When the U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of President Donald Trump’s megabill back in May, legislators included a loophole that would allow large farms to maximize the total amount of federal dollars they can collect. When the bill moved on to the Senate, legislators there first sought to expand that loophole, and make it easier for industrial farms to cash in on subsidies.

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Then, leading up to Tuesday’s vote, Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, who has previously advocated for reining in America’s factory farms, proposed an amendment that took aim at the loophole — a measure that would make sure that farm safety nets reach small and medium-sized family farms, too, according to a one-pager on the amendment released by Grassley’s staff and obtained by Grist.

Other Republicans from farm country balked at the move, and in the end, Senate agricultural committee chair John Boozman convinced Grassley to drop the amendment. The Senate voted to pass the bill, a huge legislative victory for Trump. It now moves back to the House for a final high-stakes vote before heading to the president’s desk.

The exclusion of Grassley’s provision is congruent with the Trump administration’s two evident priorities when it comes to agricultural policy: slash federal food and farm funding, leaving small farmers struggling to stay afloat, and shower commodity farmers with multi-billion-dollar bailouts.

The result, says Austin Frerick, an agricultural and antitrust expert, is akin to “throwing gasoline on the inequality in America and in the food system.”

In the end, the main agricultural policy elements of the Senate bill were virtually the same as what was in the House’s version. Funding for rural development programs, farm loans, programs that invest in local and regional supply chains, and farmer-led sustainable research remain conspicuously absent.

What both versions do contain is a slick budgeting maneuver that takes unobligated climate-targeted funds from President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and re-invests them into programs under the current farm bill. In doing so, the budget bill would erase the requirements that the money must fund climate-specific projects. The Senate bill also retains the House’s proposal to increase subsidies to commodity farms — typically larger farms that grow crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans — by about $50 billion.

“To me, it’s sending the message that there’s only one way to support farmers, and it’s through increased commodity subsidies for a select few farmers,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “And the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.”

One prominent aspect where the Senate bill deviates from the House bill has to do with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The House proposed that the federal government shift the financial onus of SNAP costs onto states, for the first time ever — increasing the administrative costs states have to cover to up to 75 percent, as well as mandating states to pay for a portion of the benefit costs. The Senate bill does that, too, but to a lesser degree. It would require states with specific payment error rates to pay anywhere between 5 percent and as much as 15 percent of the benefit costs, with some final-hour exemptions made by Senate Republicans for Alaska and Hawai’i in order to get Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski to vote in favor of the bill.

By taking resources away from the federal government’s first line of defense against rising rates of hunger, the risk of food insecurity for millions of Americans is poised to deepen. The bill also puts forward new SNAP work requirements, mandating that parents of children ages 14 and older, veterans, those who are unhoused, former foster youth, and a subset of older people all work to maintain their benefits. If finalized, fewer immigrants, including refugees, people approved for asylum, certain domestic violence victims and survivors of trafficking, would be eligible for the monthly grocery stipend.

These changes are emblematic of what Parker Gilkesson Davis of the Center for Law and Social Policy calls “the decline of public benefit programs.” The changes to SNAP, Gilkesson Davis continued, will “take away from the people, who have just not been able to catch a break, the ability to put food on their table.” Congressional Budget Office estimates suggest the Senate proposal would reduce federal spending on SNAP by roughly $287 billion over a decade. It is also expected to cause a little over 22 million families to lose some or all of their monthly food benefits, according to a new report by the Urban Institute.

Another of Trump’s priorities will have grave implications for farmworkers and the business of producing food. As it is written now, the bill will increase the $10 billion annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, by more than $100 billion through 2029 for detention facilities, border wall operations and deportations, and make it more expensive for immigrants to apply for asylum, work authorization, humanitarian parole, and temporary protected status. About 40 percent of crop farmworkers are immigrants without legal status.

“When we see ourselves targeting communities who are working to put food on our tables, and you are removing them from meat processing plants, you’re removing them from the fields where they would have otherwise been processing or harvesting food, then we have less folks to put food on our tables,” said Nichelle Harriott, the policy director of HEAL Food Alliance. “What does that mean in terms of our broader food economy and food chain? So I don’t think this is a bill that has been thought through in terms of what will be the ripple effects on the economy, on people’s budgets, on people’s wallets.”

Senator Grassley was successful in advocating for another provision in the bill related to agriculture: an extension and increase for a federal credit for small producers of biofuels, a derivative of food crops such as corn. The bill also maintains the transferability rules that allow producers using the credits to avoid large tax liabilities. Biofuels, and the devotion of land to producing bioenergy crops, have long been regarded as a misguided climate solution.

“The significant investment in biofuel developments is going to be detrimental to building a food system that is centered on farmers and consumers. Under these provisions, we’re literally turning our farmers into miners, where instead of growing food, they’ll be growing feed stocks for energy production,” said Jim Walsh, policy director at the nonprofit Food & Water Watch. That will not only “push up food costs on consumers,” he said, “but undermine our ability to actually build true clean energy projects.”

For 20-year-old Cale Johnson, what’s at stake with the budget bill moving through Congress isn’t just about the national and global implications — it’s deeply personal. Growing up in Kearney, Nebraska, his family relied on SNAP dollars to be able to afford groceries for most of his life. Even with those benefits, he and his mother still had to go to food pantries and Salvation Army food drives every month to avoid going hungry.

The steep cuts to SNAP in the bill, Johnson says, is a reflection of how congressional policymakers misconstrue the purpose of the program, and who relies on it. “Especially in Nebraska, there are so many Trump voters and Republican voters, lifelong conservatives who are on [SNAP]” he said. “I don’t think they understand that this is going to hurt millions out of their own voter base, and that they’re going to be betraying the very people that have been loyal to them for decades.”

Frida Garza contributed reporting to this story.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-tax-bill-win-for-big-ag-everyone-else-not-so-much/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Thomasville, Georgia, has a water problem. Its treatment system is far out of date, posing serious health and environmental risks.

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“We have wastewater infrastructure that is old,” said Sheryl Sealy, the assistant city manager for this city of 18,881 near the Florida border, about 45 minutes from Tallahassee. “It’s critical that we do the work to replace this.”

But it’s expensive to replace. The system is especially bad in underserved parts of the city, Sealy said.

In September, Thomasville applied to get some help from the federal government, and just under four months later, the city and its partners were awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to make the long-overdue wastewater improvements, build a resilience hub and health clinic, and upgrade homes in several historic neighborhoods.

“The grant itself was really a godsend for us,” Sealy said.

In early April, as the EPA canceled grants for similar projects across the country, federal officials assured Thomasville that their funding was on track. Then on May 1, the city received a termination notice.

“We felt, you know, a little taken off guard when the bottom did let out for us,” said Sealy.

Thomasville isn’t alone.

Under the Trump administration, the EPA has canceled or interrupted hundreds of grants aimed at improving health and severe weather preparedness because the agency “determined that the grant applications no longer support administration priorities,” according to an emailed statement to Grist.

