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The Deep Dish
An insider look at food and farming from Civil Eats
Issue 34, April 2025: Climate-Resilient Farming
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Silvopasture farming in Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy of the Savanna Institute)
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The Editors' Desk
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Immediately after taking office, President Trump signed executive orders boosting fossil fuel production, withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, and pivoting away from sustainable energy. Within days, the administration froze a host of federal programs that fund climate-resilient farming, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program, which was poised to invest $3.1 billion in helping farmers adopt a variety of regenerative practices. This week, the USDA said it was canceling the program altogether but may continue some of the projects based on new criteria. The agency's actions and lack of transparency have caused distress and financial hardship to farmers across the nation.
Meanwhile, the planet continues to rapidly warm, and the world’s top scientists warn that swift transformation of farming systems is crucial to sustaining food production and a survivable future. Agriculture, unlike other sectors that emit greenhouse gases, can draw down emissions and help weather the impacts of climate change.
Despite the federal government’s obstructive policies, many U.S. farmers are continuing to pursue climate solutions through farming. This issue of the Deep Dish is devoted to those people—to farmers and farm advocates who, faced with unprecedented difficulty, are figuring out how to pivot, adapt, and carry on.
We start in California, where environmental groups are agitating for a bigger slice of the state’s vaunted Cap-and-Trade funding program to ensure that regenerative agriculture programs stay strong. In New Mexico, we visit an ancient irrigation system that could help the Southwest overcome increasing drought. In Arizona, we tell the story of a farmer who used his own funds to turn his depleted land into a climate-resilient, biodiverse farm where he shares what he’s learned. And across the country, we talk to practitioners of agroforestry—farming with trees—about what they need for their efforts to succeed.
The next four years won’t be easy. How will farmers move forward, likely with little to no federal partnership? Kendra Kimbirauskas is the senior director of agriculture and food systems at State Innovation Exchange, an organization that works to connect state legislators around ecologically responsible policies. She believes soil-health efforts will gain strength at the state level, and with bipartisan support, too.
“These conversations are happening with communities and officials in every single state. They are happening across ideologies and breaking party molds,” she said. “There’s real opportunity in this moment. . . . to build something in the states that could be used to advance federal policy later on.”
Your member support helped us report on this unfolding moment in food and farming—and will sustain us as we continue to find and write about people who are doing what must be done. As always, we are grateful for your essential contributions. If you’d like to increase your support, you can make a tax-deductible donation by clicking the button below.
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~ The Civil Eats Editors
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Member Updates
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Help Us Grow
We just launched our spring membership drive with the goal of gaining 200 new members in April. Meeting this goal will not only ensure everyone continues to have access to our reporting, but will also grow this network of food-system changemakers. Consider telling three friends about Civil Eats or giving someone a one-year membership. If you’d like to do that, upgrade your membership to a Give One, Get One. Spreading the word will help us report on the pressing issues that will arise in the coming year.
Civil Eats Salon Recap: How to Create and Sustain Food Mutual Aid
Last month, our Editorial Director Margo True talked with two food mutual aid organizers about what community care looks like and how people can support one another during difficult times. If you weren’t able to attend (or you loved it so much you can’t wait to watch it again), you can view the recording here.
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What Book Do You Recommend?
Our Summer Food & Farming Book Guide is coming out soon, and we want to know: What food- or farm-related book have you read this year that you loved and would recommend? We encourage you to suggest food and farming books that have either just been published or will be out soon (March–August 2025). Email us the title and author, plus a brief description
of what the book is about and why it’s a worthwhile read. The deadline to contribute is Friday, May 2. (Be sure to check out our previous book coverage to find out if we’ve already included a favorite.)
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The Phillips 66 Los Angeles Refinery in Wilmington, California.
(Photo credit: Mario Tama, Getty Images)
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First Look: The Future of California’s Climate-Smart Farming Programs
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BY NAOKI NITTA
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In 2019, as California’s historic drought hit its peak, the well on Lilian Thaoxaochay’s 20-acre family farm, GT Florists and Herbs in Fresno County, looked close to drying up. With rows of Armenian cucumbers, budding dahlias, and blooming jujube trees at risk, the only fix, it seemed, was to dig the well deeper—at a cost of $20,000.
“It almost tanked us,” Thaoxaochay recalls of the crisis that threatened her family’s livelihood.
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Lilian Thaoxaochay.
