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. (Link to this post.)
This is a developing story—we will update this post with comments from Climate Smart Commodities grantees soon.
Top photo: An alley-cropping field day to show off one of several climate-smart practices at Good Work Farm in Northampton County, Pennsylvania. Good Work is enrolled in Pasa’s Climate-Smart Commodities project. Due to the frozen payments, Pasa recently stopped payments to farmers and furloughed nearly its entire staff. (Photo courtesy of Pasa)
The post USDA Cancels Climate-Smart Commodities Program, but Some Projects May Continue appeared first on Civil Eats.