The cuts are part of a broader gutting of federal programs aimed at furthering environmental justice, an umbrella term for the effort to help communities that have been hardest hit by pollution and other environmental issues, which often include low-income communities and communities of color.

In Thomasville’s case, the city has a history of heavy industry that has led to poor air quality. Air pollution, health concerns, and high poverty qualified the surrounding county for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which prioritized funding for disadvantaged communities. Thomasville has some of the highest exposure risks in Georgia to toxic air pollutants that can cause respiratory, reproductive, and developmental health problems, according to the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Vulnerability Index. The city’s wastewater woes don’t only mean the potential for sewage backups in homes and spills into local waterways but also the risk of upper respiratory problems, according to Zealan Hoover, a former Biden administration EPA official who is now advising the advocacy groups Environmental Protection Network and Lawyers for Good Government.

“These projects were selected because they have a really clear path to alleviating the health challenges facing this community,” he said.

Critics argue there’s a disconnect between the Trump administration’s attack on the concept of environmental justice and the realities of what the funds are paying for.

“What is it about building a new health clinic and upgrading wastewater infrastructure … that’s inconsistent with administration policy?” Democratic Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff asked EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin at a recent hearing.

Zeldin repeatedly responded by discussing the agency’s review process intended to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, particularly those related to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, but Ossoff cut him off, pushing for a specific answer about Thomasville’s grant. “Is a new health clinic for Thomasville, Georgia, woke?” he asked.

Thomasville’s Sealy said she understands that the federal government has to make hard funding decisions — that’s true locally too — but losing this grant has left her city in the lurch. In addition to the planned work on the wastewater collection system, the city needs to update its treatment plant to meet EPA standards. That overhaul will likely cost $60 million to $70 million, she said.

“How do you fund that?” Sealy asked. “You can’t fund that on the backs of the people who pay our rates.”

The funding cuts have left cities across Georgia — including Athens, Norcross, and Savannah — as well as nonprofit groups, in a state of uncertainty: some grants terminated, some suspended then reinstated, some still unclear. This puts city officials in an impossible position, unable to wait or to move forward, according to Athens-Clarke County Sustainability Director Mike Wharton.

“Do you commit to new programs? Do you commit to services?” he said. “Here you are sitting in limbo for months.”

Like Thomasville, Athens was also awarded a nearly $20 million Community Change grant. The city was going to use the money for backup generators, solar power, and battery storage at its public safety complex — ensuring 911, police, the jail, a domestic violence shelter, and other services could all operate during a power outage. That grant has been terminated.

The problem, Wharton said, goes beyond that money not coming in; the city had already spent time, resources, and money to get the grant.

“We spent $60,000 in local funding hiring people to write the grants,” he said. “Over a period of 14 months we invested over 700 hours of local personnel time. So we diverted our services to focus on these things.”

These frustrations are playing out for grant recipients throughout the state and country, according to Hoover. He said it’s not just confusing — it’s expensive.

“They are causing project costs to skyrocket because they keep freezing and unfreezing and refreezing projects,” he said. “One of the big drivers of cost overruns in any infrastructure project, public or private, is having to demobilize and remobilize your teams.”

Thomasville and Athens officials both said they’re appealing their grant terminations, which require them to submit a formal letter outlining the reasons for their appeal and requesting the agency reconsider the decision. They’re also reaching out to their elected officials, hoping that pressure from their senators and members of Congress can get them the federal money they were promised.

Other cities and nonprofits, as well as a group of Democratic state attorneys general, have sued, arguing that terminating their grants without following proper procedures is illegal. But that’s a difficult step for many localities to take.

“Suing the federal government to assert your legal rights is very daunting, even if the law is on your side,” Hoover said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/cities/trump-cuts-hundreds-of-epa-grants-leaving-cities-on-the-hook-for-climate-resiliency/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Early this month, after some equivocation, President Donald Trump briefly endorsed the idea to hike taxes on the wealthiest Americans in his budget proposal to Congress. Economists were quick to point out the meager impact a new millionaire tax bracket would have on the ultra-rich, particularly in the context of other proposed tax cuts that would offset any pain points for them. Still, the backlash from Republican members of Congress was swift. They spurned the proposal and instead advanced breaks for wealthier Americans. Last week, that version of Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill narrowly passed the U.S. House of Representatives and headed to the Senate.

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Tax policy isn’t the only way that this bill proposes to further widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor. Though the more than 1,000-page megabill will look somewhat different once it advances through the Senate, analysts say that there are three food and agricultural provisions expected to remain intact: an unprecedented cut to the nation’s nutrition programs; an increase of billions in subsidies aimed at industrial farms; and a rescission of some Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to help farmers deal with the impacts of climate change.

If they do, the changes will make it harder for Americans to afford food and endure the financial toll of climate-related disasters. They will also make it more difficult for farmers to adapt to climate change — from an ecological standpoint and an economic one. Overall, the policy shifts would continue Trump’s effort to transform the nation’s food and agricultural policy landscape — from one that keeps at least some emphasis on the country’s neediest residents to one that offers government help to those who need it least.

Ever since the inception of the federal food stamps program in 1939, when it was created during the Great Depression to provide food to the hungry while simultaneously stimulating the American economy by encouraging the purchase of surplus commodities, what’s now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has been falsely portrayed as a contributor to unemployment rates and politicized as an abuse of taxpayer dollars.

A vast body of research has found the opposite: roughly 42 percent of SNAP recipients are children, more than half of adult recipients who can work are either employed or actively seeking employment; the program’s improper payments are most often merely mistakes made by eligible workers or households, not cases of outright fraud; and the benefits keep millions of Americans out of poverty.

Right now, more than 40 million Americans are enrolled in SNAP, an anti-hunger program written into the farm bill and administered through the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. The federal government has always fully paid for benefits issued by the program. States operate the program on a local level, determining eligibility and issuing those benefits, and pay part of the program’s administrative costs. How much money a household gets from the government each month for groceries is based on income, family size, and a tally of certain expenses. An individual’s eligibility is also constrained by “work requirements,” which limit the amount of time adults can receive benefits without employment or participation in a work-training program.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cuts to SNAP now being proposed could amount to nearly $300 billion through 2034. An Urban Institute analysis of the bill found that the cuts would be achieved by broadening work requirements to apply to households with children and adults up to the age of 64; limiting states’ ability to request work-requirement waivers for people in high unemployment areas; and reducing the opportunities for discretionary exemptions. But most unprecedented is how the bill shifts the financial onus of SNAP’s costs onto states — increasing the administrative costs states have to cover to up to 75 percent, as well as mandating that states pay for a portion of the benefits themselves.

If the Senate approves the proposed approach to require states to cover some SNAP costs, the Budget Office report projects that, over the next decade, about 1.3 million people could see their benefits reduced or eliminated in an average month.

The burden of these changes to federal policy would only cascade down, leading to a variety of likely outcomes. Some states might be able to cover the slack. But others won’t, even if they wanted to: Budget-strapped states would then have to choose between reducing benefits or sharing the costs with cities and counties. Ultimately, anti-hunger advocates warn, gutting SNAP will undoubtedly increase food insecurity across the nation — at a time when persistently high food costs are among most Americans’ biggest economic concerns. As communities in all corners of the country endure stronger and more frequent climate-related disasters, the slashing of nutrition programs would also likely decrease the amount of emergency food aid that would be available after a heatwave, hurricane, or flood — funding that has already been reduced by federal disinvestment.