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Then came a reprieve: the State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP), a state initiative to help farms adapt to California’s increasingly erratic climate. Using the $58,000 grant, the Thaoxaochays switched their farm from full-flood irrigation to a drip system fed through trenched water lines and monitored by moisture sensors.
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As part of the upgrade, they also installed a flow meter to help comply with California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which requires farms to track groundwater use. The changes slashed not just
water use, but also the energy costs of running the pump, leaving the farm far better equipped for the next drought—which arrived just three years later.
The farm also secured a $23,000 grant through the state’s Healthy Soils Program (HSP), an initiative that helps growers integrate composting, cover cropping, and reduced tillage—practices that enhance soil health and increase its capacity to retain water and sequester carbon. In addition to boosting field productivity, the changes helped cut the farm’s reliance on synthetic fertilizers.
“It was the lifeline we needed,” said Thaoxaochay of the two programs. “We’ve been completely resilient since,” she adds, unlike many small farms that have been forced to seek emergency state relief due to erratic weather conditions.
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U.S. farmers now face significant setbacks amid steep federal cuts to climate-related agricultural programs, even as drought, flooding, and wildfires
grow more acute.
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In recent months, U.S. farmers have faced significant setbacks amid steep federal cuts to climate-related agricultural programs—including the freezing of over $1 billion in USDA funding. The uncertainty has cast a long shadow over national efforts to support climate resilience on farms, even as drought, flooding, and wildfires grow more acute.
While California farmers aren't immune to the fallout, the Golden State offers a level of support not found in much of the country. In addition to SWEEP and HSP, the California Department of Food and Agriculture oversees a suite of several other climate-smart agricultural programs that cut emissions and build on-farm resilience.
These include the Alternative Manure Management Program, which funds systems that dry manure into compost rather than flushing it into methane-emitting lagoons; the Biologically Integrated Farming Systems Program, to promote low-input, plant-based farming methods; and the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program (SALCP), to fund conservation easements that permanently protect farmland, preserving them as carbon sinks.
All these initiatives are funded through California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, which channels billions of dollars towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions and spurring economic growth.
Enacted in 2006 and implemented in 2013, Cap-and-Trade requires major polluters like oil refineries and manufacturing facilities to buy “allowances” at quarterly auctions to offset their carbon output. The proceeds flow into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), which pays for the state’s climate-smart agricultural programs—along with more than 80 other climate initiatives across transportation, housing, and
energy. Together, these investments support California's goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045, positioning California as a national model for integrated, climate-resilient policy.
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Eleven Northeastern states also cap power-sector emissions through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Yet California
Cap-and-Trade is the only program that directly accounts for emissions from agriculture, the leading global source of atmospheric methane and responsible for 8 percent of California’s carbon emissions.
Despite these significant emissions, the climate-smart agricultural programs designed to reduce
them receive just 5 percent of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) allocations. That imbalance, said Brian Shobe, policy director at the California Climate & Agriculture Network (CalCAN), overlooks agriculture’s outsized potential to sequester carbon and build climate resistance: Healthy fields, pastures, and orchards enhance biodiversity, improve water retention, and help buffer farms against extreme weather.
With federal funding cuts hitting California’s farmers—and Trump's recent executive order seeking
to nullify state cap-and-trade systems—advocates are pushing for more than just a renewal of Cap-and-Trade’s existing allocations. As the program moves toward reauthorization in 2030, a coalition of agricultural and environmental groups, including CalCAN, has started urging lawmakers to lock in 15 percent of GGRF revenues for agricultural climate programs. And, this week, Governor Gavin Newsom, Senate President pro Tempore Mike McGuire, and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas pledged to extend the program, framing it as a chance to “demonstrate real climate leadership” on the national stage.
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This week, California pledged to extend the program, framing it as a chance to “demonstrate real climate leadership” on the national stage.
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Stable funding, said Shobe, would let more farms and ranches adopt long-term climate solutions instead of scrambling for inconsistent, one-off grants tied to fluctuating auction revenues. It would also fortify the state’s broader climate strategy, he adds, and help stabilize the food system against climate-driven shocks that drive up grocery prices.
But agriculture isn’t the only sector competing for those funds. With no automatic appropriations for most climate programs, about 40 percent of Cap-and-Trade revenue is up for grabs each year, prompting fierce competition among advocates for housing, transit, energy, and agriculture.
“There’s an annual food fight over limited climate dollars,” said Zack Deutsch-Grosse, policy director at Transform, a nonprofit focused on sustainable, equitable transit and land use. “It pits climate advocates against one another as they seek [stable] appropriations for their programs.”
