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A conversation with the author of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade
It was questionable if we needed a second season of Tiger King — or, let’s be honest, a first season. Regardless, if Netflix ever decides it’s interested in a story that features surprisingly charming criminals, IWT violations, and yes, even possibly murder (but without the tabloid tone and mullets), producers might look in the future to Jared D. Margulies’ delightful debut, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade.
Wait, illicit succulent trade? you might be wondering. Oh yes.
From the cliffs of California and the deserts of Brazil to the markets of Seoul and the private greenhouses of Czechia, Margulies follows the extraction and relocation of plants so rare that they might only exist in one valley or mountainside in the world. Weaving in ample philosophy and research about what drives these sorts of obsessions — as well as his personal reflections as he, in turn, is captivated by the lovable, spiky plants — The Cactus Hunters is just the right balance of edgy and academic.
Last week, I caught up with Margulies about the process of researching the book, being mistaken for an undercover cop by his subjects, and the lie that is “the green thumb,” among other topics. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You open The Cactus Hunters with a story about how you were going to study the illegal trade of tiger bones when you came across a story about saguaro cactus rustling that piqued your interest and sent you on this journey. What most stands out to you as the differences between the illegal trade of animals and animal products and the world of illegal cactus trading?
To clarify, I never actually got around to studying the illegal trade in tiger bones. I had encountered it a little bit in my past research on human-wildlife conflicts.
But there are a lot of important differences: One of the things that made the illegal plant trade so interesting to study, compared to illegal trade in animals, is that it receives a lot less attention, so there was just a lot more to learn that people hadn’t already researched. But also, the way that this material and these plants can move around the world — there are so many more options available because of the nature of plants. So if what you’re after is the genetics of the plant, to be able to grow them somewhere else in the world, there’s not just the one plant but there’s the cacti propagate, for instance. Pups. Their seeds. You can make cuttings of plants. None of these things are really available to people interested in illegal trade and animals. That affects supply chains and how these things can move around the world.
Also, because of the lack of attention to illegal plant trade compared to animal trade, the subject is a lot less criminalized. I would argue that my access to informants and research participants was a lot better because it did happen that, every now and then, people thought I was a cop. Or maybe, like, an undercover detective. But usually within pretty short order, they realized that wasn’t the case and I was generally interested in trying to understand their perspectives. I think that it would be a lot harder to develop trust within certain trades that are a lot more heavily criminalized.
Over the course of the book, you encounter the Indiana Jones of plants and the Robin Hood of cacti, among others. Can you talk a little about why these enthusiasts, who clearly care deeply about conservation, sometimes break the law by smuggling seeds or entire cacti out of the places where they naturally grow?
One of the fascinating things that really gripped me was this seeming contradiction, where you have people who are made out as conservation villains by certain actors seeing themselves as unsung conservation heroes. The reason for that is, for a lot of these collectors, they saw their community as really passionate people who wanted to get access to the plants that become objects of their desires. By and large, the people who want these plants aren’t trying to do harm to the species in the world, and they care a lot about them. But they also recognize that in their desire is something fairly insatiable and that people are going to go to lengths to get the plant that they have to go to.
For a lot of these collectors, they might see engaging in a kind of illegal activity as still a socially acceptable behavior, if it meant it got material out into the world in a way that people might want it. And the goal there, the long-term goal, is to try to reduce demand on wild harvesting of plants and wild populations. If you get a little bit of material out into the communities that delight in these plants, then you can start grafting them, propagating them, growing them from seed, and, in theory, get that material out into the world.
I wanted to take that perspective seriously. It’s a hard thing to study empirically and so it was important for me to try to be open to a really diverse set of opinions about the right way to do conservation.
You leave most of the sources in the book, including those working within the law, anonymous. Why did you make that decision?