Sweeping cuts to SNAP would also constrain how much income small farmers nationwide would be able to earn. That’s because SNAP dollars are used at thousands of farmers markets, farm stands, and pick-your-own operations throughout the country.

Groups like the environmental nonprofit GrowNYC helped launch the use of SNAP dollars at farmers markets in New York almost two decades ago, and have since built matching dollar incentives into their business model to encourage shoppers at the organization’s greenmarket and farmstand locations to spend their monthly food aid allotments on fresh, locally grown produce.

The program “puts money in the farmers pockets,” said Marcel Van Ooyen, CEO of GrowNYC, and “helps low-income individuals access healthy, fresh, local food. It’s a double-win.”

He expects to see the bill’s SNAP cuts result in a “devastating” trend of shuttering local farmers’ markets across the nation, which, he said, ”is going to have a real effect both on food access and support of the farming communities.”

While the ethos of this bill can be gleaned by counting up the proposed cuts to social safety nets like SNAP, looking at the legislation from another perspective — where Trump wants the government to spend more — helps to make it clearer. These dramatic changes to nutrition programs would be accompanied by a massive increase in commodity farm subsidies.

The budget bill increases subsidies to commodity farms — ones that grow crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans — by about $50 billion. Commodity farmers “typically have larger farms,” according to Erin Foster West, a policy campaigns director specializing in land, water, and climate at National Young Farmers Coalition. A trend of consolidation toward fewer but more industrial farm operations was already underway. Less than 6 percent of U.S. farms with annual sales of at least $1 million sold more than three-fourths of all agricultural products between 2017 and 2022. The Trump plan might just help that trend along.

Earlier this year, the USDA issued about a third of the $30 billion authorized by Congress in December through the American Relief Act to commodity producers who were affected by low crop prices in 2024. Because the program significantly limited who could access the funding, it funneled financial help away from smaller farmers and into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. An April report by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute concluded the $10 billion bailout for commodity farmers “was probably not justified.”

Later in their report, the American Enterprise Institute authors note that lobbyists representing commodity farms have already begun pushing for more subsidies because of the fallout of the Trump administration’s tariffs.

Then they pose a question: “Does the Trump administration need to give farmers further substantial handouts, especially when it is doing nothing for other sectors and households significantly affected by its policy follies?”

The budget bill, with its $50 billion windfall for commodity farms, may be its own answer.

This September will mark the deadline for the second consecutive year-long extension that Congress passed for the farm bill, the legislation that governs many aspects of America’s food and agricultural systems and is typically reauthorized every five years without much contention. Of late, legislators have been unable to get past the deeply politicized struggle to agree on the omnibus bill’s nutrition and conservation facets. The latest farm bill was the 2018 package.

The farm bill covers everything from nutrition assistance programs to crop subsidies and conservation measures. A number of provisions, like crop insurance, are permanently funded, meaning the reauthorization timeline does not impact them. But others, such as beginning farmer and rancher development grants and local food promotion programs, are entirely dependent upon the appropriations within each new law.

Trump’s tax plan contains a slick budgeting maneuver that takes unobligated climate-targeted funds from the agricultural conservation programs in President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and re-invests that money into the same farm bill programs. The funding boost provided by the IRA was designed to reign in the immense emissions footprint of the agricultural industry, while also helping farmers deal with the impacts of climate change by providing funding for them to protect plants from severe weather, extend their growing seasons, or adopt cost-cutting irrigation methods that boost water conservation.

On its surface, the inclusion of unspent IRA conservation money in the tax package may seem promising, if notably at odds with the Trump administration’s public campaign to all but vanquish the Biden-era climate policy. Erin Foster West, at the National Young Farmers Coalition, calls it “a mixed bag.”

By proposing that the IRA funding be absorbed into the farm bill, Foster West says, Trump creates an opportunity to build more and longer-term funding for “hugely impactful and very effective” conservation work. On the other hand, she notes, the Trump megabill removes the requirements that the unspent pot of money must fund climate-specific projects. Foster West is wary that the removal of the climate guardrails could lead to more conservation money funneling into industrial farms and planet-polluting animal feeding operations.

The House budget package also omits many of the food and agricultural programs affected by the federal funding freeze that would typically have been included in a farm bill. Those include programs offering support to beginning farmers and ranchers, farmer-led sustainable research, rural development and farm loans, local and regional food supply chains, and those that help farmers access new markets. None of these were incorporated into the Republican megabill.

“It’s just a disinvestment in the programs that smaller-scale, and beginning farmers, younger farmers, tend to use. So we’re just seeing, like, resources being pulled away,” said Foster West.

Moreover, up until now, several agricultural leaders in Congress have expressed confidence about passing a new “skinny” farm bill, to address all programs left out by reconciliation, before September. Provisions in the Trump budget bill may erode that confidence. By gutting funding for SNAP and increasing funding for commodity support, two leading Republican farm bill priorities, the need for GOP legislators to negotiate for a bipartisan bill diminishes.

Inherent to the farm bill are provisions set to incentivize Congress to break through its own gridlock. If neither a new farm bill nor an extension is passed ahead of its deadline, some commodity programs revert to a 1930s and 1940s law, which helps trigger what is colloquially known as the “dairy cliff” — after which the government must buy staggering volumes of milk products at a parity price set in 1949 and risk spiking milk prices at the supermarket. Trump’s tax package would suspend this trigger until 2031.

Under Trump’s vision, encoded in the tax bill, U.S. food and agriculture policy would “cannibalize” itself, according to Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The policies meant to make better food more available to more people, and support the producers that grow it, in other words, could make way for a world in which fewer people will be able to farm — and to eat.

“It’s an irresponsible approach to federal food and farm policy,” Lavender said. “One that does not support all farmers, does not support the entire food and farm system.”

NOW READ: No administration has ever been this corrupt – and you just can't look away anymore

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To a throng of goats foraging in a remote expanse of Sanibel Island, Florida, the low whir of a plane flying overhead was perhaps the only warning of what was to come. As it passed, the specially modified plane dropped scores of parasitic New World screwworm flies through an elongated chute onto the herd.

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Then the plane’s whir gave way to the swarm’s buzz. It was 1952, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture was conducting a series of field tests with male screwworm flies that had been sterilized with gamma radiation. The experiment’s aim was to get them to mate with their female counterparts, reduce the species’ ability to reproduce, and gradually shrink the population — and its screw-shaped larvae’s propensity to burrow into living mammals before swiftly killing their host — into oblivion.

It didn’t fully work, but the population did diminish. So the team of scientists tried again; this time in an even more remote location — Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean. That quickly proved to be successful, a welcome development after a decades-long battle by scientists, farmers, and government officials against the fly, which was costing the U.S. economy millions annually and endangering colossal numbers of livestock, wildlife, and even the occasional human. Within months, the screwworm population on Curaçao fell, and the tactic would be replicated at scale.

