA.
“With this uncertainty, they are withdrawing from farmers’ markets, canceling contracts already because they do not believe they will have the ability to meet them,” said Vanessa García Polanco, director of government relations of the National Coalition of Young Farmers, a defense group For farmers and ranchers. “When all that financing freezes, it sends them a sign that their business plan is not safe.”
In a press release, the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, said Thursday that “it is clear that part of this financing went to programs that had nothing to do with agriculture, so we are still reviewing.” She criticized what she described as “disastrous envelope policies, extreme environmental programs of the previous administration, extreme environmental programs and paralyzing inflation.”
The USDA did not say when additional money would be released.
Brian Geier, a farmer in Indiana, had had a subsidy of $ 10,000 of the USDA to expand the grazing area for his sheep, which would later rotate with the hay fields of his farm to preserve the quality of the soil over time. According to the expectation of receiving the subsidy, he agreed to buy lambs this spring from a local sheep breeder.
Within nine weeks, the lambs are expected to be born. But Geier still does not know whether he will receive or when he was promised to build the fencing and water lines he needs, so he hastened to ensure a friend’s loan to make sure the lambs have a place to graze.
“Farmers have to change when the deadlines change,” Geier said. “We have to adapt given the biological situations that occur with animals and stations.”
Not having received USDA updates in your subsidy until Friday afternoon, now you are rethinking your plan to buy more sheep this summer for its farm, which he and his partner founded two years ago. “We will have to climb that and stop it.”
Those who receive subsidies explicitly related to climate change are specially concerned, since the Trump administration has made the objective of such programs a political priority.
Sustainable Agriculture passes, a non -profit organization that supports farmers, manages around 200 projects related to the climate funded by the USDA in 15 states, including improvements to the Garden of Roell in Massachusetts.
The group now owes about $ 2 million in reimbursement of the USDA, according to executive director Hannah Smith-Brubaker, who fears that he has to fire the staff if the freezing continues for much longer. “There will be no people to help those farmers and process those payments,” he said.
Roell looked for USDA funds to support a new garden after Hurricane Helene destroyed the hives that they maintained in the west of North Carolina, only one of the many extreme climatic events that interrupted their business of beekeeping and honey production.
“The goal of this garden was to make us more resistant,” said Roell. “We can have a diversified farm that has other products to offer and can compensate for losses when catastrophes like this occur. But instead, now, we have the federal government as a catastrophe. “