The really short answer is, I was part of a larger research project called BIOSEC, which was run by Professor Rosaleen Duffy at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Politics and International Relations, and we were using a fairly symmetrical ethics approval process, or what in the U.S. we would call an institutional review board approval. Because a number of us were studying illicit economies, in order to ensure research-subject protection and anonymity and security, we were required to make all of our sources anonymous.
But this caused some issues because, on the one hand, it meant that everyone in the book is anonymous, even if they’re people who are law enforcement officials or botanists who would have probably really enjoyed having their names in the book. I regret that.
Most interesting, though, were the number of collectors who were mad at me because they’re also anonymous. One of the reasons for that was they saw anonymity as being suggestive of wrongdoing and for a lot of these people, they don’t feel like what they’re doing is wrong, necessarily, even if it’s against the law. They wanted their story told. I think one of the reasons I had good access to the kinds of interlocutors I had was because they felt like I was providing a space for them to get their version of the story out into the world.
You were asked to be an expert witness in a case against a South Korean smuggler who took thousands of plants from the California coast. How do you navigate moments like this, when your position as an illicit trade researcher is perhaps in tension with your own ethical code?
This was a really difficult decision for me, and I write about this. I went back and forth about whether or not to serve as an expert witness, which in this case just required writing a statement. I never had to go to court or, you know, be on a witness stand — thank goodness. But I go back and forth about if I would do it again.
I think that in the end, I chose to do it because I realized that my testimony would only serve to probably reduce the sentence that this person was facing. And I don’t say that because I think that what they were doing was okay. It was really bad and really harmful to this species of plant. I just don’t think that criminalization and incarceration actually do rehabilitative work or serve much function. It costs us a lot of money as taxpayers and causes harm.
It was complicated; I guess that’s how I would leave it. I debated whether or not to include [the story] in the book but I felt like, in the end, it would be wrong not to include it. I think that if people eventually found out I had served in that capacity, they might felt like I was trying to not disclose something. But yeah, I have some ambiguous feelings about it. In the end, what I was asked to actually do was very limited: I was just asked to put a value on these plants. But as I wrote in my letter to the judge, that value in monetary terms is such an arbitrary thing. The price of those plants has declined precipitously since I wrote that, and it had already gone down a lot since the person who sold them stole them. How interesting, though, that the court of law — at least in the United States — in order to assess the damage done to the state, it had to be valued in monetary terms.
I really liked the inclusion of the story. It’s interesting for a researcher of illicit and illegal trade to all of a sudden be dragged into the concrete legal system, and have it, you know, ask something of you.
Sometimes academics are hard on ourselves in that we think we put in all this work and do all this writing and no one actually reads it. And that’s not true. People do read your work when you publish it and you should think about who those people might be. They might be district attorneys for the state of California. People will use your work, and you should think from the outset about what the social implications of that might be. It was a big lesson for me.
At the end of the book, you write that your experiences in the cactus and succulent community have left you with hope that meaningful change is possible “not through the repressions of desire but through its celebration.” After spending so much time among people that some might call poachers, what makes you optimistic?
We have so many examples from other illicit economies where prohibition doesn’t work. I am concerned by a tendency to move in that direction. Given that we’re talking about plants — you know, as far as we know, this conversation could be different in 50 years — but we’re not having to really think about the welfare issues of, say, illegal trade in animals. There are pragmatic solutions to these problems. This material could get out into the world so that people who want these plants can get it in a way that doesn’t harm wild-growing species.
There’s still a ways to go in working through regulatory conventions to support those efforts. And importantly, in doing so, supporting the people who should have the most support, which I would argue are the communities in places in the world that have lived with these plants the longest.
I see hopeful promise in this, and I saw a whole lot of love. I really did. I saw a lot of love between people and plants, and what that can do for people in moving into developing more careful relations with plants and other species. I don’t have a large collection of cacti and succulents, but I do have some, and I have like a cactus right now that’s in flower. Do you want to see it?
Yes!
This is where I think it’s fun, to think about what plants can teach us—
Oh, it’s gorgeous!