The USDA took its extermination campaign first throughout much of the south, and then all the way west to California. From then on, planes loaded with billions of sterilized insects were also routinely flown over Mexico and Central America. By the 1970s, most traces of the screwworm had vanished from the U.S., and by the early 1990s, it had all but disappeared from across the southern border and throughout the southernmost region of North America.

Since 1994, the USDA has partnered with the Panamanian government to control and wipe out established populations all the way down to the country’s southeastern Darién province, where the Comisión Panamá–Estados Unidos para la Erradicación y Prevención del Gusano Barrenador del Ganado, or COPEG, now maintains what’s colloquially called the “great American worm wall.” Each week, millions of sterilized screwworms bred in a nearby production facility are dropped by plane over the rainforest along the Panama-Colombia border — an invisible screwworm biological barrier zone, complete with round-the-clock human-operated checkpoints and inspections. But questions are now surfacing about its efficacy.

The pest is attracted to open wounds as small as tick bites and mucous membranes, such as nasal passages, where the female fly lays her eggs. A single female can lay up to 300 eggs at a time, and has the capacity to produce thousands during her short lifespan. Those eggs then hatch into larvae that burrow into the host animals with sharp mouth hooks and feed on living flesh.

To save the host, the larvae must be removed from the infested tissue. Otherwise the infestation can cause serious harm, and can even be fatal within a matter of days.

Female flies generally mate only once in their lifespan, but can continuously lay more than one batch of eggs every few days, which is why the sterile-insect technique has long been considered a fail-safe tactic for wiping out populations, when accompanied by surveillance and host treatment and quarantine. The best way to prevent infestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is to avoid exposure.

About 20 years after the “worm wall” was created, the screwworm was spotted in the Florida Keys, the first sighting in the Sunshine State since the 1960s. An endangered deer population in Big Pine Key was discovered with the telltale symptoms of gaping wounds and erratic, pained behavior. The USDA responded rapidly, deploying hordes of sterilized flies, setting up fly traps in affected areas, and euthanizing deer with advanced infections. In totality, the parasite killed more than 130 Key deer, a population estimated at less than 1,000 before the outbreak. Though the threat was contained by the following year, the incident stoked concerns throughout the country.

No one really knows why the worm wall has started to fail. Some believe that human-related activities, such as increasing cattle movements and agricultural expansion, have allowed the flies to breach the barrier that, until recently, had been highly effective at curbing the insect’s range expansion. Max Scott, professor of entomology and genetics at North Carolina State University, researches strains of livestock pests for genetic control programs, with a focus on the screwworm.

“Why did it break down after being successful for so long? That’s the million-dollar question,” said Scott.

Bridget Baker, a veterinarian and research assistant professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, thinks climate change may have had something to do with the screwworm’s sudden reappearance in the Florida Keys. “There was a major storm just prior to the outbreak. So the question is, were flies blown up from Cuba, for example, into the Florida Keys from that storm?” said Baker. Though invasive in the U.S., the screwworm is endemic in Cuba, South America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

“And if there’s more major storms, could that potentially lead to more of these upward trajectories of the fly?” she added. “With climate change, all sorts of species are expected to have range shifts, and so it would be reasonable to assume that the flies could also experience those range shifts. And those range shifts are expected to come higher in latitude.”

In the past few years, we may have seen just that happen. In 2023, an explosive screwworm outbreak occurred in Panama — the recorded cases in the country shot up from an average of 25 cases annually to more than 6,500. Later that year, an infected cow was found in southern Mexico not far from the border of Guatemala. In response, last November, the USDA halted Mexico’s livestock imports from entering Texas and increased deployments of sterile screwworm males south of the border. Early this year, the suspension was lifted, after both nations agreed to enhanced inspection protocols.

Then, on May 11, the USDA suspended live cattle, horse, and bison imports from Mexico yet again. The fly had been spotted in remote farms in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, only 700 miles from the southern U.S. border. Experts worry it may just be on the verge of resurging in the U.S.

If the screwworm does regain its stronghold in the U.S., estimates suggest it will result in billions in livestock, trade, and ecological losses, and the costs of eradication will be steep. It could also take years to wipe out again, and decades for sectors like the cattle industry to recover. But with President Donald Trump’s USDA overtly refusing to acknowledge climate change or fund climate solutions, and federal cuts resulting in a skeleton agency to tackle the issue, any attempts to halt the range expansion of the fly may ultimately be doomed.

In a press release about the temporary ban, the USDA noted that it would be renewed “on a month-by-month basis, until a significant window of containment is achieved.”

“This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety,” stated Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously criticized Mexico for imposing restrictions on a USDA contractor conducting “high-volume precision aerial releases” of sterilized flies in its southern region.

New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat and member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, co-sponsored the STOP Screwworms Act, a bill introduced to the Senate on May 14 that would authorize $300 million for the USDA to begin construction on a new sterile fly production facility.

“It is vital that Congress act to pass this legislation to protect our farmers and ranchers and prevent an outbreak in the U.S.,” Luján told Grist. When asked about the absence of climate change in the USDA’s messaging about the screwworm, Luján said he’d “long fought to ensure our agricultural communities have the tools they need to confront climate change and its growing impact on farmers and ranchers. Unfortunately, this administration does not share those priorities.”

The bill has bipartisan support, but another major concern is the USDA’s shrinking capacity to contain the screwworm threat. As part of an effort by the administration to gut spending across most federal agencies, the USDA has cut more than 15,000 staffers since January, leaving behind a skeleton workforce. Several hundred were employees at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who were working to prevent invasive pest and disease outbreaks. The budget reconciliation bill currently making its way through Congress includes proposals to further cut USDA spending and gut the agency’s research arms.

A spokesperson for the USDA declined to comment for this article, and did not respond to Grist’s questions about the role of climate change in escalating the screwworm expansion risk.

Andrew Paul Gutierrez, professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, has been investigating the relationship between invasive pests and weather since the 1970s. In 2014, he found that the screwworm moves northward to new regions on anticyclonic winds, or a high-pressure weather system, which scientists believe warming may be affecting — leading to prolonged and more intense heatwaves and shifting wind patterns.

Before it was widely eradicated, the screwworm had been considered somewhat of a seasonal problem in more northern climates where it wasn’t endemic, as it was routinely killed off by freezing temperatures. Though the metallic green-blue fly thrives in tropical temperatures, it doesn’t tend to survive in conditions lower than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, though the movement of livestock and wildlife has shown that colder spells aren’t a silver bullet. As the planet heats up, rising temperatures are creating more favorable conditions for a legion of agricultural pests, like the parasitic fly, to spread and thrive.

Thirty-year average coldest temperatures are rising almost everywhere in the U.S., a new Climate Central analysis found. Future climatic modeling predicts those average temperatures will only continue to climb — further influencing which plants and insects thrive and where across the country.

“With climate change … if it becomes warm enough, and you can get permanent establishment in those areas, then we got a problem,” said Gutierrez.

