Axed program designed to help with climate change

Local farmers, racing to figure out how to adapt to a rapidly changing climate that has buoyed pests and led to both droughts and flooding, thought help was on the way from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But a major source of funding looks like it is about to disappear.

The Hudson Valley is one of four regions in the country to receive a Climate Smart Commodities Grant through a USDA pilot program to make farms more resilient while improving air and water quality. Contracts had been signed, and planning was underway on eight local farms when the program was cut following the re-election of President Donald Trump.

"We have partners who received letters out of the blue telling them that their government contracts - contracts that have been signed and that they were already doing work toward - have been canceled," said Megan Larmer of the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming in Philipstown, which was overseeing the program. "Your government contract should be the most secure type of funding you could have."

The Climate Smart Commodities Grant is one of many sources of funding for local farms that has been frozen or canceled in the past six weeks. Rocksteady Farms in Millerton had over $400,000 cut for projects such as farmer training, food access and water mitigation. A $2.5 million grant from the USDA to help Rocksteady and a dozen other farms build a food hub with barns and processing facilities is on hold.

Farming is, by nature, a famously unpredictable undertaking, even without climate change. But financial cuts and freezes at the beginning of the growing season have added another layer of uncertainty, leading farmers to downgrade their plans and projections. It's also giving younger farmers second thoughts about the profession.

"The fact that all this is sowing fear amongst all these organizations that are dedicated to the public good is psychologically damaging, and the repercussions of it are going to be felt for a long time," said Larmer.

Among those affected is Jackie Matza, a Hudson Valley native who was living in Germany and graduated from Kiel University with a degree in sustainability. Speaking with her classmates from around the world made her realize how much her talents were needed back home.

"The U.S. needs to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of climate change planning, resiliency planning, protecting land and protecting Indigenous communities," she said. "All of these things are routine in a lot of European countries. They have such a clear plan. Even the general public takes things like 'reduce, reuse, recycle' very seriously. Americans don't. It was a wake-up call for me to come back to my own country and be a part of actual change for the people who need it."

Matza was hired in the fall to help administer the Climate Smart Commodities Grant at Glynwood as part of the Working Lands Climate Corps, a Biden-era program partly inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps that helped build parks, plant trees and restore farms in the 1920s and '30s. After the November election, the program changed its name to the Working Lands Conservation Corps because of a Trump directive to eliminate any program with the word climate in it.

That didn't help. The program has been canceled and Matza is out of a job that she traveled thousands of miles to take. Finding a new one will be difficult. "Anything similar to what I was doing here has either been cut or has thousands of other government employees who were just fired applying for it," she said. "The competition is quite fierce."

Zach Wolf of EZ Farms in Columbia County is also out of a gig. He was helping to develop plans for the eight local farms taking part in the Climate Smart Commodities Grant, including his own. "It's a lot of things that farmers would like to do but just don't have the money," he said. The practices included planting cover crops, as well as integrating more trees to act as a...