This is a Mammillaria laui. Named for Alfred Lau, who I write about in one of the chapters of the book — a German who lived in Mexico, who has a lot of different species named after him. This is Mammillaria laui, subspecies subducta. It’s got this gorgeous crown of pink flowers.
I love having these plants. Specifically, I’ve started a small collection of plants that are associated with particular people that I wrote about, or that I thought about. Bringing some of that social history to our plants, I think, is a really nice thing that people can do. Learn about where our plants come from and the histories of how they got to where we are.
That’s kind of what set me off on this whole journey, anyway. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for thinking thoughtfully about the place of these plants in the world and how they travel and maybe, hopefully, that can help move us towards a more ethical kind of relation.
Are you worried now that once you collect all of the plants that are connected to your book, you’ll throw your whole collection out?
I don’t think I have a strong collector tendency, per se. I have been accused of being a low-key hoarder before. I’m excited to think about how I’m going to slowly develop a collection over time. Yeah, but your reference — the worst thing that can happen to a collector is completing a collection. Freud wrote about this in the context of completing his collection of statues and dying days later. This one collector who I went to see, I thought I was going to see a giant greenhouse of cacti, but I found a bunch of Mexican chili plants. Because he’d just tossed [the cacti collection] off, he was done with it. I don’t see myself going down that road but one never knows.
For someone reading this interview who might be interested in collecting, where would you say to start?
We need to get over this idea that cacti and succulent plants are great house plants because they don’t require any care. It’s not true. Everyone I know who’s had a succulent has killed it very quickly.
I killed mine.
Yeah, if you just throw a succulent on, like, a north-facing windowsill, it’s not going to do well, especially if you ignore it.
Also, get over the idea that there are natural people in the world with a green thumb — I think that is also nonsense. We just need to spend time learning about what these plants need. One of the ways you can do that is by paying attention to them.
In terms of obtaining material — you know, so much plant material can also just be found for free, gifted from friends or colleagues or the community. A lot of collector clubs, like, say, the Cactus and Succulent Society of America here in the U.S., I believe may even send you free seeds of cacti, and stuff like that.
The thing that I want to start doing is trying to grow cacti from seed. They’re slow-growing plants but I think it’d be really fun to actually watch that process unfold. And it’s quite easy to obtain seeds for a lot of these plants. Just, you know, be careful where you’re buying stuff from. Reputable nurseries are a good source. But be wary of buying from unknown people on the internet. That might be where people start to get into trouble.
Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to let me know about your book or your experience writing it before I let you go?
I’m not too prescriptive at the end of the book about what I think the answer is. Some people may find that frustrating, like, “Oh, but you didn’t tell us like what should we do” or “What’s the right response?” One of the reasons for that was I just wanted to let people develop some of their own thoughts about this. But also it’s because the work isn’t done.
I’m developing some work right now dealing with illegal succulent trade in South Africa with some colleagues, both in South Korea but also in South Africa. I’m doing a new project on illicit Venus flytrap harvesting and the carnivorous plant trade. I’m trying to continue the process of thinking and learning with plants. But the work continues.
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Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.
Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.
Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.
“This was an opportunity to repair some of that trust, through this project,” Emily Moose, the executive director of the sustainable agriculture organization A Greener World, told me in an email. Moore and her teammates spent years recruiting farmers from the group’s Oregon community, and eventually got 77 of them to sign up to create certified regenerative farm management plans. A Greener World was notified in January that its reimbursements were being suspended, and now risks losing $10,000 in incentive payments, meaning the farmers in the program “are now having to weigh paying for certification out of pocket or dropping the certification process entirely and losing market opportunities.”
Nicole Delcogliano, director of programs at the Organic Growers School, a farmer training organization in North Carolina, and a small farmer herself had similar hopes for a grant the group received to help mentor and educate early-stage farmers. The department had “finally started to build back a little bit of trust,” she told me. With the funding pause, she said, “I think that is going to be lost.”