As the USDA attempts to skirt the role of climate change and weather dynamics in escalating the threat, Gutierrez questions whether the agency’s response and longer-term plan to combat the threat from screwworm flies is destined to fall short. The agency’s response is missing what Gutierrez designates “really critical” insight into how screwworms interact with temperature conditions, and what climate-induced shifts in those means for its survival and reproduction.

The USDA, said Gutierrez, “spends an awful lot of money” on dealing with the screwworm issue, but he argues that is being hindered by a lack of understanding of the weather-pest-biology relationship, or how weather drives the dynamics of such a species. “And if you don’t know that, then you can’t, say, model the interaction of the invasive species and its natural enemies, or the effects of weather on the invasive species itself,” he said.

“Without that kind of platform, you’re kind of flying blind.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-climate-denial-screwworm-fly-make-comeback/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

As Earth heats up, the growing frequency and intensity of disasters like catastrophic storms and heat waves are becoming a mounting problem for the people who grow the planet’s food. Warming is no longer solely eroding agricultural productivity and food security in distant nations or arid climates. It’s throttling production in the United States.

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Farmers and ranchers across the country lost at least $20.3 billion in crops and rangeland to extreme weather last year, according to a new Farm Bureau report that crowned the 2024 hurricane season “one of the most destructive in U.S. history” and outlined a long list of other climate-fueled impacts.

Texas experienced the highest losses for the third year in a row. Extreme drought, excessive heat, and high winds took out more than $3.4 billion worth of crops like cotton and wheat, and damaged rangeland. Flooding cost Minnesota some $1.45 billion in corn, soybeans, and forage, among other crops. California endured nearly all the same weather challenges as the south-central U.S. and the upper Midwest, costing its agricultural sector $1.4 billion.

And then there was the one-two punch of hurricanes Helene and Milton that tore through the Southeast. Georgia’s agricultural sector sustained over $459 million in losses as Helene wiped out crops like peanuts, pecans, and cotton. The same storm destroyed some $174 million worth of tobacco, blueberries, and apples in North Carolina. Florida’s ag industry lost nearly twice that to the two hurricanes, adding to the problems pummeling citrus production, all of them caused by previous storms, water scarcity, and disease.

Those tallies are but a snapshot of the economic impact of last year’s disasters on U.S. farm production, as they only account for damages wrought by major weather events such as billion-dollar disasters. They also don’t figure in most livestock or infrastructure losses following Helene and Milton, which significantly hike up total agricultural economic impacts for states like Georgia and Florida.

By the end of the year, farmers from coast to coast were left with diminished income, unpaid bills, and little recourse. Those financial stressors were compounded by inflation, surging labor and production costs, disruptions to global supply and demand, and increased price volatility. So in December, Congress authorized nearly $31 billion in emergency assistance to help struggling producers.

Last week, the USDA opened those disaster aid applications and said it was expediting disbursements. But there’s a catch: The funding pot the agency is gearing up to distribute makes up just a third of the assistance Congress approved.

That $10 billion is intended for farmers growing traditional commodities, such as corn, cotton, and soybeans, and is available to those who experienced most any kind of loss, not just those stemming from extreme weather. Payouts are determined by multiplying a flat commodity rate, based on calculated economic loss, with acres planted. It significantly limits eligibility, said Billy Hackett, policy analyst at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and funnels help away from smaller farmers into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. Fewer than 6 percent of U.S. farms sold more than three-fourths of all agricultural products between 2017 and 2022. “[The program] works exceedingly well for the largest farms, but leaves behind smaller farms,” said Hackett.

The USDA has not yet said when or how the remaining $21 billion will be distributed. That funding was, in fact, allocated for producers impacted by weather-related disasters in 2023 and 2024. But unlike the package structured for commodity growers, which had a 90-day timeline for implementation, Hackett noted that the USDA doesn’t necessarily have to act quickly on it. The American Relief Act that authorized the funding gives the USDA 120 days to begin reporting on its implementation progress, but no hard deadline for actually disbursing money. That means the $21 billion program isn’t on the same ticking congressional clock.

Ultimately, lawmakers did not provide clear reasoning for why they split the pot and crafted different disbursement mechanisms, with one measure of relief pushed through over the other. Hackett noted that it could be a reflection of who policymakers in Washington are hearing from most: “Who is the loudest? Who has the most meetings? It doesn’t always reflect who is in the most need.”

That lack of a deadline also doesn’t mean the agency shouldn’t move quickly, said Hackett. The $21 billion program is primed to help many more farmers, he said, particularly those that are underserved and passed over by other federal programs such as crop insurance. Farms without crop insurance tend to be small and medium-sized, while the bulk of larger farms have coverage. Speciality crop farms — those producing fruits, vegetables, nuts, horticulture, and nursery crops — are also less likely to be covered than those that produce commodities. Just 15 percent were insured in 2022, compared to nearly two-thirds of oilseed and grain farms.

Hackett worries that the application process may end up being unduly demanding or complicated, and that small or uninsured operators and historically excluded farmers that have faced issues with federal disaster relief eligibility and coverage in the past will be shut out. That has been the case with previous supplemental disaster relief programs, including the Wildfire, Hurricane, and Indemnity Program enacted in 2017 under the first Trump administration.

In a briefing last week, Brooke Appleton, the deputy undersecretary for farm production and conservation, told reporters that more information on the $21 billion program should be “coming soon.” This followed remarks Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made late last month when she noted the agency would hit the congressional deadline of March 21 for sending out the full $31 billion — despite that deadline not applying to two-thirds of the money. The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Meanwhile, farmers like Daniel Spatz are left wondering what’s next. Last spring, he lost roughly $20,000 because “intense” rain waterlogged his central Arkansas fields, leaving him unable to plant 70 acres of rice. The year before, a prolonged drought cost him much more. Spatz is among the 13 percent or so of farmers with crop insurance, but recouped no more than $2,000 after the heavy rains. He’s unsure if he’s eligible for this disaster aid program, which he sees as another sign that the Trump administration is supporting large farmers “at the expense” of small operators like himself. Above all, he’s concerned about calamities yet to come.

“It appears to me that we’re depending more and more on the government to bail us out of these climate-induced disasters,” he said. The USDA shelled out more than $16 billion to farmers from 2022 through 2024 for crops lost to extreme weather events alone. “My question to the Trump administration would be, ‘How much do we have to spend as a society, bailing out people, rebuilding and putting public funds into rescuing people, citizens? What does that price tag have to be before climate change is understood as real, and a public threat, a threat to our future?’”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/the-20-billion-question-hanging-over-americas-struggling-farmers/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

As Earth heats up, the growing frequency and intensity of disasters like catastrophic storms and heat waves are becoming a mounting problem for the people who grow the planet’s food. Warming is no longer solely eroding agricultural productivity and food security in distant nations or arid climates. It’s throttling production in the United States.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Farmers and ranchers across the country lost at least $20.3 billion in crops and rangeland to extreme weather last year, according to a new Farm Bureau report that crowned the 2024 hurricane season “one of the most destructive in U.S. history” and outlined a long list of other climate-fueled impacts.

