WASHINGTON — The curtain is coming down on another Biden-era program that funded projects across the country aimed at reducing the environmental impact of farming.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced on April 14 the cancellation of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a program that incentivized farmers to adopt climate-smart practices and mitigate the environmental impact of farming. The funds came from President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture made more than $3 billion in funding available for 141 selected agricultural projects under the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities banner.
Rollins said in a press release announcing the news that following a review, USDA concluded the funding from the program was being cannibalized by administration fees; the press release called the program a “Biden Era Climate Slush Fund.”
“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs (non-governmental organizations), not American farmers,” Rollins said. “With this action, USDA is cutting bureaucratic red tape, streamlining reporting, lowering the paperwork burden on producers and putting farmers first.”
In place of Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, the USDA is launching a new program called Advancing Markets for Producers, which the agency says is designed to align with Trump administration priorities while imposing stricter benchmarks for federal fund distribution. Only select projects funded under the Climate-Smart Commodities program will be allowed to continue — and only if they can demonstrate that at least 65% of federal funds will go directly to producers.
Additionally, grant recipients must show they had enrolled and paid at least one producer by Dec. 31, 2024. The USDA said it will individually contact all current grantees to review their compliance with these criteria.
But on the ground, the impacts will be felt by farm operations, food hubs and rural workforce programs that were holding out for the funds as promised.
For local agriculture groups like Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, which serves more than 900 producers from Maine to South Carolina, the cancellation could result in tens of millions of dollars in lost funding. Pasa, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit, had been administering Climate-Smart funding for widely accepted conservation practices such as agroforestry, cover cropping and regenerative grazing.
According to Executive Director Hannah Smith-Brubaker, the program represented more than $40 million in direct payments and technical assistance to its member farms, many of which had already begun implementing improvements based on promised funding.
“Hearing that the United States government may cancel our existing binding agreements is more than concerning,” Smith-Brubaker said in February about PCSC funding being stalled. “These agreements represent real commitments to farmers who have made critical business decisions based on a promise. They are investments in small businesses and a more resilient food system.”
Now, producers in the middle of funded projects face the possibility of not being reimbursed for their efforts.