A grant freeze left Bill Brinkerhoff and Kathy Sample’s Argus Farm Stop on the hook for contracts totaling $200,000. In mid-March they were still waiting on a promised review. | Photo by Mark Bialek
At risk are dozens of conservation easements, grants, and farm programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In Michigan, 90 percent of USDA funding is allocated to commodity conservation, leaving new farmers and small agricultural businesses particularly vulnerable.
A group led by the Legacy Land Conservancy won a $24.6 million matching grant last year to conserve 4,000 acres of farmland, most of it in Washtenaw County. Legacy was in the middle of contract negotiations when it was told that funding was on hold pending a review by the new administration. After a pause, Legacy and USDA staff completed negotiations and the contract is at the point of signature—but so far, no funding has been released.
The freezes also are hitting local businesses. Argus Farm Stop was awarded a $413,480 USDA Local Food Promotion Program grant, with a matching amount of $103,729, in late 2024. The grant was intended to fund new food storage and transportation infrastructure, critical for increasing sales during winter months when farmers’ market activity plummets.
Argus received its first payments in December. Based on that, co-owners Kathy Sample and Bill Brinkerhoff moved forward with major equipment purchases. But in January, payments abruptly stopped, leaving them personally responsible for more than $200,000 in unpaid contracts.
“Argus is an L3C, meaning all sales revenue goes back to farms,” Brinkerhoff says. “There’s no distribution of profit—its purpose is to put money in farmers’ hands, not to generate income for owners.”
As of mid-March, Brinkerhoff estimates they have about six weeks before the funding crisis forces drastic decisions. Their USDA grant administrator has called the delay a “systems issue.”
“No one can communicate honestly,” Brinkerhoff says. “Everyone has to speak in coded language.”
The freeze also hurt the Washtenaw County Conservation District (WCCD): grant payments for its Michigan Climate Smart Farms Project, which provides money and technical assistance to help small farms reduce their climate footprint, halted after January 20.
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“Although this grant has not been officially canceled, payments have stopped, leaving farmers, conservation districts, and program partners with unpaid expenses dating back to October 1, 2024,” WCCD executive director Summer Roberts says in a statement. In March WCCD was owed more than $100,000, and program staff had been furloughed or forced to take unpaid leave.
At Slow Farm on Whitmore Lake Rd., Kim Bayer was counting on $40,000 from WCCD’s Climate Smart Farms Project for conservation practices like cover cropping, invasive species removal, and equipment purchases.
“That’s $40,000 I don’t have to improve my farm and provide the environmental benefits that farms like mine offer,” Bayer says. Meanwhile, President Trump’s tariffs and supply chain issues are driving up her costs. “For farmers, prices are up 30 percent or more for basic supplies,” she says.
Food Gatherers leverages federal, state, and local resources to distribute emergency food assistance through local food pantries and nonprofits. They’ve counted on the USDA for fifteen percent of their annual food distribution—1.5 million pounds of food worth $2.3 million. Executive director Eileen Spring says there’s been no announcement that the program has ended, but orders placed months in advance have been canceled.
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“The food we’re getting from USDA was planted a year ago, so there will be longer term disruptions to the food supply that we are only beginning to sort out,” Spring says. Food Gatherers typically spends 21 percent of its budget on direct purchases, but tariffs on Mexico and Canada will raise food prices, reducing the amount they can buy to replace the canceled deliveries. “It’s hard to come up with a value number about how to replace that poundage,” says Spring. “We can replace some of it with our purchasing power but we don’t have two million dollars to spend.”
Food Gatherers will still get $50,000 from another USDA program to source locally grown vegetables from farms like Green Things Farm Collective, which supplies $20,000 in produce to Food Gatherers and other pantries. But that program will not be renewed, so this is its last year.
The Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program is also terminated. The program provides funding to states for purchasing local foods for distribution to schools, including Ann Arbor Public Schools. Now farmers are scrambling to find new outlets for that food.
USDA secretary Brooke Rollins recently announced that some conservation program reviews are complete and the first $20 million in funding will be released. Legacy’s program, however, was not among them.
Kate Fitzgerald, a Washington, D.C.–based consultant on sustainable food policy who has worked at the USDA and advocated for farm-focused federal programs, credits the releases to pressure from farmer advocacy groups and legislators. “The priority now is to make Congress understand the impact this is having on farmers and rural businesses,” she says.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) communications office in Washington, D.C. has not responded to a request for comment, and local NRCS representatives, including East Lansing’s Brian Buehler, have been instructed not to speak to the press. According to the Washington Post, however, the freeze was ordered to review grants compliance with Trump’s executive order banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives.
Internal documents show USDA staff were required to scan grant paperwork for terms such as “underserved communities” and “underrepresented producers.” In all 866 projects were flagged. According to the Post, however, the agency’s grants division prepared a report explaining why most of them did not violate an executive order—including at least thirty flagged for using the word “biodiversity.”
Funds can be reinstated case by case at the discretion of political appointees, but many of those positions have not been filled, so the process is expected to be slow. As the Observer went to press, Brinkerhoff emailed that they’d “heard the USDA will resume reviewing grant funding requests for our program. We have yet to see any actual reimbursements for expenses we incurred and submitted in January, but it’s the first positive news we’ve heard.”
Brinkerhoff says the delay is stifling not just farm finances but innovation. “One risk is financial loss; the other is the momentum we’re losing. Right now, I don’t know of a single new initiative in local food moving forward.”