Texas experienced the highest losses for the third year in a row. Extreme drought, excessive heat, and high winds took out more than $3.4 billion worth of crops like cotton and wheat, and damaged rangeland. Flooding cost Minnesota some $1.45 billion in corn, soybeans, and forage, among other crops. California endured nearly all the same weather challenges as the south-central U.S. and the upper Midwest, costing its agricultural sector $1.4 billion.

And then there was the one-two punch of hurricanes Helene and Milton that tore through the Southeast. Georgia’s agricultural sector sustained over $459 million in losses as Helene wiped out crops like peanuts, pecans, and cotton. The same storm destroyed some $174 million worth of tobacco, blueberries, and apples in North Carolina. Florida’s ag industry lost nearly twice that to the two hurricanes, adding to the problems pummeling citrus production, all of them caused by previous storms, water scarcity, and disease.

Those tallies are but a snapshot of the economic impact of last year’s disasters on U.S. farm production, as they only account for damages wrought by major weather events such as billion-dollar disasters. They also don’t figure in most livestock or infrastructure losses following Helene and Milton, which significantly hike up total agricultural economic impacts for states like Georgia and Florida.

By the end of the year, farmers from coast to coast were left with diminished income, unpaid bills, and little recourse. Those financial stressors were compounded by inflation, surging labor and production costs, disruptions to global supply and demand, and increased price volatility. So in December, Congress authorized nearly $31 billion in emergency assistance to help struggling producers.

Last week, the USDA opened those disaster aid applications and said it was expediting disbursements. But there’s a catch: The funding pot the agency is gearing up to distribute makes up just a third of the assistance Congress approved.

That $10 billion is intended for farmers growing traditional commodities, such as corn, cotton, and soybeans, and is available to those who experienced most any kind of loss, not just those stemming from extreme weather. Payouts are determined by multiplying a flat commodity rate, based on calculated economic loss, with acres planted. It significantly limits eligibility, said Billy Hackett, policy analyst at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and funnels help away from smaller farmers into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. Fewer than 6 percent of U.S. farms sold more than three-fourths of all agricultural products between 2017 and 2022. “[The program] works exceedingly well for the largest farms, but leaves behind smaller farms,” said Hackett.

The USDA has not yet said when or how the remaining $21 billion will be distributed. That funding was, in fact, allocated for producers impacted by weather-related disasters in 2023 and 2024. But unlike the package structured for commodity growers, which had a 90-day timeline for implementation, Hackett noted that the USDA doesn’t necessarily have to act quickly on it. The American Relief Act that authorized the funding gives the USDA 120 days to begin reporting on its implementation progress, but no hard deadline for actually disbursing money. That means the $21 billion program isn’t on the same ticking congressional clock.

Ultimately, lawmakers did not provide clear reasoning for why they split the pot and crafted different disbursement mechanisms, with one measure of relief pushed through over the other. Hackett noted that it could be a reflection of who policymakers in Washington are hearing from most: “Who is the loudest? Who has the most meetings? It doesn’t always reflect who is in the most need.”

That lack of a deadline also doesn’t mean the agency shouldn’t move quickly, said Hackett. The $21 billion program is primed to help many more farmers, he said, particularly those that are underserved and passed over by other federal programs such as crop insurance. Farms without crop insurance tend to be small and medium-sized, while the bulk of larger farms have coverage. Speciality crop farms — those producing fruits, vegetables, nuts, horticulture, and nursery crops — are also less likely to be covered than those that produce commodities. Just 15 percent were insured in 2022, compared to nearly two-thirds of oilseed and grain farms.

Hackett worries that the application process may end up being unduly demanding or complicated, and that small or uninsured operators and historically excluded farmers that have faced issues with federal disaster relief eligibility and coverage in the past will be shut out. That has been the case with previous supplemental disaster relief programs, including the Wildfire, Hurricane, and Indemnity Program enacted in 2017 under the first Trump administration.

In a briefing last week, Brooke Appleton, the deputy undersecretary for farm production and conservation, told reporters that more information on the $21 billion program should be “coming soon.” This followed remarks Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made late last month when she noted the agency would hit the congressional deadline of March 21 for sending out the full $31 billion — despite that deadline not applying to two-thirds of the money. The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Meanwhile, farmers like Daniel Spatz are left wondering what’s next. Last spring, he lost roughly $20,000 because “intense” rain waterlogged his central Arkansas fields, leaving him unable to plant 70 acres of rice. The year before, a prolonged drought cost him much more. Spatz is among the 13 percent or so of farmers with crop insurance, but recouped no more than $2,000 after the heavy rains. He’s unsure if he’s eligible for this disaster aid program, which he sees as another sign that the Trump administration is supporting large farmers “at the expense” of small operators like himself. Above all, he’s concerned about calamities yet to come.

“It appears to me that we’re depending more and more on the government to bail us out of these climate-induced disasters,” he said. The USDA shelled out more than $16 billion to farmers from 2022 through 2024 for crops lost to extreme weather events alone. “My question to the Trump administration would be, ‘How much do we have to spend as a society, bailing out people, rebuilding and putting public funds into rescuing people, citizens? What does that price tag have to be before climate change is understood as real, and a public threat, a threat to our future?’”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/the-20-billion-question-hanging-over-americas-struggling-farmers/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Jason Myers-Benner wants answers. Most of the time, the Virginia farmer feels “unsettled” by the lack of communication and clarity surrounding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s funding freeze. During the quieter moments he’s spent staring at an empty inbox, awaiting word about his pending grant, he’s felt “disgusted” by how the government has treated him and many of his peers.

“It’s a sort of powerlessness, that it doesn’t feel like there’s anything that I can do about it,” said Myers-Benner. “Like, can you count on these systems or not?”

Myers-Benner owns a family-run six acre farm in Keezletown, Virginia. Last spring, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded him a little more than $18,000 to support the farm’s work breeding winter peas that could increase soil’s ability to trap carbon. The grant is through the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, or SARE, which has supported farmer-led research initiatives nationwide for decades. The money represented an opportunity to expand work he and his family have been bootstrapping for years, growing crops that help feed lower-income, rural communities like his while preserving the planet.

Then, in late January, the Trump administration began freezing funds for programs across a broad swath of the government. Shortly after, his SARE representative at the University of Georgia fell silent. That’s when he started to worry: Without the grant, which reimburses expenses already incurred, he would need to line up part-time work to pay the bills. “There’s just a deflated feeling of ‘Okay. We were just about getting this rolling,’” he said. “And then … one change at the top has the potential to just completely wipe that out. And so we’ll have to pick up and hard-scrabble our way through it.”

Myers-Benner finally got an answer on Monday, though one riddled in ambiguity. “You may continue your research or you are welcome to put your research on hold given the uncertainty of the situation, and once we learn more we can communicate that to you,” he was told by email, which he shared with Grist. “If this situation delays your research and outreach per your grant timeline we can offer a no-cost extension if you still have monies left in your budget. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you decide to hold your project let us know so we can note that in your files. That’s about the best information we can provide at this time while we wait to receive further guidance from USDA.”

