Some USDA office functions will be suspended during the government shutdown. (USDA Photo by Lance Cheung)

Nearly half of U.S. Department of Agriculture employees will be furloughed during the federal government shutdown, though key programs that support nutrition, forest preservation and wildfire prevention, the most pressing plant and animal diseases and agricultural commodity assessments will continue.

Many offices, including county USDA service centers, will be closed or operating with minimal staff until Congress agrees on a temporary spending package. Support, payment processing and other functions of these offices are also suspended during the shutdown.

Congress failed to pass a stopgap spending bill Tuesday which resulted in the start of a government shutdown at midnight and federal agencies had to implement the contingency plans required by the Office of Management and Budget.

According to the contingency plan filed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only a handful of agency operations will continue during the shutdown. The primary objective is that agencies cannot incur financial obligations if the funding source has lapsed and any planned or in-the-works activities that would incur new obligations, must cease. 

Activities that may continue during the shutdown include those that are financed by something other than current year appropriations, expressly authorized to continue, either by law or by necessary implication, necessary to the presidential duties and powers or related to emergencies that endanger human life or the protection of property.

According to the plan, more than 42,000 USDA employees are expected to be furloughed during the shutdown. That’s about half of the more than 85,000 employees the agency said would be “on board” prior to the shutdown. 

USDA programs that will continue despite the shutdown: 

• Farm loan processing.
• Certain natural resources and conservation programs that are mandatory under the farm bill or to protect human life and private property, like the Emergency Watershed Protection Program, dam safety and rehab work, the National Water and Climate Center which tracks flooding and weather risks and the National Soil Survey Center. 
• “Core” nutrition safety net programs. This includes SNAP and child nutrition programs which have funding appropriations through October. The Women Infants and Children, or WIC, program is set to continue through the shutdown “subject to the availability of funding.” According to the plan, WIC can “recover and reallocate” unused grant funding from previous years to cover gap in coverage. 
• Food safety operations, like inspections and laboratory testing.
• Wildfire preparation and response. 
• Activities like grading, assessment, inspection, import and export for farm commodities. These activities are supported by user fees and therefore not impacted by the shutdown.
• Emergency programs under USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that address new world screwworm, highly pathogenic avian influenza, African swine fever, rabies and exotic fruit flies. Surveying for other plant and livestock diseases will cease during the shutdown. 
• Prior obligations in the Section 521 rental housing agreement program. This is the program element of USDA Rural Development offices that will persist.
• Operational requirements like human resource policies, cybersecurity and critical IT infrastructure. 

Under the contingency plan, USDA functions like ongoing research, reports, outreach and technical assistance are suspended. The agency will also stop processing payments and disaster assistance. 

Trade negotiations, hazardous fuel treatments, special use permits, regulatory work, training and travel by USDA employees and agencies are also suspended. 

According to the contingency plan, most functions are suspended for the Risk Management Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Foreign Agricultural Service, Food and Nutrition Service, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Economic Research Service, National Agricultural Statistical Service, Rural Development, and staff offices.

Website updates are also suspended under the shutdown. A banner atop the USDA website informs visitors that the website will not be updated “due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown.” 

“President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people,” the banner reads. 

According to the plan, “all activities will cease” for the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and her office during the shutdown. 

Approximately 67% of Farm Service Agency, or FSA, employees will be furloughed. According to the plan, selected leadership at headquarters and USDA offices will stay on during the shut down. This means county service centers, and the majority of the services they offer, will not be available during the shutdown. 

Nearly all, 1135 out of 1237 employees, at the Food and Nutrition Service offices were projected to be furloughed during the shutdown, though according to the plan, enough employees remain to facilitate SNAP, child nutrition programs and WIC. WIC must make unspent funds from past years available in order to continue operations through October.

Close to 20,000 of the 32,390 Forest Service employees will continue to work on certain approved areas of agency work, like wildfire prevention, protection of federal land and federal directives to expand timber production. Public access to recreation sites managed by the department will be reduced, according to the plan. 