CalCAN and its allies argue that carving out 15 percent for agricultural programs is essential to safeguarding California’s food supply in the face of the relentless cycle of droughts, floods, wildfire, and heatwaves.
“This is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to secure a more stable, climate-resilient food system,” Shobe said. Given the competition for funding as Cap-and-Trade’s reauthorization deadline nears, and the added pressure of federal pullback, he and his colleagues are wasting no time in laying the groundwork for legislative support.
In the next few weeks, we’ll publish the full story of California’s climate-smart programs and their potential to preserve a path forward.
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Acequia de los Vallejos in southern Colorado's San Luis Valley.
(Photo courtesy of the Acequia Institute)
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First Look: An Ancient Irrigation System May Help Farmers Face Climate Change
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BY SAMUEL GILBERT
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On a stormy spring day, Devon Peña stood atop a sagebrush-covered hill and looked down on Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Dark clouds had unleashed a deluge just a few hours earlier, but now they hovered over the mountains, veiling the summits above.
Below, rows of long, narrow fields extended from Culebra Creek toward a man-made channel, the main artery of the valley’s centuries-old “acequia” irrigation system. This was the “People’s Ditch,” a waterway holding the oldest continuous water right in Colorado. The channel carried water from tributaries of the San Juan river, high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, down to the fields below. There, the flow was
diverted into smaller ditches that irrigated fields of alfalfa, cabbage, and potatoes, the water seeping naturally through the earthen walls. In the San Luis Valley as a whole, 130 gravity-flow ditches irrigated 30,000 acres of farmland and 10,000 acres of wetlands.
“This is an incredibly productive, resilient, and sustainable system,” said Peña, founder of The Acequia Institute, a nonprofit that supports environmental and food justice in southern Colorado.
The acequia system was once dismissed by Western water managers. But as a changing climate brings increasing drought and
aridification to the Southwest, time-tested solutions like this one could hold the key to mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, especially in rural communities.
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An illustration of how acequias work. A larger version is available on Civil Eats' website.
(Illustration credit: Jerold Widdison for the Utton Center at the University of New Mexico)
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“[Water managers] are starting to appreciate us a lot more than they did 20 or 30 years ago when they thought we were backward, primitive, and inefficient,” Peña said.
An Ancient History
Water management in what is now New Mexico dates back to at least 800 A.D., to the Pueblo people, who used gravity-fed
irrigation ditches for their crops. The acequia system, which arrived with Spanish colonizers in the 1600s, is not merely hydrological. It is political, even philosophical.
The word acequia—from the Arabic word “as-saquiya,” which means “that which carries water”—was used to describe the irrigation ditches that evolved in the Middle East and were introduced to the Iberian Peninsula during the Islamic Golden Age. In New Mexico, these systems were often put in place even before a church was built.
Acequias operate under the principle of “shared scarcity,” rooted in Islamic law, whereby every living thing has a right to water, and to deny them water is a mortal sin. Water is thus treated as a communal resource to be shared, rather than divvied up and contested.
“They all share something in common, which is community governance,” Peña said. “It’s a water democracy.”
An acequia is both a physical canal system and a political structure, which includes an elected mayordomo, or ditch boss, along with commissioners who govern management and operations. Acequias are self-sufficient and collectively owned by members, each with water rights to the ditch and an equal vote regardless of property size. The Spanish built acequias throughout the Southwest, but most in Arizona and California were
abandoned or replaced by modern irrigation systems. In Texas, a few remain, including the San Antonio Mission Acequias.
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“[Acequias] all share something in common, which is community governance. It’s a water democracy.”
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“Our ancestors and predecessors created a cultural landscape and spread a broad ribbon of life that is an extension of the river,” said Paula Garcia, executive director of the grassroots New Mexico Acequia Association. “They have literally shaped the landscape.”
Acequias are central to the system’s resilience and adaptability, New Mexico State University hydrologist Sam Fernald said. “By having people on the ground, connected to every drop, they are able to adapt. They have been adapting to changes in water and land for 400 years.”
Unlike conventional irrigation systems, the physical design of the acequias mimics natural hydrological and ecological functions, slowly distributing water throughout the landscape through unlined ditches that allow seepage. This “keeps surface and groundwater connected,” Fernald said, recharging the aquifer, reducing evaporation and aridification, enhancing biodiversity, and returning flows to the river.
