The Unraveling of Federal Food Policy: Civil Eats Investigates.

Eat. Drink. Think.

Civil Eats senior reporter Lisa Held joins the show to discuss her 'Losing Ground' series, detailing how abrupt USDA funding cancellations under the Trump administration have disrupted

Key takeaways

• The Local Food Purchase Assistance Program (LFPA) enabled small farms to scale infrastructure and sell directly to food banks by providing stable wholesale markets post-pandemic.
• USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins canceled anticipated LFPA funding rounds right after the Biden administration authorized them, leaving farmers with unsold inventory and stalled growth.

Main topics

• Regional food system resilience
• USDA program cancellations (LFPA, Climate Smart Commodities)

Notable quotes

"we are going to survive, but we're not going to thrive."

Conclusion

The episode underscores how abrupt federal policy shifts disrupt long-term agricultural planning and

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) Welcome to Eat, Drink, Think. I'm Amy O'Neill Hauk. In this podcast from Edible Communities, a network of magazines published across North America, we celebrate all things local and sustainable in the food world. A little over a year ago, we invited Civil Eats senior staff reporter and contributing editor Lisa Held back on the show to talk with us about the rapid-fire changes occurring in food and farm policy under the then-new Trump administration. Civil Eats is a news site dedicated to reporting on the food system, and Lisa had begun logging the flood of change in a food policy tracker. Lisa reports on agriculture and the food system with an eye towards sustainability, equality, and health. Her stories have also appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Mother Jones. Recently, Civil Eats published a new series called Losing Ground. It's in-depth reporting documenting the real cost of the losses in funding due to the canceling of programs that were designed to strengthen regional food systems. Lisa spoke to dozens of farmers, to regional food systems program managers, to organizations that were newly able to purchase from small farmers, and more. Lisa's here today to talk with us about losing ground and the effects of changes under Trump's USDA. Lisa, welcome back to Eat, Drink, Think. Thanks for having me, Amy. We're glad you're here. So Losing Ground is a four-part series. It took months of reporting, and the first two pieces focus on the now-canceled Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, or LFPA. We're going to be having a lot of acronyms today, so we'll try and slow down for those. The LFPA was a connector program for groups in need of support, including both food banks and small farms. Can you talk about the program and what your reporting shows about how those who had been involved are doing now that the programs are gone? Speaker 1 (2:09) Yeah, and I'm glad we're starting here. And it's funny that you mentioned that both the first and second stories focus on this program, LFPA, because, you know, the first story I really... see as kind of an overview for the whole series. But because the local food purchasing assistance program kind of rose to the top in my reporting as the program that farmers talked the most about and really wanted to share about, I ended up using it to frame the introduction too, because there was so much to say and so many farmers who wanted to talk about it. Yeah, as you mentioned, so this program was set up coming out of the COVID pandemic. There was a lot of funding that had been passed by Congress and sent to USDA with the intention of kind of stabilizing supply chains, right? Like basically Congress allocated extra money to USDA and then the USDA was tasked with kind of figuring out how to create more resilient supply chains. And one thing that they really wanted to do was to make it easier for small farms to access wholesale markets and not just wholesale markets, but food banks and schools, because, you know, everybody calls it this win-win, because if you get these small farms. into food banks and schools, not only are they getting income, it's helping the farm, but also the food is going to populations that benefit from healthy food that might not otherwise be able to access it or afford it, right? So the programs were set up. LFPA had a sister program called Local Food for Schools, and I kind of talk about them all as one. I just say LFPA to reference both because otherwise it's too confusing. But the programs were set up as kind of state run and or run by tribes. And so each state and tribe got this funding and then kind of designed systems themselves. And in my reporting, I found that that was a really important component because they were able to look at their own state and see like how it might work the best for them there and really design it according to that need. Speaker 1 (4:37) What happened is, you know, these farms that really in the past had not been able to sell to these bigger buyers were suddenly getting a fair price for their crops consistently. and at high volume, which is like essentially the hardest thing for a small farm to figure out how to do. And they can compete because, you know, the food system is really consolidated and the bigger farms really dominate those markets. They can't compete on price if they don't have a little bit of help. So this kind of bridged that gap and really helped them. And a lot of these farms, they were, because they suddenly had this market, They weren't only selling more, they started to scale up and build their infrastructure because suddenly they had stable markets. They were like, okay, you know, one farmer I talked to in Illinois, he was like, he was growing chickens. He