A significant portion of Agricultural Marketing Service operations are funded by previous farm bill appropriations or by user fees, so services like the Federal Grain Inspection Service and dairy grading will continue, as will market news information.

Operations like country of origin labeling, the packers and stockyards program, the national organic program, shell egg surveillance and the pesticide data program will be suspended. 

The plan calls for a number of reconsiderations in the event the shutdown persists longer than 5 days. This could include, for example a farm loan employee or other staff member on call at USDA service centers, or the reinstatement of some furloughed employees to deal with wildfire management. 

Glenn “GT” Thompson, chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, blamed Democrats, who demanded extentions to the Affordable Care Act be added to the stopgap spending bill, for shutting down the government and putting “critical USDA services in jeopardy.”

“These political games harm rural America through disruptions to farm payments, disaster relief, food assistance, and other critical services,” the Republican from Pennsylvania said in a statement. “Performative photo ops at state fairs and lip service to the producers who feed, fuel, and clothe our country won’t hide the truth—Democrats forcing a government shutdown only inflicts more pain on our agricultural economy.”

This story was originally published by the Iowa Capital Dispatch.

BOONE – Engineers at Critical Materials Recycling break apart circuit boards, old transmissions and decommissioned wind turbines to extract and recycle rare earth materials.

Most recycling facilities extract things like copper and aluminum from the same scraps, but few know how to break down the batteries, meaning those rare earth material components are often lost. 

Rare earth materials are a series of elements with properties like conduction or magnetism that make them essential to electronics. They’re also part of the 10%-15% of wind turbine materials that are not currently recycled.

Iowa-based Critical Materials Recycling was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of six companies to receive a $500,000 cash prize and $100,000 in assistance from national laboratories. Twenty projects were selected in the initial phase of the DOE prize and awarded smaller sums, $75,000, to further develop their concepts.

The $5.1 million Wind Turbine Materials Recycling prize was funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as part of its efforts to achieve a carbon-pollution-free power sector by 2035.

Dan Bina, Critical Materials Recycling president and CEO, said his company was already interested in wind turbine recycling but the DOE funding expedited and prioritized the project.

“The prize will give us the funding to be able to do that initial leg work, and we’ll build a team to make it happen much sooner and probably much better,” Bina said. 

The need for better wind turbine recycling

Tyler Christoffel, a technology manager for materials manufacturing and design innovation at the DOE wind energy technologies office, said a big goal of the office is to create a circular economy. 

“Basically looking at the ways that we can make our materials more sustainable, be able to reuse them, make them go further,” Christoffel said. 

He said about 90% of the turbines, mostly the parts made of steel and concrete, have an established recycling process.

“The work in the program was really focusing on those materials that have been hard to recycle so far, developing technologies so that you can more cost effectively recycle them and then get them into secondary markets,” Christoffel said. 

Those materials include the fiber reinforced composites that make up the blades, housing components and the rare earth materials found in the turbine generators. 

Christoffel said increasing recycling infrastructure and technology will help reduce waste at all stages of the turbines, from the production process, to the end of life and updating stages that occur less frequently. 

Critical materials recycling is a big focus for the department across various industries, not just wind technology. Most of that research is going on at the Critical Materials Innovation Hub led by Ames National Laboratory, here in Iowa. 

Ikenna Nlebedim, a scientist at the hub who worked with Critical Materials Recycling, said rare earth recycling is “a key strategy” for U.S. sustainability, security and technological advancement.

“Recycling rare earth elements is crucial for the United States, particularly in the context of wind generators, electronic waste (e-waste), and electric vehicles,” Nlebedim said. “It helps reduce the environmental damage caused by mining and processing, conserves finite resources, and supports a circular economy by reusing materials.”

Most of these minerals are mined overseas, with a majority coming from China, which spurred of the U.S. to develop better recycling capacity.

How it works

Critical Materials Recycling worked with the Ames National Laboratory to use an acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) process that has little to no waste, saves more of the metal components and doesn’t expose technicians to dangerous acids.