A Model for Modern Times
Modern management of rivers for commercial agriculture has reduced this connectivity through channelization, levees, and dams. These have stopped streams and rivers from meandering into the floodplain, reducing aquifer recharge and late-season groundwater return.
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But the modern system is under stress, as a changing climate reduces mountain snowpack, the main source of Western water. Snowpack acts as a water bank that holds frozen water in the mountains into the spring and releases it throughout the summer. Changing climate patterns also mean shifts in melt patterns, and all of this makes managing water flows through dams a challenge.
Adding to the uncertainty, the Trump administration is making cuts to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, which manages dams, and President Donald Trump has shown a willingness to demand water releases himself, as he did recently with two dams in California, to the consternation of farmers and water managers.
“The acequias and Rio Grande have given life, food, and shelter to people and wildlife, but they’re at risk if we don’t value and better adapt these systems and ecosystems for future conditions,” said Yasmeen Najmi, a planner for Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which helps manage irrigation in the valley, including the acequias.
Industrial agriculture exacerbates climate change through its use of synthetic fertilizers, whose production generates significant fossil-fuel emissions, and soil tillage, which disrupts soil’s ability to capture
carbon. According to José Maria Martín Civantos, an expert in landscape archaeology at the University of Granada, in Spain, this kind of agriculture is “literally building the desert.”
By contrast, traditional irrigation systems like acequias enhance water quality, expand wildlife habitat, increase soil fertility, and—crucially—support highly productive food systems.
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Youth interns from the Move Mountains Project harvesting corn in Colorado's San Luis Valley. (Photo courtesy of the Move Mountains Project)
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After New Mexico was ceded to the U.S. in 1848, Americans quickly recognized the productivity of acequia agriculture, said Sylvia Rodriguez, an anthropologist and author who grew up in an acequia community in Taos, New Mexico. “American takeover incorporated the acequia system into the state statutes because it was so efficient. Local
management is hard to improve on.”
Acequia Soil and Community
The San Luis Valley, along with many other high desert communities, would look markedly different without its acequia. Nestled at the base of the San Juan and Sangre De Cristo mountains, this region is the driest in Colorado, receiving only 7 inches of rain annually.
In an acequia community, land-based ecological knowledge is passed down through generations along with time-tested practices such as companion cropping, crop rotation, seed-saving, fire ecology, and agroforestry. “Literally all the tenets of regenerative agriculture that were here well before anyone was talking about it,” Peña said. Many of these practices originated with Indigenous farmers.
Sustainable acequia irrigation regenerates the soil horizon, bringing mineral and sediment-rich water from the mountains to the fields. While acequias remain the primary irrigator in northern and central New Mexico, small-scale farming has declined in the region through massive economic restructuring, depopulation of rural areas, and the move from diversified crops to monocultures.
Today, few farmers grow food in the region. “We’ve become an alfalfa monoculture and beef export colony,” said Peña. “We need to transform farming back to polyculture.”
For Peña, local water management improves soil and crops. But it also means self-determination when it comes to healthy food. On the Acequia Institute’s 181-acre farm, Peña and others are reviving traditional farming practices and crops such as heirloom corn, beans, and squash.
The institute also provides no-interest loans to acequia farmers who are paid by the acre instead of by yield. Farmers have access to youth interns through the Move Mountains Project, aimed at creating “the next generation of farmers,” Peña said.
In 2022, the Acequia Institute purchased R&R Market, the oldest grocery store in Colorado, which was going to close. The institute is converting the space into a worker-led community co-op, a place to distribute the bounty of the acequia system.
The market, now renamed The San Luis Peoples Market, will reopen in late April and include a grocer, deli, commercial kitchen, community center, and market featuring produce from acequia farmers in the valley. In the years to come, Peña plans to open a second commercial kitchen, a USDA-certified slaughterhouse, and a solar-powered greenhouse.
“I know we're going to bring healthy food and nutrition to the community,” Peña said, as the storm clouds above Culebra Peak cleared. “The model is, we don’t want to go outside the valley.”
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Oatman Flats Ranch farm manager Yadi Wang kneels in a field of cover crops planted during fallow periods to help restore soil health and reduce erosion. (Photo credit: Samuel Gilbert)
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First Look: Could This Arizona Ranch Be a Model for Southwest Farmers?
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BY SAMUEL GILBERT
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On a mid-morning in May, the temperature at Oatman Flats Ranch had already soared into the 90s. By 4 p.m., the thermometer peaked at 105 degrees—a withering spring heat, but still mild compared to the blistering summer months ahead.