Affected grants include billions set aside for the USDA through the Inflation Reduction Act for soil and water conservation projects, as well as more than $820 million earmarked for the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, which incentivized agricultural producers to make energy-efficiency improvements on their land. Grants issued through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program for farm innovations that have greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration benefits — funded through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a Dust Bowl-era entity more typically leveraged to protect farm income and prices during disasters — are also on pause. Original plans for the program under Biden would have seen it eventually scaled to 60,000 farms, reducing an estimated 50,000 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Though the Trump administration eventually released about 1% of the IRA-related USDA grant money in late February, much remains out of reach, with no timeline for payout. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition assumes that the “majority” of the $2.3 billion allocated to farmers on IRA-funded contracts is “likely still in USDA’s coffers.” Additionally, more than half of the $3.1 billion allocated to the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program had not yet been paid out by the end of February, according to The Hagstrom Report, an agricultural news service. (The Trump administration has said it would reconsider REAP grants if applicants rewrite them to “remove harmful [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] and far-left climate features.”)
All of the affected grant programs work on a reimbursement basis, with the farmers incurring costs upfront protected, in theory, by a contractual guarantee that the government will pay them back. Individual farmers aren’t usually the direct beneficiaries of USDA grants, however. The USDA more commonly awards a grant to nonprofit organizations that, in turn, provide financial and technical support to farmers making sustainable transitions. Many of the nonprofits are now having to furlough or lay off staff. Meanwhile, farmers are still seeking their reimbursements, but there’s no funding there to pay them.
Hannah Smith-Brubaker, the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that was awarded a Climate Smart Commodities grant and a Farm and Food Workers Relief from the USDA, is planning to furlough 60 people — most of her team — due to the pause. Another project director at a Mid-Atlantic sustainability nonprofit told me his organization has “been lending cash” from their own books since January 27, when the pause was announced, and that he anticipated being laid off shortly after our call.
But while the nonprofits are certainly hurting, the farmers are the ones stuck with the final bill. In addition to the USDA’s history of discriminating against Black farmers, many who manage smaller acreages report feeling overlooked by the federal government in favor of powerful agro-business conglomerates. More than 70% of farmers under age 40 reported being unfamiliar with USDA programs that could help them, and nearly half said they’d never received support from the agency, according to polling by the National Young Farmers Coalition published in 2022.
“In the last administration, there was recognition that they didn’t have the trust of a lot of farmers who historically haven't been served, or been underserved, by USDA,” Smith-Brubaker said. With programs like the Climate-Smart Commodities grant, the Biden administration “asked us to leverage the trust that we already have with farmers — to ask them to trust us to enter into this program.”
It worked: Many of the more than 30,000 contracted farms are already a year or two into multi-year projects with nonprofits designed to improve soil health, plant cover crops, or improve farm efficiency. That means they’ve already hired the extra staff for the projects, placed orders for new equipment, and set aside precious land for soil-enrichment projects.
But with no word on the future of their funding, some are now hesitating over whether to spend more money out of pocket on those projects if the government might not uphold its end of the deal. The pause has led many of the farmers I spoke with to reevaluate their trust in future USDA funding. “It’s unsettling because you’re like, ‘Well, if I implement the practices I’m supposed to, but then I don’t get that reimbursement sometime in 2025, what does that look like?’” said Delcogliano, who received one Conservation Stewardship Plan payment in October for her farm, Green Toe Ground, but hasn’t yet heard yet whether future payments will be affected.
Delcogliano also emphasized that despite the commodities grant containing the “buzz word” of “climate,” what it actually encourages are long-established practices that help conserve water and soil. “It’s just smart farming,” she told me. Ed Winebarger, a chef and farmer in North Carolina, told me he participated in the Climate-Smart Commodities program for a year and saw an immediate 20% increase in production. “My crops did better, the system works — period,” he said.