doubled his, the number of chickens. in the first year. Then he doubled it again the next year. And so every time you do that, you're buying more feed. You're, you know, you need new infrastructure to house the animals. And so he was kind of like growing his farm as this program continued. And everybody thought there was at least another year because right before the Biden administration left, they authorized another round of funding. So when Secretary Rollins canceled that funding, The blow is really big because everybody was expecting that the money would be there. And, you know, no one thought that it was going to last forever, but they were in this growth mode. And so that's why it had a really big impact. And it left a lot of farmers with inventory that they thought was going to be bought. And then it wasn't. You know, one farmer I talked to in Wisconsin had pigs and a lot of piglets had just been born. And then all of a sudden it was like, actually, this food bank that said they were going to pick up The harvest, you know, six months from now isn't going to. And you can't just like, you know, it's not like other things where you can just kind of like stop. Like the piglets already were born. So there was a lot of stories like that that I heard where people were just kind of left in this space where they expected purchases. They were investing money because they were growing their farms. And then suddenly they were left. like looking at the coming year and thinking, okay, now I need to find another buyer. How will I find another buyer? All these other farms are doing the same thing as me. And so it just created a lot of chaos. And I think what I heard was that a lot of these farms that thought that they would have really gotten to a new... place in terms of size and stability just felt like that's no longer going to happen for them. They're essentially kind of stalled or back where they started and have been shut out of a lot of these wholesale markets once again. I Speaker 2 (7:42) think it's maybe worth thinking back for a second to you mentioned that these were instigated by kind of what happened during COVID. And maybe just it's worth thinking about that because it's easy for us to not want to think about that era anymore. But I think what, you know, came to light was the fragility of the centralized food system. It's it suddenly it was very fragile when the big chicken plants and meat processing plants and egg. producers and all of that, they had to shut down and food just left the shelves. And then this idea that a sort of more spoken hub model or a regional food model could be way more resilient, that really had momentum, right? And so that's, you know, that's why kind of everybody got behind it. I mean, I felt like there wasn't like pushback. It wasn't necessarily a partisan issue. It was just this idea like, well, if we have more regional resilience, we can be better prepared for future problems. And so that wind changing was probably pretty shocking, right? Speaker 1 (8:53) Yeah, that was I think that's really key to all of this reporting, because it was this kind of singular moment where everybody and I don't think I think you're right. It wasn't partisan where people. Across the country, you saw like, oh, this sort of industrialized, centralized food system is more fragile than we thought. And creating something that isn't so dependent on these international supply chains or having all these farms with a little bit of meat all over the country is maybe a more resilient approach than having one company that is sending all of the meat because... then if something happens to that one supply chain, it's really devastating. Whereas if it's spread out, there's more of that resilience. And it's key to this story in a lot of ways because it did, I think, change the thinking of... federal policy in like a pretty significant way just for that small moment in time. And all of, I think like all of that investment that went into these like new programs, that was really, really unique. And, you know, like we spend, the USDA spends tons of money on agriculture every year for commodity programs, conservation programs, you know, billions and billions of dollars. That's normal. But these were brand new programs and not only were they new and it was a big infusion of money that was promised to farmers, but most of the projects were multi-year projects. So they were so, you know, the Biden administration like got them going. gave farmers multi-year contracts. And so in a lot of cases, you know, they might be, they were in the middle of a contract, you know, and this doesn't apply as much to LFPA, but a lot of the other programs I wrote about, like the Climate Smart Commodities, for instance, you might have had a three-year contract and only been in... you know, a year and a half in. And so that kind of like lots of money, long-term structure meant that when this stuff was canceled, it was really, really disruptive in a way that it wouldn't have been in the past. You know, it's almost like they created more things to be canceled in a way, you know? Is there Speaker 2 (11:25) a farm or a farmer who you can share? kind of how they're doing now or how they're managing now that this, the rug has kind of been pulled out from under them? Speaker 1 (11:34) Oh, there's so many. I talked to so many farmers. I guess I already mentioned a couple, but one group that I talked to that had a big impact on me was kind of a, I don't, I guess I'll say, I'll say collective, but they're not actually. Speaker 1 (11:54) formally related to each other at all. It was just a group of farmers in upstate New York that all know each other and just try to sort of work together and support each other. And so it was a bunch of small farms. And one