The USDA administers SARE through four regional offices hosted in universities. Daramonifah Cooper, a spokesperson for Southern SARE at the University of Georgia, which oversees Myers-Benner’s grant, told Grist it is holding all calls for proposals until it hears from its federal funding source. When asked, Cooper could not clarify the funding status for grants already awarded.

Since late January, the USDA has frozen, rescinded, or cancelled funding supporting everything from donations to food banks to climate-smart agricultural practices. The move aligns with the administration’s goal of rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and climate benchmarks. These steps prompted the termination of thousands of federal employees before courts intervened, pressuring the USDA to reinstate many of them, albeit temporarily, and federal judges have repeatedly ordered the administration to release gridlocked funds. Such abrupt and sweeping moves by the agency, and wider administration, have thrown the world of publicly-funded agricultural research into a tailspin.

A USDA employee, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation, said “basically all” of the agency’s programs that fund agricultural research, including SARE grants, have been put on standstill due to the freeze. This person called the environment within the agency “a shitshow” and said, “It’s all really unknown right now. Even internally.”

“We know that, yeah, things have been paused. Some political appointee at some level is reviewing our calls for proposals” this person added. “We know that DOGE is in the system, reviewing, doing searches of our databases, but we don’t know like … are they going to massively cut things right now? Things are on hold. But is the shoe gonna drop, and is lots of stuff getting canceled?”

“Trump doesn’t really care about farmers or delivering services or efficiency or cost-savings. This is all politics. And we’re caught in the middle of it.”

At least 19 university labs have ceased agricultural research work because the Department of Government Efficiency dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development in February, a move one federal judge said may be unconstitutional. These decisions by the administration have impacted research programs nationwide.

Kansas State University shut down two labs that were developing drought-resilient varieties of wheat and sorghum crops and pest-resistant plants. Johns Hopkins, the largest university recipient of federal research funding, cut roughly 2,200 jobs. USDA staffing cuts forced a federal project in Maryland investigating unprecedented managed honeybee losses to ask others to carry on its work. Seed and crop research being conducted across the nation’s network of gene banks have also been hobbled by layoffs and grant application suspensions, and grape breeding programs and work on crops affected by wildfire smoke in California have reported disruptions. The administration then announced an abrupt withdrawal of millions in federal funds for multiple universities, triggering a new round of layoffs, lab closures, and project suspensions across the country.

The federal government provides roughly 64 percent of the country’s public agricultural research and development funding. “With federal funding, especially research dollars, being on the chopping board for the current administration, the consequences of that, coupled with layoffs … means that at a time when we need innovation the most to deal with climate change, to make our food systems more resilient, that capacity is going to be lost,” said soil scientist Omanjana Goswami of the nonprofit the Union of Concerned Scientists.

There will likely be economic fallout, too. A study published March 11 finds that the compounding effects of climate change and lagging investment in research and development has U.S. agriculture facing its first productivity slowdown in decades.

The researchers modelled the eroding effects of climate change on American agriculture and the decades-long stagnation of spending for publicly funded research and development, using the estimates to quantify the research investment necessary to avoid agricultural productivity declining through 2050. To offset an imminent climate-induced productivity slowdown, federal agricultural research spending, which includes expenditures from every USDA agency except the U.S. Forest Service, and state agricultural experiment stations and schools, must replicate the unprecedented boom in public spending that followed both world wars. The government currently allocates approximately $5 billion annually to ag research and development, a figure that grew less than 1 percent annually from 1970 to 2000 before leveling off. Adding at least $2.2 billion per year to that tally would offset the climate-induced slowdown, the paper found.

If the current investment trend doesn’t change, the costly impacts of warming, including higher inputs, reduced yields, and supply chain shocks, will result in lower productivity, leading to more government bailouts and increased U.S. reliance on other countries for food, said Cornell University climate and agricultural economist Ariel Ortiz-Bobea. Without action, agricultural productivity is estimated to drop up to 12 percent with each passing year by 2050. This will cost the U.S. economy billions annually. American farms contributed roughly $222.3 billion to the economy in 2023 alone.

“This is like a double whammy. They’re both human-caused, inflicted wounds. One because we’re failing to invest in R&D, the other because we’re emitting so much that it is actually slowing down productivity itself. So it’s like it’s being compressed from both sides,” said Ortiz-Bobea, who led the new study.

Experts worry that the Trump administration is heading in the wrong direction with its layoffs, funding freezes, and efforts to roll back scientific initiatives. House Republicans, for example, have been pushing to cut some $230 billion in agriculture spending over 10 years. Millions of dollars in reductions to the USDA’s research, inspection, and natural resources arms were included in the funding stopgap bill Trump signed March 15.

Most of the foundational agricultural research that happens in the United States is through some kind of USDA funding mechanism. The USDA is made up of multiple agencies and offices with their own research pipelines that support universities, nonprofits, businesses, farmers, ranchers, and foresters, among others. SARE grants are one of the ways the wider agency has funneled money into agricultural research conducted on farms nationwide, awarding nearly $406 million across 8,791 initiatives from its inception.

Jon Kasza runs an organic vegetable farm in New York’s Hudson Valley and relies on SARE funds to conduct his agricultural research. He doesn’t understand why the agency is still freezing that funding, given all of the administration’s promises to put farmers first. “I can’t say enough about how fragile it all looks to me,” said Kasza. He’s thinking about the excessively volatile bouts of rain that battered his fields in summer of 2023, followed by a smattering of dry periods last year that dried his soil so much he couldn’t plant his cover crops on-time in the fall. That’s where research grants like SARE, which he said allow farmers to bypass the typically “sluggish” timelines of conventional scientific trials to develop things like drought-resistant crop varieties, are critical.

In November, he submitted his first SARE grant proposal of nearly $30,000 to grow multiple varieties of rice on hillsides in raised beds with biodegradable plastic mulch to conserve water and expand where the crop can be produced. Earlier this year, he was notified by a regional representative that the grant had been approved. “We’re moving forward as if some of the funding is going to be there, but we know that that’s uncertain,” said Kasza, who called the messaging surrounding the freeze a “rollercoaster” of confusion. A local land conservation group has promised to step in to save about 20 percent of the project if federal funding falls through. Still, that is “not nearly enough” to complete the work, he said.

“It’s already hard enough just to have an agricultural business, but then to have climate change as a factor on top of that, and then have this administration who’s wreaking havoc?” he said. “Cutting research, particularly our farmer-driven research, off at the knees, just seems like such a silly and short-sighted thing to do.”

On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, another SARE grant recipient has also been stuck in limbo. Rancher Don Heacock spent decades working as an aquatic biologist for the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources before retiring and launching his nearly 40-acre farm in the late 1980s. Ever since, he’s raised a herd of water buffalo, grown crops like taro, and cultivated ponds of tilapia. He does it all with local food systems, soil health, and water conservation at the forefront, maximizing crop diversity, maintaining living roots in the ground year round, and integrating livestock farming.

