CT Farmers Face Federal Funding Uncertainty Just in Time for Spring Start-Up
Photo: Sunset Farm in Naugatuck got 15 inches of rain in one day last August. Owners Kaitlyn Kimball and Lawrence Passeck are waiting for disaster funds to help pay for that loss and in the meantime face uncertainty with three federal grants – one of which they already know is paused. Credit: Sunset Farm
David Buck got the good news late last month.
Federal funding he had been awarded for his Southbury goat and cow dairy —Guardians Farm — was being “unpaused.”
Buck had signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA, on January 17 to access just under $10,000 to set up a rotational grazing system, do seeding and run waterlines for three pastures. But like so many farmers around the state and the country, his promised funding was frozen by the Trump administration because its source was the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA.
After several weeks of defying court orders to release IRA and other pools of money, on February 20, the USDA released $20 million of its IRA funds, a tiny speck of what had been a $20 billion, five-year pot of funding for the department’s four most popular programs.
It raises the question of whether consumers will end up paying more for food as a result.
The uncertainty over federal farm funding, as well as layoffs at the USDA that are slowing down work that isn’t frozen, come as farmers in this region are in their heaviest spending time of the year. Prepping for spring planting means buying seed and supplies; making repairs, upgrades and new purchases of equipment from tractors to greenhouses to irrigation lines to power; and starting to prepare land for planting. It can be a lot of money out the door that won’t come back in until crops are harvested.
“We’re fully run on credit this time of year,” said Dakota Rudloff-Eastman, who has her fingers crossed that funding for two new greenhouses will come through for her River Ridge Farm in Portland.
Funding from the longstanding alphabet soup of grant programs farmers have counted on for decades is part of her and many farmers’ calculations. Most USDA grants operate as reimbursements and may also require matching funds or other investments from producers, leaving them handwringing over whether to lay out their own money or get a loan without the usual guarantee the feds will live up to their part of the bargain.
“We have a pretty calculated cash flow plan so in terms of normal expenses, if the greenhouse reimbursement doesn’t happen, then yeah, that’s a different conversation,” Rudloff-Eastman said.
For more than a few Connecticut farmers, that uncertainty is just one more layer of concern on top of several years of severe weather that has frozen, fried, drowned and parched — sometimes all in one year — their crops. The federal government has promised cash to pay for damage to the region in 2023 and 2024. But that was a Biden administration commitment of $220 million for New England, Hawaii and Alaska — housed in a supplemental package to the continuing budget resolution passed in December. Connecticut has requested nearly $84 million of that.
That the announcement about the money came only hours before the Trump administration instituted a spending freeze definitely worried U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd district.
“I would not trust Russell Vought as far as I can throw him,” Courtney said, referring to the Office of Management and Budget director who served in the same position at the end of the first Trump administration and was the chief architect of Project 2025. It was his office that issued the freeze. “These guys could easily use their theory of impoundment and grab it.”
Kaitlyn Kimball and her husband Lawrence Passeck’s seven-year old Sunset Farm in Naugatuck got 15 inches of rain in one day last August leaving a three-acre field under a foot of water. It resulted in a lot of crop loss they hope the disaster funds will help them recoup.
In the meantime they have active grants through three different federal programs. One — which uses IRA money — is for native tree plantings to help with wind breaks around a field. It is now paused one-third of the way through.
“It was supposed to be a three-year contract, and so we had built those payments into our cash flow for the next two years,” she said. “We had signed the contract last year and so it seems illegal to pause that.”
The other two are not IRA-funded. One is for a high tunnel — large plastic greenhouses widely used for better weather control and year-round farming by many Connecticut vegetable growers like Kimball. The other is for a well. Supposedly they are not paused, but the Natural Resources Conservation Service, NRCS, the USDA division that handles all three of the grant programs Kimball is using, is so strapped for staffing that many projects may not be done in time for the upcoming growing season. Under program rules, NRCS engineers must design many projects.
“It’s work that needs to happen before this farming season begins,” Kimball said. “The offices are telling us that they’re just extremely short staffed and we’re likely going to see more delays.
‘If we’re seeing layoffs within the USDA and we’re seeing a pause to this funding, that hurts us as farmers.” Dakota Rudloff-Eastman is co-owner of River Ridge Farm in Portland. With four federal grants to help her operation expand including more year-round farming. Without that assistance she said: “People, consumers are really going to be forced to realize the real cost of food.”
Nationally nearly 6,000 USDA probationary employees have lost their jobs in the mass federal worker firings. On March 5th, the Merit System Protection Board, a quasi-judicial independent agency in the federal government, ordered they be rehired for 45 days while the matter is investigated. It’s not clear what that will mean in Connecticut, which was short-staffed even before the dismissals.
Steve Munno of Massaro Community Farm in Woodbridge considers himself lucky to have completed, and been reimbursed for, two high tunnels before the end of last year. But right now, he’s stalled out on two erosion control projects because the NRCS engineers who did the measurements haven’t completed an actual plan yet.
“I have no idea who got fired. I don’t know who’s there, and I don’t really want to call up to ask who’s still in the office, who’s still there,” he said. “People need to be able to rely on existing contracts and their providers. That’s no way to do business.”
Analysis by House Appropriations Democrats shows that nationwide, more than $800 million is being withheld. Connecticut accounts for more than $5 million of that, 85% of which is for farms in Courtney’s district, which spans all of eastern Connecticut, where most of the farms in the state are located.
Despite court rulings against Trump’s executive orders that froze program funding broadly and IRA money specifically, it remains unclear whether the administration will honor long-term funding commitments like those in many multi-year farm programs or even the rest of the farm bill money for fiscal 2025. And it is well-known that Trump not only wants to stop IRA funding in its tracks, but also is trying to take back funding that has already been obligated.
In the agriculture and environmental sectors, the administration has made no secret that it wants to eliminate funding for climate change work, which arguably almost every program does as farmers struggle to grow products and raise animals in the face of climate change-exacerbated extremes.
Chris Laughton, director of knowledge exchange at Farm Credit East, a banking coop that handles much, if not most, of loan and financial services for Connecticut farmers, said he’s not seeing a higher loan uptake this season so far. And he’s uncertain whether the federal problems could drive more financial problems such as defaults. In his 14 years at Farm Credit East and decades prior in his family’s agriculture business, he said this is probably the most uncertainty he’s ever seen.
“The pendulum has swung left and right at various times where politics have gotten more liberal or more conservative, but it’s never been this uncertain.”
Rudloff-Eastman said if the funding that farmers have counted on goes away, the rudest awakening may be for the public.
“People, consumers are really going to be forced to realize the real cost of food,” she said. “I think that’s going to hurt a lot of people that don’t realize we don’t pay the real cost of food in this country. And so when you take away the support network of farmers that’s helping offset the cost, what’s going to happen is that’s going to get passed on.
Economic viability of farms is pretty fundamental to being able to eat.”