“I joke that this farm is a little better than Death Valley, but I'm not really joking,” said Yadi Wang, the farm director, as he drove his pickup through this 665-acre ranch in the Sonoran Desert about a two-hour drive from Phoenix.
For Wang, every day at the ranch is different. During the winter, he spends his days preparing fields of heritage wheat, planting seeds, and moving water from the well-fed irrigation ditches to the row crops at the edge of the now-dry Gila River. Early summer is the busiest, with the farm team spending up to 10 straight days harvesting the desert-hardy wheat, barley, and other grains.
“These cash crops translate into the tangible,” Wang said. Yet much of his time is devoted to the intangible: restoring land degraded by conventional agriculture, often through practices that originated with the Indigenous peoples of this region.
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“If we're going to hold on to farmland, we need a significant change in how we farm and what we farm.”
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Oatman Flats Ranch is attempting to create a sustainable, scalable model for regenerative farming in the Southwest, demonstrating what can and perhaps should be grown in an increasingly hot, dry, and water-limited region. In 2021, the ranch became the region's first-ever Regenerative Organic Certified farm, with practices that build soil health and biodiversity, help sequester carbon, and reduce water consumption.
‘We Need a Significant Change in How We Farm’
Those time-tested techniques will become increasingly important as Arizona farmers grapple with the worst water crisis in the state’s history.
“If we're going to hold on to farmland, we need a significant change in how we farm and what we farm,” said Dax Hansen, the ranch’s owner.
But it won’t be easy. Oatman Flats Ranch has undergone a dramatic transformation that required significant investments in training, research, equipment, and techniques, all of which took years to deliver a return. Although processes have been refined and problems worked out along the way, many practices are out of reach for the average farmer.
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Dax Hansen (above) and his wife, Leslie Hansen, purchased the farm in 2018 to create a model of regenerative farming in an increasingly hot and water-scarce Southwest.
(Photo credit: Adam Riding)
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“It's an experimental farm,” Wang said. “I have a lot of respect for [Hansen], willing to get all these cash assets to pour into this, to lose money. Not many people can or are willing to do that.”
Hansen, a successful financial technology lawyer who grew up in Mesa, Arizona, purchased the property from his aunt and uncle in 2018. Oatman Flats Ranch has been in the family for four generations. His grandfather Ray Judd Hansen ran cattle in the 1950s before becoming one of Arizona’s first conventional cotton farmers.
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Sonoran wheat, barley, and other desert-hardy crops stretch along the now-dry Lower Gila River valley where Oatman Flats is located. (Photo credit: AJ Ledford)
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The land was severely degraded when Hansen bought it, with compacted, salty, eroded fields caused by decades of conventional farming practices and 10 years of neglect. “It was pretty bleak,” he said. “[The land] had basically been sterilized, with almost nothing growing on it.”
Hansen wanted to demonstrate the potential for regenerative farming in the arid Southwest, so he and his team redesigned the farm. They restored the dilapidated infrastructure, repaired wells and pump equipment, and excavated irrigation ditches. They cleared hundreds of invasive trees, leveled the fields, fertilized them with manure, and planted hedgerows to reduce erosion and provide habitat for pollinators like bees and hummingbirds.
The team introduced rotational sheep grazing and moved away from flood irrigation. And they followed the practices of Indigenous farmers in this region, who have long rotated their fields and cultivated multiple mutually beneficial species to improve water and soil quality and biodiversity. The Oatman Flats Ranch team does so as well, planting 30-plus species of cover crops like millet, chickpeas, sunflowers and sorghum. These also conserve water, fix nitrogen in the soil, suppress weeds, attract beneficial insects, and sequester carbon.
Instead of tilling the cover crops into the fields at the end of their cycle and disturbing soil structure, the team uses a roller-crimper—a ridged cylindrical drum attached to a tractor—to cut stalks and lay the crops down “like a carpet,” which protects topsoil, Hansen said.
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The roots remain in the soil, reducing erosion and creating an extensive microbial network that cycles nutrients, builds soil organic matter, and increases water infiltration “like a sponge,” Wang said. All this protects soil from high temperatures, too.
The varying heights of cover crops make multi-storied microclimates, with vapor condensing near the cooler soil surface, creating dew. “I can make dew in the hottest part of July when the ambient temperature is over 90 degrees by 9 a.m.,” Wang said.
Water constraints also led Hansen and his wife to explore water-conserving crops. His team planted native, drought-tolerant, and nutrient-dense white Sonoran wheat and mesquite trees, loaded with edible pods rich in protein and fiber.
