The agency said it would review existing projects based on new criteria and continue to fund those that qualify under a new name, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative.
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The agency said it would review existing projects based on new criteria and continue to fund those that qualify under a new name, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative.
April 14, 2025
This story is developing and was updated on April 15, 2025, to include details of some of the projects that are being affected by the cancellation.
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April 14, 2025 – After nearly three months of frozen payments, the USDA announced today that it would officially cancel the Biden-era Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. However, the agency said it would review existing projects based on new criteria and continue to fund those that qualify under a new name, the Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) initiative.
“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in a press release. “The concerns of farmers took a backseat during the Biden Administration. During my short time as Secretary, I have heard directly from our farmers that many of the USDA partnerships are overburdened by red tape, have ambiguous goals, and require complex reporting that push farmers onto the sidelines.”
While Trump’s USDA has paused funding across many programs that pay farmers, the Climate-Smart Commodities Program freeze has caused an outsized amount of turmoil among farmers and organizations that support them due to the scale of the $3.1 billion investment in 135 projects across the American farm landscape. Projects were spearheaded by large corporations, universities, and tiny nonprofits. In June of 2024, the USDA reported that 14,000 farms were enrolled, implementing climate-smart practices on 3.2 million acres. Those ranged from simple cover cropping to the adoption of advanced agroforestry systems.
In the release, Rollins said many of the projects had high administrative costs and that in many cases less than half of the funding was going directly to farmers. To continue under the AMP initiative, the agency said, projects now must show a minimum of 65 percent of funds go directly to producers and grant recipients must have enrolled and made a payment to at least one producer by December 31, 2024.
The grants were for five-year terms and many organizations spent the first year hiring staff, designing their projects, and enrolling farmers. Many were already making payments to farmers, but some had just gotten to that phase in the project. At the end of March, a coalition of 105 organizations running the projects and 260 farmers sent Rollins a letter asking her to keep the program going.
Working Landscapes, an organization that was running a $5 million project with vegetable, livestock, and row-crop farms enrolled across North Carolina, received a termination letter from the USDA saying their project did not meet the first parameter on percentages. The letter said the team can resubmit a proposal by June 20 to try to align the project with the new priorities.
Jon White, the project director, said it’s not clear at this point how the agency calculated the percentage of dollars going to producers. In addition to the money paid directly as incentives to farmers, he said, the organization spent money on tasks that supported the work, including technical assistance, soil sampling, and equipment. “While the reapplication process has not been detailed yet, we are interested in submitting a revised application that meets the current agency’s priorities,” White said.
Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, which was running a large project across 15 states, also received a termination letter based on the fact that the USDA’s evaluation concluded that 45 percent of their funding is directly supporting farmers. But Pasa director Hannah Smith-Brubaker said she’d calculate it at closer to 85 percent, because Pasa pays contractors assisting farmers directly rather than giving the funds to the farmer to pay the contractor. For instance, to implement an agroforestry project, farmers often hire a tree-planting business, and Pasa pays the business directly. Smith-Brubaker has asked the USDA for a review. (Link to this post.)
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