In November, after months of finishing complicated paperwork, developing infrastructure, and building relationships, the pieces were finally in place for Emma Jagoz to start fulfilling a new contract to sell fresh fruits and vegetables to Maryland schools.
It was terrible timing. Jagoz, owner of Moon Valley Farm, grows organic vegetables on 70 acres near Frederick, Maryland, while also acting as an aggregator of produce from about 50 other small farms in the region. By November, the bulk of the Mid-Atlantic harvest had been sold. Despite that, in the months since, she managed to move more than 300,000 pounds of apples and pears, about 10,000 heads of lettuce, and more than 30,000 pounds of broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash into hundreds of schools in 12 Maryland counties.
“What this means from a bigger picture is that people are not going to have access to as much local food, and our farmers are already going into debt.”
All of it was enabled by a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) initiative called the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which had active contracts in 43 states and was meant to make it easier for schools to serve students fresh food from small farms. The USDA had also funded a related initiative set up to move local farm harvests into food banks, called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. The agency had invested more than $1 billion in the two programs since 2020 and was queued up to spend another $1 billion.
Last week, President Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, canceled both.
The day after the announcement, Jagoz, who has other USDA grant contracts that are also paused, told Civil Eats she couldn’t get a straight answer as to whether she’d be able to finish out the current contract through May, and she was devastated that renewal was off the table.
“I’m heartbroken about this because a lot of these students that we’re serving, this is their only meal in a day,” she said, and she believed replacing the often-processed school meals with fresh food grown nearby undoubtedly provided a nutrient boost. “I care less about the financial hit. I care about it, I’m a business owner, but I’m also a mother,” she said.
The Rise and Fall of New Local-Food Programs
In that moment of crisis, the resilience and adaptability those farms, ranches, markets, and food hubs demonstrated sparked new policies and investments in local and regional food systems. Under President Biden, the USDA became a primary funder, expanding a suite of programs that support regional food systems from seed to processing to plate.
Students at a Washington, D.C. public school gather around a salad bar. Last week, the USDA cut an initiative called the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which helped schools receive fresh ingredients from small farms. (Photo credit: Paul Sale/USDA)
Just two months into the Trump administration, that steadily growing ecosystem of producers, processers, and distributors is being bulldozed.
USDA’s cancellation of the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance programs has garnered headlines, but they are just two of more than a dozen programs supporting small farms and regional food infrastructure that have been impacted.
The agency has also canceled individual contracts—within programs including the Farmers Market Promotion Program and the Local Food Promotion Program—with groups that train young farmers, provide technical assistance to small farms, and help connect small farms to markets in their local communities, based on words like “equitable” appearing in their contracts.
Payments to grantees in the $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities Program are paused, and a private contract canceled by DOGE threatens some grantees’ ability to continue. Within some programs—including Organic Market Development Grants, the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program, and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program—payments have started up again for some farmers and groups but not for others. Farmers and farm groups are also waiting to find out if new contracts they spent months working on will be thrown out.
The impacts of pauses and cancellations are widespread, affecting a livestock feed-processing facility in Montana, tribes working on Native food sovereignty in Kansas, a community-supported fishery project in Maine, and many more.
At the same time, the agency has worked quickly to distribute “economic relief” funding authorized by Congress last December for commodity farmers. Farmers who grow corn, soybeans, oilseeds, and other row crops will be able to apply for direct payments starting today.
“Let’s not forget that canned food is also wholesome. . . . So that’s always an option as well.”
Some of the grant payments may be unfrozen as USDA continues its review of contracts. Legal challenges have already begun, and others are being considered. But sources told Civil Eats that regardless of what happens next, there will be long-term impacts, especially because all of this is happening at a critical time of year for many farmers and the organizations that support them—a period when crop planning and field prep must be completed to get plants in the ground on time.
“What this means from a bigger picture is that people are not going to have access to as much local food, and our farmers are already going into debt,” said Sadie Willis, the network coordinator for Wisconsin’s Fairshare CSA Coalition.
Democrats in the House and the Senate are pushing back. At a recent Politico event, Senator Tina Smith (D-Minnesota), a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, condemned the cuts. “Over the last 10 years or so, we have done so much good work at the federal level and at the state level to build connections between local producers and schools in their communities so that kids can have healthy foods and local producers can have markets for the food that they’re producing. This has been highly successful,” she said. “So, I think what they’re doing [now] is completely wrong.”
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