Sharing the Learning From Oatman Flats
In five years, Oatman Flats Ranch's regenerative practices have saved over a billion gallons of water, doubled the amount of organic matter in the soil, and steadily transformed the once-beleaguered ecosystem, according to its May 2024 Regenerative Impact Report. The formerly barren land now supports life for more than 120 species of flora and fauna.
The ranch also sells Regenerative Organic Certified products such as stone-milled flour and mesquite flour, as well as bread, pancake, and waffle mixes, under the Oatman Farms brand. The flours and mixes are used by numerous restaurants, including Arizona Wilderness Brewing Company.
Hansen is sharing what he has learned. Oatman Flats is one of the Regenerative Organic Alliance’s five Regenerative Organic Learning Centers in the U.S., farms that other farmers can visit to observe regenerative solutions to climate impacts that could potentially work for them as well.
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“You’ve seen what the land looks like in five years; imagine it in 10. If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.”
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Hansen routinely speaks with farmers to better understand how the regenerative farming movement is evolving, and he’s clear about what must happen for it to really take hold. “We are all figuring this out together. But there is not an inexpensive way to make these enormous strides. The only way to sustain these efforts is for customers to proactively choose to buy products from regenerative farms at prices that allow farmers to complete the work of regeneration.”
With the growth of regenerative agriculture, Hansen sees the potential to preserve his family’s farm and a way of life he holds dear, while demonstrating the agricultural practices needed to adapt to climate change.
“You’ve seen what the land looks like in five years; imagine it in 10,” Hansen said. “If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.”
A longer piece about Oatman Flats Ranch will be published on our site soon.
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Alley cropping at an agroforestry farm on the Wisconsin River.
(Photo courtesy of the Savanna Institute)
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The Follow-up: Agroforestry Projects Across US Now Stymied by Federal Cuts
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BY DANIEL WALTON
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Austin Unruh is an advanced practitioner of patience. As the founder of Pennsylvania-based agroforestry business Trees for Graziers, he helps farmers plant saplings like honey locust and mulberry that take years to reach their full potential.
“Everything just happens fairly slowly with agroforestry because of the nature of the beast—we’re working with trees,” he said.
Given enough time and care, Unruh continues, agroforestry—farming with trees—can become a keystone of resilient, profitable, and climate-conscious land management. In silvopasture systems like his, which bring trees onto pasture for livestock, cows can beat the summer heat under shade-giving honey locust trees while grazing on their seed pods. Besides keeping animals happier and lowering farmers’ feed costs, silvopastures can sequester carbon as the trees draw carbon dioxide from the air and, through their root systems, deliver it deep into the ground.
Other agroforestry practices, such as windbreaks, hedgerows, riparian buffers, and alley cropping, can help retain topsoil, prevent nutrient pollution, and provide wildlife habitat. According to the final installment of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report in 2023, agroforestry is one of humanity’s most feasible options for reducing climate risks.
Agroforestry’s Growth Spurt
The USDA’s 2017 Census of Agriculture was the first to include a question about agroforestry; over the next five years, the number of farms using agroforestry increased
by 6 percent, even as the overall number of American farms fell by 7 percent. Practitioners formed a professional network, the Agroforestry Coalition, in 2022.
As Civil Eats has reported, the federal government gave agroforestry a major boost that same year through the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, awarding over $153 million to agroforestry work. Many of the organizations interviewed said the funds helped them hire staff, share knowledge, and implement agroforestry practices on thousands of farms.
Unruh said that while Trees for Graziers had been growing even before the program, 80 percent of the projects he had planned for this spring were supported by Climate-Smart Commodities funds.
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For nonprofits that support agroforestry, such as Virginia-based Appalachian Sustainable Development, the funding provided greater capacity for technical assistance and market development. Katie Commender, who directs the group’s agroforestry program, was working with one employee in 2020, trying to serve a backlog of hundreds of farmers who had requested site visits for agroforestry advice. Through Climate-Smart Commodities and other grants, she was able to hire four additional staffers and start whittling down the waitlist.
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An Appalachian Sustainable Development visit to a forest-farming site.
(Photo courtesy of Appalachian Sustainable Development)
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In January, when President Trump took office, that expansion began losing momentum. His administration froze already approved federal grant funding, including Climate-Smart Commodities grants. Farmers said they couldn’t pay for materials during the critical spring planting season, nonprofits began cutting the hours of their technical advisors, and experts were no longer able to attend events where they’d planned to share knowledge.
