Farmers MIGHT Be Able To Get Their USDA Grants, If They Reject Satan And All His Wokes
Wokes like 'conserving soil' and 'crop rotation.'
Farmers are seeing US Department of Agriculture subsidies suddenly frozen under Donald Trump, because the administration decided that smart farming practices that conserve soil and increase yields are secretly part of Joe Biden’s communist plot to fight global warming, so they have to go.
Never mind that many of the subsidies support long-proven soil conservation techniques like reducing how much soil is tilled, planting cover crops that renew the soil, or measures to reduce erosion. Those have been supported by USDA grants for decades, well before Joe Biden came to office. Biden’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, boosted many existing grant programs because those sustainable growing methods also had climate benefits, so now entire categories of subsidies are frozen while the USDA decides whether they’re infected with wokeness and what TrumpWorld considers the false religion of climate.
Mind you, the climate stuff is just a pretext anyway, because if it weren’t climate, the administration would still want to cancel grants and use the money for tax cuts for billionaires. Maybe Trumpers would cancel the grants as “DEI,” like they did when they slashed tree-planting initiatives.
Still, rescinding the subsidies because “climate” does seem to give the assholes an extra little boner, because they really seem thrilled to claim they’re eliminating wasteful “far left climate activities.”
The subsidy freeze comes at an especially crappy time for farmers, since they’re also about to be hit by other countries’ retaliation against US producers in response to the Big Beautiful tariffs Trump announced last week. Decisions about what and how much to plant are a lot harder when farmers find out the subsidies they’d applied for and been granted are suddenly canceled. Contracts? Donald Trump doesn’t believe in those, never has.
Most of the grant programs the administration has frozen — almost certainly unconstitutionally, since Congress established them — have been around for decades, because they support good agricultural practices. They’re so consistently popular with farmers that the USDA often had to turn applicants away because the programs exhausted their allocations. But the IRA infused additional funds into them because not only are they good for the soil and for farmers’ bottom lines, they also have significant benefits for reducing greenhouse emissions, like reducing the need for chemical fertilizers, many of which are derived from petrochemicals. Yes, terrifyingly woke stuff, that.
The USDA oversees 20 conservation programs that are funded through the Farm Bill, the massive legislation covering farm and nutrition programs that’s negotiated every five years. Under the Biden administration these conservation and energy programs got a huge boost: $19.5 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate legislation.
Estimates of the funding being withheld run from between $2 billion in an analysis by former USDA employees, to an agricultural economist’s estimate that it’s more like $12.5 billion, all told. Republicans in Congress are eager to redirect the funds, however much they are, to other, more earth-despoiling parts of the farm bill for next year.
Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins claimed in February that some $20 million in frozen IRA funding would be released, eventually, but only after the USDA made absolutely certain that “programs are focused on supporting farmers and ranchers, not DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] programs or far-left climate programs.”
Eventually, in March, the USDA said it would release funds from the
Rural Energy for America Program, which gives grants for farmers to install energy-efficient projects, like solar panels. In order to receive the funds, recipients of the grants will have to revise their applications to ensure that they “remove harmful DEIA and far-left climate features,” the agency said.
For some farmers, that may be as simple as removing keywords like “sustainable,” “climate smart,” or “carbon sequestration” that they had added to their applications to make them eligible for the IRA funding, even though what they’re actually doing on their land is no different. Only when the word “biodiversity” has been extirpated can the funds be released, it seems.
That’s no guarantee of success, of course; as an earlier Washington Post story (archive link) on the USDA freeze noted, some grants were frozen even if the applications weren’t scented with patchouli and were for practices the USDA has incentivized for decades, like rotating the areas where cattle graze, to let soil recover. All it took in many cases was for the grants to have been funded by the IRA. One such $150,000 grant, which supported a rancher’s installation of fencing and water tanks, “was flagged for ‘full termination,’ […] because the ‘goal of this project is to combat global climate change.’”
Eventually — and probably only after lawsuits brought by farmers seeking to have their broken contracts honored — some of the funds may be restored. Even without them, plenty of farmers will continue using best practices because they increase yields and keep their land healthier. But the incentives definitely help, since only about 40 percent of ranchers rotate the areas where their cattle graze to preserve the soil. One nonprofit, the Mississippi Minority Farmers Alliance, lost its grant to teach such sustainable practices to farmers around the state. While the grant program is being reviewed, the group’s leader, Carolyn Jones, told the Post she and her staff would continue the education efforts without the funding, because it’s needed, hoping that at some point the funds are restored.
“When you start taking programs out it hurts everybody. It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, Black or White,” Jones said. “It’s going to hurt our future — my grandchildren, your children and your children’s children.”
On the other hand, if America keeps blowing money on preventing farmland from being ruined by overuse, where will we get our next John Steinbeck, did you ever think of that?
[Ars Technica / WaPo (archive link)]
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Saaay, you know what *other* autocratic leader implemented mandatory agricultural policies based on political ideology instead of either proven traditional methods or science? And millions starved?*
*Mao. It was Mao. And I know y'all know that. The pseudo-guessing game is fun, but I wanted to point out this parallel explicitly.
EDIT: Yes, Stalin/Lysenko also. I missed that. You all are right. I have learned things. Now cut it out!
An excellent book on an absolutely verifiable climate disaster is called The Worst Hard time by Timorthy Egan. About the dust bowl. I highly recommend.