Nlebedim, who led the research, said the hub invented the process in 2015 and has worked with TdVib, Bina’s other company that produces a very specific type of material used in sonar-like technologies. Bina’s team commercialized the process with its Critical Materials Recycling company.

“ADR is both environmentally friendly and efficient, eliminating the need for pre-heating and reducing pollution, making it a greener alternative to traditional methods,” Nlebedim said in a statement. 

The DOE prize went to Critical Materials Recycling to apply the acid-free dissolution process to wind turbines.

The first step in the process is to break apart the various “feedstocks,” — a wind turbine, car part or other electronics brought to the company — into their components.

Computer hard drives, already shredded by the technology companies for security purposes, get tossed in a rock-tumbler like machine with a copper salt that Bina said selectively dissolves the rare earth materials and pulls them out into a solution. 

The rest of the hard drive, which has copper, gold and aluminum, can go to a more traditional recycler after CMR has extracted the approximately 2% rare earth materials from the hard drives. 

“We insert ourselves into the process, and actually add value, because now there’s more copper,” Bina said. 

The process is more or less the same moving up the line to larger, discarded magnets and the “swarf,” which is like magnet sawdust, accumulated from cutting them to size. 

Bigger items, like a transmission from a sedan or the generator of a wind turbine, have to be taken apart before they undergo the same process. Some of these magnets can also be recut and used again in various components. 

Each type of magnet has a slightly different process, but Bina said they go through a selective leaching process, like the hard drives in the copper salt tumbler, and come out as a rare earth solution. 

The solution then goes through a series of tanks where it is precipitated into a solid form and cleaned to a rare earth material that Bina said is “exactly” like what a buyer would find on the open market. 

Bina said the water used in the process goes through treatment and filtration and can be used again. 

“We’re not using any strong acids throughout the entire process, we don’t produce any hazardous waste, and we almost have no waste whatsoever,” Bina said.

An acid process would break down everything but rare earth materials, which are typically such a small portion of the electronic that it rarely makes financial sense to do. Critical Materials Recycling pulls the copper and aluminum to sell to smelters, to make up for the cost of gathering the rare earth materials.

“In order to get the rare earth from something like this, you have to valorize everything,” Bina said.

Moving forward

Soon, as part of the second phase of the DOE prize, Bina said his team will process several of the big, 4-megawatt or larger, turbines. 

“Not just looking to see if we can do it, but actually doing it,” Bina said. 

He said part of the challenge is building a team and the partnerships to operate. He doesn’t have a contract in place but has been in conversation with big energy and wind companies in Iowa to work into their decommissioning plans.

A spokesperson with MidAmerican Energy said the company was aware of Critical Materials Recycling and wrote a letter of support for its project with DOE. 

“We look forward to seeing how the company develops and we embrace the potential for additional recycling and disposal options,” the statement read. “The more options, the better.” 

Some of the other recipients of the DOE prize are developing processes for recycling wind turbine blades, which had proven to be rather difficult, as more than one company has run into problems processing the blades quickly enough.

MidAmerican has partnered, in the past, with a company that was later sued by the state for leaving piles of wind turbine blades, destined for recycling, around the state. MidAmerican has since partnered with another facility in Fairfax for recycling the blades. 

Bina hopes wind turbines become a large part of his business, which he has plans to expand into a larger space soon. But, since wind turbines are typically decommissioned en masse at intervals of 10 or 20 years, the other items, like hard drives and swarf will be constant inputs for the plant. 

“We have seen numerous pieces of these feedstocks just getting thrown away, in our eyes, the rare earth anyways, because there just isn’t that technology, that industry in place to capture them,” Bina said. “

The team in Boone is at the beginning of the growing industry. 

“Rare earth recycling, five years or so ago, was unheard of,” Bina said. 

Christoffel said the development of a circular economy of these expensive materials will help the U.S. to more sustainably build out expanded wind and solar infrastructure. 

“It’ll provide some insulation to our supply and help us to ensure a more sustainable build out of clean energy domestically,” Christoffel said.

Iowa company recycles rare earth materials from wind turbines, electronics is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.