The administration received multiple court orders to lift the freeze; Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released $20 million for certain conservation initiatives in February, as well as an unspecified amount for rural energy work in March. Some USDA grant programs were fully unfrozen, while payments for others remained suspended.
A further roadblock appeared on Monday, when the USDA announced it would cancel the Climate-Smart Commodities program. While some projects may continue under a different name if they meet certain criteria, the program’s largest agroforestry grant—the $60
million Expanding Agroforestry Project (EAP), led by The Nature Conservancy—was decisively terminated. The future of other individual projects remains uncertain.
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While Trees for Graziers had been growing even before the Climate Smart Commodities Program, 80 percent of the projects Unruh had planned for this spring were supported by those now-canceled funds.
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“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 announcing the cancellation.
Consequences of Funding Freezes and Cancellations
An hour’s drive northwest from the White House, Sara Brown raises a herd of about 50 beef cattle on 200 acres in Lincoln, Virginia, that her family has owned since the early 1700s. This spring, as part of the EAP, she’d planned to start planting nearly 3,600 chestnuts and other trees across 30 acres of pasture. She hoped to add new forage options for her animals while retaining more water on her land, a concern given the area’s ongoing severe drought.
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Silvopasture operation at the Catawba Sustainability Center, overseen and operated by Virginia Tech. (Photo courtesy of Appalachian Sustainable Development)
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But after making arrangements to buy seedlings and prepare land, Brown learned in February that $225,000 in grant funding she’d been guaranteed was paused indefinitely. Moreover, she learned that Trump’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency had canceled a contract with the Clark Group, a consultancy the USDA had hired to review her grant. On April 14, The Nature Conservancy notified grantees that its agroforestry project had been terminated by the USDA.
“I think I actually lost a couple of friendships that morning . . . people were in the crossfire of me being in a very bad mood,” Brown said with a rueful laugh. Given Monday’s news, the money is now entirely off the table.
Brown said she’s still planning to plant some trees that she’d already acquired, but is unable to buy many more that had been scheduled to go in the ground this year. She’s paying out-of-pocket for deer fencing to protect those seedlings as well.
The funding uncertainty also upended technical assistance for farmers. Commender, with Appalachian Sustainable Development, said her team was working fewer hours, with 19 site visits currently on hold, to compensate for missing grant money; others at the nonprofit have been furloughed. Longer-term work to develop markets for high-value agroforestry products like elderberries, silvopasture-raised meat, and medicinal herbs is on hold.
That kind of dedicated support is crucial for agroforestry because the practice is still relatively uncommon, said Keefe Keeley, executive director of the Savanna Institute, the Midwest’s leading agroforestry nonprofit. The organization has used federal money to scale up technical assistance staff in six Upper Midwestern states over the past several years, as well as develop demonstration farms.
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“Seeing a farm where something is happening and imagining how it could work on your own farm is really essential.”
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Similar efforts were underway through over two dozen partners supported by the EAP grant alone. “Seeing a farm where something is happening and imagining how it could work on your own farm is really essential,” Keeley said.
A Hit to Indigenous Agroforestry
Similar difficulties are occurring for agroforestry outside of the Climate-Smart Commodities program. San Carlos Apache Tribe member Stephanie Gutierrez, Ecotrust’s forests and Indigenous leadership program director, said Ecotrust was awarded over $2.5 million for that work.
The funds, from the American Rescue Plan Act in 2023, supported the Indigenous Agroforestry Network, which connects Native practitioners so they can share traditional and modern agroforestry techniques, including at an in-person meeting attended by many West Coast tribes last year. “The network brought them together to just share and listen and learn from each other,” she explains.
The grant was scheduled to cover work through 2027, and Gutierrez had been planning a new year of meetings and events when, in February, Ecotrust found itself unable to access federal reimbursement systems. Gutierrez said the organization was cut off from more than half of the money she’d been guaranteed, and federal officials haven’t shared any information about why the Indigenous Agroforestry Network remains frozen out or when that funding might be restored.
Trying to Forecast the Future
Other agroforestry practitioners also say communicating with the USDA has been challenging, especially in light of the department’s recent staffing cuts. Keeley highlights layoffs at state-level Natural Resource Conservation Service offices, which have made it harder for farmers the Savanna Institute serves to access federal support. Some of those employees are returning after a court order reversed the layoffs of probationary
workers, but the legal situation is not resolved.
