Critics say the Trump administration’s halt to billions in conservation spending could cause long-term damage and slow hard-won progress.
For two decades, farmer John Burk has been working to improve the soil on his farm in Michigan, taking a few extra steps to make it more resilient and productive. His efforts have paid off.
“When we have the dry, hot summers or lack of rainfall, our crops can sustain the dry spells better. We don’t have huge yield decreases,” Burk said. “And when it rains and we have the freak storms, like it seems to do so much now, we don’t have the ponding and all the runoff.”
An added bonus: He needs less fertilizer, a major operating expense.
But Burk, and tens of thousands of farmers across the country like him, have learned that the Trump administration now considers these steps—which include limiting tillage, planting soil-enriching cover crops or installing water chutes to control erosion—“far left climate” activities. The administration has frozen billions of dollars in funding that pay for these activities while the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and White House conduct ongoing reviews.
The funding freeze, along with layoffs, threatened cutbacks and orders from the administration to remove climate information from the USDA’s website, have had a destabilizing effect on farmers and the agency alike. The agency, which under the Biden administration had more seriously embraced a role in addressing the climate crisis, is in chaos, former staffers say. Frustration from farmers is growing.
“I hear a lot of anger,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
The freeze has stoked uncertainty across farming communities at a particularly bad time. The Trump administration’s tariffs on imports from China, Canada and Mexico have sparked retaliatory tariffs that are expected to hurt American farmers already struggling with low crop prices and high fertilizer costs. Most farmers make decisions about the year ahead in the spring, but without knowing how much funding they can count on, those decisions are especially fraught this year. As extreme weather becomes the norm, the uncertainty mounts. Last year alone, farmers lost more than $20 billion to weather disasters, prompting Congress to approve $31 billion in disaster assistance.
“We’ve got an ag economy where prices are down and you’ve got increasing pressure because of Trump’s trade war—and now you’re taking away a source of income,” said Robert Bonnie, the under secretary for farm production and conservation at USDA under Biden. “You can put payments on hold. You can’t put spring on hold.”
The agency did not respond to specific questions or a request for comment for this story.
For decades, the agency has funneled support and funding for conservation projects through hugely popular programs that are so in demand each year, the agency turns away applicants. These farm practices make the soil healthier and more productive. They also help it store more carbon and are seen as significant tools for controlling climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
“Everyone thinks these conservation programs are about farmers,” Burk said. “But it’s way bigger than just the farmer. These don’t just help with yield. It’s helping every single person on the planet.”
The USDA oversees 20 conservation programs that are funded through the Farm Bill, the massive legislation covering farm and nutrition programs that’s negotiated every five years. Under the Biden administration these conservation and energy programs got a huge boost: $19.5 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate legislation.
But amid the Trump administration’s broader attacks on climate action, most of the unspent dollars remain frozen, despite the popularity of these programs and their benefits beyond addressing climate change.
One analysis, by former USDA employees, says the agency currently owes nearly $2 billion in promised grants and unpaid funds for conservation and energy efficiency programs to more than 22,000 farmers. Another, by an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, finds that farmers stand to lose $12.5 billion from the agency’s most popular and widely used programs. Congressional Republicans have signalled that they would shift the funds to other programs covered by the Farm Bill.
While the agency and its new secretary, Brooke Rollins, announced in February that $20 million in IRA funding will be released, it’s not clear when and how. Rollins said in a statement that the agency was concerned the dollars were being spent on programs “that had nothing to do with agriculture,” but went on to say the review was being conducted “to ensure that programs are focused on supporting farmers and ranchers, not DEIA programs or far-left climate programs.”
On March 26, the agency said it would release funding for the Rural Energy for America Program, which gives grants for farmers to install energy-efficient projects, like solar panels. In order to receive the funds, recipients of the grants will have to revise their applications to ensure that they “remove harmful DEIA and far-left climate features,” the agency said.
“The Biden administration didn’t go out and make up new practices,” Bonnie said. “These are things farmers have been doing for a long time.”
Advocacy groups sued the agency earlier in March to make it honor its contracts.
Cuts or freezes to funding aren’t the only potential challenges to climate action within the agency. The administration cut as many as 1,200 jobs from the agency’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and threatened to relocate offices, terminating dozens of leases. It has directed staff to remove mentions of climate change from the agency’s website (an action over which it was subsequently sued) and has threatened to defund or derail climate research, which would also impact work at universities that partner with the agency.
“Even conservative estimates have been that ag research returns $20 for every dollar spent,” said Karen Perry Stillerman, a deputy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “A major retrenchment would be a big deal for farms and for climate adaptation and resilience.”
For decades, environmental and farm groups pushed Congress, the USDA and farmers to adopt new conservation programs, but progress came in incremental steps. With each Farm Bill, some lawmakers threaten to whittle down conservation programs, but they have essentially managed to survive and even expand.
The country’s largest farm lobby, the American Farm Bureau Federation, had long denied the realities of climate change, fighting against climate action and adopting official policy positions that question the scientific consensus that climate change is human-caused. Its members—the bulk of American farmers—largely adhered to the same mindset.
But as the realities of climate change have started to hit American farmers on the ground in the form of more extreme weather, and as funding opportunities have expanded through conservation and climate-focused programs, that mindset has started to shift.
“They were concerned about what climate policy meant for their operations,” Bonnie said. “They felt judged. But we said: Let’s partner up.”
The Trump administration’s rollbacks and freezes threaten to stall or undo that progress, advocacy groups and former USDA employees say.
“We created this enormous infrastructure. We’ve solved huge problems,” Bonnie added, “and they’re undermining all of it.”
“It took so long,” Stillerman said. “The idea that climate change was happening and that farmers could be part of the solution, and could build more resilient farming and food systems against that threat—the IRA really put dollars behind that. All of that is at risk now.”
Burk says he plans to continue with conservation and carbon-storing practices on his Michigan farm, even without conservation dollars from the USDA.
But, he says, many of his neighboring farmers likely will stop conservation measures without the certainty of government support.
“So many people are struggling, just trying to figure out how to pay their bills, to get the fuel to run their tractors, to plant,” he said. “The last thing they want to be doing is sitting down with someone from NRCS who says, ‘If I do these things, maybe I’ll get paid in a year.’ That’s not going to happen.”
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