Up until now, Heacock had heard nothing about his pending SARE grant, a $59,000 funding proposal submitted last year to expand his farm’s agrotourism education, buffalo raising, and soil conservation work. Then, suddenly, late last week, he was told the proposal was denied. He believes that rejection is linked to the federal funding freeze.

After reaching out to SARE representatives for all four regions and the national arm of the program, Grist has learned that the USDA-NIFA has frozen funding for all pending grant applications this fiscal year, which began in October. When asked, a national spokesperson confirmed those funds were still “under review” while regional representatives told Grist that all new calls for proposals have been paused as a result. None of the representatives specified a timeline for when those funds were disbursed nor whether already-awarded grant funding will be released.

For farmers like Heacock, the stakes of the administration grounding agricultural research initiatives like his is far bigger than the work happening on one lone project or farm. “Trump has got it all wrong. Climate is a real issue and it’s hitting us right in the face,” he said. “If we don’t become sustainable real quick, we’re dead in the water.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/farmers-are-reeling-from-trumps-attacks-on-agricultural-research/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Life these days is expensive. The lingering effects of the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, higher fuel and energy prices, and extreme weather shocks throttling the supply chain have conspired to make many everyday necessities much less affordable. Rising food costs in particular have become a source of financial stress for millions of U.S. households. Though overall inflation has cooled from a record peak in 2022, food prices increased nearly a quarter over the last four years and are expected to continue to climb.

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So far this year, Americans have faced a nationwide bird flu outbreak, propelling the cost of eggs to record levels, while rising temperatures and erratic rainfall across Western Africa are escalating chocolate prices to new highs. Years of drought in the U.S. have also contributed to historically low levels of cattle inventories, hiking up beef prices. The result is skyrocketing supermarket bills, tighter household budgets, and dwindling access to food.

President Donald Trump’s latest trade decisions aren’t likely to help the situation. Amid a flood of announcements about federal funding freezes, food program terminations, and mass government layoffs, the president has been issuing on-again, off-again sanctions aimed at the United States’ biggest trading partners. In the span of a single week, he enacted blanket tariffs against goods from Mexico, Canada, and China, exempted some products under the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and then doubled tariffs on China before threatening a new set of taxes on Canadian products. On Tuesday, he ordered his administration to double duties on Canadian steel and aluminum imports, which he subsequently walked back to 25 percent before those snapped into effect Wednesday morning, prompting immediate retaliation levies from Canada and the European Union.

The pendulum-like nature of Trump’s trade policies, economists told Grist, almost certainly means higher grocery store prices. It has already spooked financial markets and prompted major retailers like Target’s CEO Brian Cornell to warn that if some of the promised tariffs go into effect, customers could see sticker shock for fresh produce “within days.”

“When it comes to extreme weather shocks, which are destroying our supply chains, climate change is increasing prices and creating food inflation,” said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University. If policymakers don’t fully account for that by adjusting trade policies, he said, then to some degree, “we will see the compounding impacts of tariffs and climate change-related shocks on the supply chain.”

Tariffs, or taxes charged on goods imported from other countries, are typically a negotiation tactic waged by governments in a game of international trade, with consumers and producers caught in the crosshairs. When goods enter a country, tariffs are calculated as a percentage of their value and paid by the importer. The importer may then choose to pass on the cost to consumers, which, in the case of something like fresh fruit grown in Mexico, often ends up being everyday people. Given the extent of the United States’ dependence on Canada, Mexico, and China for agricultural trade, farmers, analysts, business leaders, policymakers, and the general public have all raised concerns over the effect of tariffs on grocery store prices and the possibility of trade wars slowing economic growth.

During the first Trump term, levies on China triggered retaliatory tariffs that decimated agricultural exports and commodity prices, costing the U.S. agricultural industry more than $27 billion, which the government then had to cover with subsidy payouts. To date, the U.S. has not fully recovered its loss in market share of soybean exports to China, its biggest agricultural export market. An analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit organization, found that the 2018 trade war with China was largely passed through as increases in U.S. prices, reducing consumers’ income by about $1.4 billion per month. Rural agricultural sectors in the Midwest and the mountain west were hit harder by China’s retaliatory tariffs than most others, the analysis found.

This time around, Trump appears to have doubled down on the tactic, though the demands and messaging of his tariff policy have remained wildly unpredictable, with economists dubbing the president an “agent of chaos and confusion.” All told, China, Canada, and Mexico supplied roughly 40 percent of the goods the U.S. imported last year. In 2023, Mexico alone was the source of about two-thirds of vegetables imported to the U.S., nearly half fruit and nut imports, and about 90 percent of avocados consumed nationwide.

Without factoring in any retaliatory tariffs, estimates suggest that the levies imposed by Trump last week could amount to an average tax increase of anywhere between $830 a year and $1,072 per U.S. household. “I’m a little nervous about the increase in tension,” said Lee. “It could lead to an immediate shock in supermarket prices.”

Canada and China have since responded with tariffs of their own. Canada’s tariffs imposed last week amounted to nearly $21 billion on U.S. goods, including orange juice, peanut butter, and coffee. China imposed 15 percent levies on wheat, corn, and chicken produced by U.S. farmers, in addition to 10 percent tariffs on products including soybeans, pork, beef, and fruit that went into effect on Monday. Meanwhile, Mexico planned to announce retaliatory tariffs but instead celebrated Trump’s decision to postpone. On Wednesday, in response to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariff hike, Canadian officials announced a second $20.7 billion wave of duties and the European Union declared it would begin retaliatory trade action next month for a range of U.S. industrial and farm goods that includes sugar, beef, eggs, poultry, peanut butter, and bourbon.

With Trump’s planned tariffs, Americans can expect to see fresh produce shipped from Mexico — such as tomatoes, strawberries, avocados, limes, mangos, and papayas, as well as types of tequila and beer — become more expensive. Other agricultural products sourced from Canada, including fertilizer, chocolate, canola oil, maple syrup, and pork are also likely to see cost hikes. New duties on potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer, and steel used in agricultural machinery coming from Canada could also indirectly elevate food prices. Many of these products, such as avocados, vegetable oils, cocoa, and mangoes, are already seeing surging price tags in part because of rising temperatures.

Though there’s no shortage of questions surrounding Trump’s tariff policy right now, James Sayre, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis, said that even this current state of international trade uncertainty will lead to a higher grocery cost burden for consumers.

“All of this uncertainty is really bad for businesses hoping to import, or establish new supply chains abroad, or for any large-scale investment,” said Sayre. “Just this degree of uncertainty will increase prices for consumers and reduce consumer choice at the supermarket … even more than tariffs themselves.”

All the while, climate change continues to fuel food inflation, leaving American consumers to foot the bill of a warming world and the cascading effects of an administration seemingly set on upending global trade relations.

“It is actually a little bit hard to anticipate what we can expect from the current administration when we are seeing the burden of food inflation by tariffs or trade, and also at the same time, we have climate-related shocks on the supply chain,” said Lee. “Hopefully we will not see an unexpected compounding effect by these two very different animals.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/what-trumps-escalating-trade-wars-mean-for-your-grocery-bill/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org