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The Agroforestry Coalition is particularly concerned about the USDA National Agroforestry Center and its 30 years of service. On April 2, the group delivered a petition to protect the center’s employees, signed by over 40 farmers and agroforestry organizations, to federal lawmakers from Nebraska, where the office is based.
The USDA office represents the only dedicated voice for agroforestry in the federal government, said Cristel Zoebisch, who co-chairs the coalition’s policy working group. While the Trump administration hasn’t yet cut the center’s staffing, she said it’s a likely target for future layoffs.
“We wouldn’t have anyone within the USDA that’s focused on figuring out how agroforestry might fit under different federal programs, advocating for that, and providing that information to stakeholders,” Zoebisch said of what might happen if the center is shuttered.
Back in Pennsylvania, Unruh said he’s largely been able to pivot from the Trees for Graziers projects that had been supported by Climate-Smart Commodities, thanks in part to community connections and the local interest in agroforestry.
Other practitioners may not be so fortunate. Unruh said many farmers taking their first chance on trees are facing significant bills, now with no chance of federal reimbursement. But he hopes the administration will eventually come around to see agroforestry’s potential.
“We’re here to support small farms, family farms, and that’s language that everyone can get behind. This isn’t just about climate change,” he said. “It’s about seeing more small farms thrive. I want to see more folks doing grass-fed beef while managing their land in ways that work for water quality and wildlife.”
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Member Spotlight: Liz Ross Cultivates Change in Caribbean Food Culture
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BY JIM COLGAN
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Liz Ross describes her work with an apt metaphor. “I think it's so important to provide information to people, because you're planting seeds,” she says. Her Florida-based nonprofit, Rethink Your Food, does just that, celebrating Caribbean culture while promoting the benefits of a vegan Caribbean diet.
Ross identifies the “seeds” that shaped her own life. Probably the most important influence was her family’s food and farming lineage. She was raised on her parents’ 250-acre cacao farm in Tobago, where her family’s cooking was rich in organic fruits and vegetables, much of it from the farm’s own garden. “When it came to eating animal products, it was very rare,” she says. Food permeated the culture. “It’s in our music, it’s in our literature,” she said. “We say [a kind person is] ‘sweet like a mango.’ ”
Another seed planted itself in 1990, after Ross moved to Virginia for university and another student told her he was vegetarian. He described how egg-laying hens live in cages made of wires so thin their feet bled.
“I thought about it, but I was like, well, it's a chicken, you know?” Ross recalls. At the time she did not believe animals had the capacity to suffer.
But the conversation stayed with her—and eventually, Ross became vegan, a decision she said was also influenced by watching the sitcom Girlfriends, about the lives of three Black women in Los Angeles. “Persia White was one of them, and she was vegan on the show and she was openly vegan in her public life,” Ross says.
An entirely different seed took root when Ross was living in Oakland, California, where she learned about Black liberation struggles. “It was that maturity of learning that there are other possibilities, other ways of being,” Ross says. That helped spark an interest in food justice and animal rights, and in 2016 and 2017, she organized a conference around those themes at California State University, Northridge.
In 2018, taking a break from a career in real estate, Ross completed an agroecology apprenticeship program at U.C. Santa Cruz, where she honed her interest in veganic gardening. A year later, she moved to Florida and became part of the Caribbean community there. By that time, multinational corporations like McDonald’s and Burger King had completely reshaped Caribbean foodways.
That radical cultural and dietary shift prompted her to start Rethink Your Food to serve people of Caribbean heritage living on the islands, in North America, and in the United Kingdom. The organization’s Vegan Caribbean Kickstart initiative offers a 21-day guide to plant-based eating, with daily recipes like West Indian pelau, a tempting, herb-flecked combination of brown rice, pigeon peas, and diced pumpkin.
Ross says her goal is to help participants “be more informed to make better choices for themselves and not just be at the mercy of the status quo.”
While it’s hard to change habits, Ross says that with healthy, traditional ingredients like pigeon peas and cassava, still growing in abundance throughout the region, there's no reason why Caribbean people can’t reclaim traditional ways of eating.
“It may not happen in my lifetime,” Ross says. “But the seed is there.”
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Did You Know?
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That's all for this issue of The Deep Dish. Thank you for reading, and thank you for being a member of the Civil Eats community. If this is your first time reading The Deep Dish (welcome!), be sure to check out our previous issues:
If someone forwarded this email to you, please support our work and become a member today. Questions? Compliments? Suggestions? We love to hear from our members: Please send us a note at members@civileats.com. |
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