Leading Federal Advocate Spells Out Breadth of Funding Freeze Impacts

Farmers Put at Risk Well Beyond IL-EATS Program

Local Food Forum has published multiple articles about the critical and possibly devastating impact on Illinois farmers whose promised federal reimbursements, for work they did under the IL-EATS program, have been frozen by the administration in Washington, D.C.

But it is very important to note that the Local Food Purchasing Assistance (LFPA) cooperative agreement — which funds IL-EATS through the Illinois Department of Agriculture — is not the only program subject to abrupt funding suspensions and terminations... and that the impacts are not just in Illinois, but nationwide.

For example, USDA announced this week that it was terminating a program, created toward the end of the Biden administration, established to fund purchases of food from local farmers by schools and food banks.

In addition — as reported by National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), the federal policy advocate for sustainable farming — billions of dollars in payments have been suspended in these longstanding programs: Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), and Conservation Technical Assistance (CTA).

In a blog post titled "Broken Promises: Over 30,000 Farmers Denied Funds," NSAC wrote:

Shortly after his inauguration on January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an array of executive orders, a practice that has become common in recent years. However, abnormally, several of these executive orders triggered a pause on broad swaths of federal funding. As a result of this pause, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is now refusing to make payments to farmers on signed contracts for voluntary conservation. By threatening to renege on these contracts, the Trump Administration is breaking commitments to farmers and threatening the economic stability of rural America.

Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, America’s farmers, ranchers, foresters, and rural small businesses have been signing up in droves to receive funds by entering into formal contracts with USDA. Rural residents in every state have benefited from the IRA through contracts to support conservation efforts on working lands and to improve energy efficiency and energy independence. These programs are designed to provide reimbursements, where farmers take on the initial expense of any contracted project with the expectation that USDA will promptly reimburse them. However, the freeze on payments is preventing those timely reimbursements from happening.

Many projects funded through the IRA are already a year or more underway, and consequently farmers and ranchers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket, trusting that USDA would hold up their end of a legally binding agreement. Pausing IRA funding means leaving tens of thousands of farmers holding the bill for work they were legally promised they would not have to complete alone.

Many now face an unplanned expense so large it could destroy their farm businesses. Crushing farms by withholding contractually promised funding is not only unlawful, but it harms rural communities by undermining families that are central to local economic growth, and leaving small businesses that service the farm economy all across this country in a state of panic.

The link below will take you to this article on the NSAC blog, which is packed with details about the programs and their impacts. I urge you to read it to get a fuller picture of the unfair and devastating impact that the funding cuts and freezes are having on farmers and their communities.

Click here — https://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/trump-denies-over-2-billion-in-payments-owed-to-30000-farmers/ to access the article.

Click here — https://sustainableagriculture.net/ — to learn more about NSAC.

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