Small farmers who pursued the government grants likely would have been interested in the practices regardless of the financial incentives in many cases; Erin Foster West, the Policy Campaigns Director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, told me the group’s research found nearly 85% of its membership was “motivated by environmental stewardship to farm.” Caroline Anderson Novak, the head of the Professional Dairy Managers of Pennsylvania — which is collaborating with Penn State on its greenhouse-gas-reducing Climate-Smart Commodities program, and which hasn’t received a notification of a pause from the USDA as other organizations have — told me that things like experimental feeds and sharper data assessments represent “operational improvements” that just happen to have attractive climate upsides. “They are things that the farm already wants to do,” she said.
What the grants do is provide the capital necessary for farmers to put these efficiency upgrades into practice. Margins, particularly at small farms, can be razor thin, and the risks of operational experiments can be steep. “A lot of the time, you would need to pursue a loan just to get started with the project,” Emma Jagoz, the owner of Moon Valley Farm in Maryland, who has hundreds of thousands in USDA grants tied up by the pause, told me.
As a result, farmers waiting for clarity on their grants generally have clear eyes about the root of the problem. “The organization that we work with, they can’t help the cuts. It’s not their fault,” Patrick Brown, who enrolled 90% of his North Carolina farm’s acreage in a climate-smart project, told me. “This administration has blatantly stated their approach.”
Kristin Reilly, the executive director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, a collective of small nonprofits in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that is helping its farming partners navigate the funding freeze, agreed that “the practitioners on the ground are definitely seeing that it’s not the nonprofits who are not paying them; they’re struggling along with them.”
Almost everyone I spoke with was pessimistic that the USDA would honor the grants, even as Earthjustice and other groups have launched lawsuits against the federal government over the freeze. (Pasa has joined a lawsuit with the Southern Environmental Law Center.) “I don’t think [the pause is] going to lift as long as this guy is in power because he’s so disconnected from reality,” Winebarger, the North Carolina chef and farmer, said of President Trump. “He’s never put his hands in dirt in his entire life. He doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t understand my farming neighbors.”
Delcogliano shared a similar sentiment: “The government is incompetent,” she told me. “They’re not in touch with the people that are actually doing the work.”
Perhaps most crucially, while the federal money is paused, the climate continues changing. Any given season could bring a new drought or deluge that wipes out a farm entirely. Though separate from the troubles with the grant pauses, both Delcogliano and Winebarger are also recovering from extensive damage to their farms from Hurricane Helene, a process they told me has been made even more painful due to the lack of emergency funding available from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Farmers will also be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of some of the tariffs the Trump administration plans to enact this week.
“It just feels like I’m driving behind a truck full of hammers that are dumping on me,” Winebarger said of the compounding problems. “And I can’t dodge them — they’re going to hit me. I don’t know how we’re going to get out from underneath this.”
Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, a Maine-based nonprofit that stands to lose a $35 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant, has begun to reformulate how its programs could continue with the support of buyer funds, state funding sources, or philanthropic dollars instead. It had once envisioned working with more than 400 partners over the grant’s lifespan, but that idea has given way to smaller-scale projects it can still afford.
“This is about so much more than climate change,” Ellen Griswold, the director of Wolfe’s Neck, stressed to me about the importance of finding a way forward with or without the government. “It’s about making farmers as resilient and profitable as possible. Without this assistance, there will be impacts to the farming community” — including farmers themselves and their suppliers. That could include a fencing company, nursery, or refrigerated truck dealer farmers can no longer afford to pay, or regional schools or food banks that are now forced to pay more for local, organic produce.
The reverberations of the grant pause will be felt far into the future, too. Even if the contracts are ultimately honored by the Trump administration, some farmers will undoubtedly feel justified in their suspicions of partnering with the federal government. Nonprofits will have more difficulty convincing community partners to take on voluntary climate projects down the line, and common-sense efficiency projects with climate co-benefits will stay dormant.
“If another opportunity comes along like this, I completely understand if farmers say, ‘No, I’m not doing that,’” Smith-Brubaker of Pasa said.