The USDA announced earlier this month it was ending a $3 billion program to help farmers use climate-friendly practices. (Preston Keres | USDA)
In the first months of the administration of President Donald Trump, organizations working to keep Wisconsin’s environment healthy have seen cuts to key grant programs. Now they are watching for Trump’s retreat from environmental protection to hit communities across the state.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it was cancelling the Climate Smart Commodities Program — a $3 billion effort to fund projects across the country to improve soil health, sequester carbon, reduce methane emissions and encourage other climate-friendly farming practices.
Trump administration officials called the program a “Biden era slush fund,” saying that not enough of the money went directly to farmers. The USDA cancelled projects that did not meet three criteria: a minimum of 65% of funds needed to be going directly to producers, grants must have had one producer enrolled by the end of 2024 and at least one payment must have been made to a producer by the end of 2024.
“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement. “The concerns of farmers took a backseat during the Biden Administration. During my short time as Secretary, I have heard directly from our farmers that many of the USDA partnerships are overburdened by red tape, have ambiguous goals, and require complex reporting that push farmers onto the sidelines. We are correcting these mistakes and redirecting our efforts to set our farmers up for an unprecedented era of prosperity.”
A USDA fact sheet published last year states that 28 Wisconsin-based projects were funded by the program. One of the organizations receiving funding was the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance, which has worked to protect the Fox and Wolf Rivers — which are connected to Lake Michigan — for more than three decades in the region of the state most densely occupied by industrial agriculture operations.
On April 22, the Alliance received an official termination notice for two grants it had received through the program to share costs with farmers to institute practices such as cover cropping and no-till planting, according to a statement from the alliance. Both practices help farmers maintain soil health and prevent potentially harmful nutrients such as phosphorus from running off fields and into the local water system.
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The grant funding also supported 10 technical support jobs at county land and water departments, Pheasants Forever and the Wisconsin Farmers Union. The loss of the money has resulted in the cancellation of 37 contracts with farmers, 4,000 acres of planned no-till planting going unfunded and, this fall, 16,000 acres of farmland that may not have cover crops planted.
In its statement, the Alliance said that government support for programs like these is an investment that helps farmers long term, even if some of the money doesn’t go directly into their hands.
“We fully support the goal of directing more resources to farmers. In fact, we design our programs with low overhead to ensure dollars go where they matter most,” the Alliance stated. “However, the review process did not account for one important factor: technical assistance is direct farmer support.”
Just because the money doesn’t go straight to the farmers doesn’t mean they don’t benefit, according to the Alliance.
“Farmers often pay out-of-pocket for the kind of expertise our technical staff provide — support that is essential to the success and longevity of conservation practices,” the statement continued. “Excluding this from the ‘producer-directed’ category overlooks the real-world value of those services. Without that guidance, funding becomes a one-time transaction instead of a long-term investment. Fox-Wolf’s model is built not just on providing financial support, but on ensuring that practices are implemented effectively and sustained over time. That’s what makes our work effective — and why this funding mattered.”
Jessica Schultz, the Alliance’s executive director, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the goal of the grants was to help the region’s farmers transition to these soil-friendly practices beyond just one season, allowing the organization to help protect the watershed, which is suffering from “excess phosphorus and sediment loading,” in the long term.
“These practices also improve soil health, but transitioning to a continuous cover system requires a new approach to farm management. This shift can result in short-term yield losses or necessitate investment in new equipment,” Schultz said. “The cost-share provided through our grants would have played a vital role in helping farmers overcome these initial barriers. However, to realize lasting water quality improvements in our rivers and lakes, these conservation practices must be adopted consistently — not just for a single season, but year after year — across the majority of farmland in the basin.”
“The technical assistance offered through our projects was intended to support farmers through this transition, providing both expertise and access to equipment from across the region,” she continued. “Our goal was to foster long-term adoption by equipping producers with the tools and knowledge they need to succeed — not just for one growing season, but for the future health of our local waterways.”
Climate and sustainability grants worth $100K canceled
The Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance isn’t the only organization that has lost grant funding since Trump’s inauguration. Wisconsin Green Fire has already had two grants, totaling nearly $100,000, canceled, according to Meleesa Johnson, the organization’s executive director.
The first grant, worth about $32,000, was aimed at working with the Wisconsin Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy to develop resources for local governments seeking to implement climate change mitigation strategies such as improving stormwater management and planting more trees to reduce heat island effects. The second grant was a $65,000 contract with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to establish a farm sustainability rewards program. Similar to the alliance’s grant, that program would have given farmers money in exchange for implementing practices such as no-till planting or reducing the use of nitrogen.
Green Fire had already spent money on getting the farm sustainability program off the ground, and now, according to Johnson, it’s unclear if the organization will be reimbursed.
“We’re not the only ones,” she said. “There’s a lot of groups out there that have been moving along, doing the work, meeting the benchmarks of contract expectations, and now, well, many of us are, most of us are not being paid for the work that we’ve all begun. So it’s hard. It’s not impossible for organizations to regroup, but it just makes it more difficult.”
Johnson said that this program was about getting money directly to farmers — even if the program’s description used the word “carbon.”
“First and foremost, this was about getting money into the hands of farmers either already deploying good conservation practices or wanting to, [who] didn’t have the resources to do it,” she said. “This wasn’t about Green Fire. This was about farmers, and we were just developing the metric and the strategies to make sure that high performing farms with good conservation practices were being rewarded for doing really, really good work.”
Without programs like these, Johnson said, Wisconsin will continue to “see that continual slow degradation of farm fields and water quality.”
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