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Or maybe you want to go electric? Because yes, they are different.
Have you given much thought to the inner workings of your stove? Me neither. Your home probably came with one already installed, and so long as you can turn it on, boil some water and simmer up a sauce, perhaps that’s reason enough not to second guess it.
But if you’re cooking with gas, we’re here to let you know that, culinary connoisseur or not, there are undeniable benefits to switching to either electric or induction cooking. First and foremost, neither relies directly on fossil fuels or emits harmful pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide into your home, making the switch integral to any effort to decarbonize your life — not to mention establish a comfortable living environment. Second, both electric and induction are far more energy efficient than gas.
“So on a gas range, about 70% of the heat that is generated from the gas goes into your kitchen,” DR Richardson, co-founder of the home electrification platform Elephant Energy, told me. “So it's very inefficient. You get hot. The handle gets hot. The kitchen gets hot. Everything gets hot, except your food. And it takes a really long time.” With an electric or induction stove, you can boil water faster and heat your food up quicker, all while reducing your home’s carbon footprint.
Convinced yet? If you’re reading this guide, we sure hope you’re at least intrigued! But even after you’ve decided to make the switch, confusion and analysis paralysis can still loom. Are your needs better suited to electric or induction? Will expensive electrical upgrades be required? How will this impact your cooking? And where are all the stove stores, anyway? So before you start browsing the aisles and showrooms, let’s get up to speed on all things stoves… or is it ranges? You’ll see.
Friday Apaliski is the director of communications at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit composed of members across various sectors including environmental justice groups, energy providers, and equipment manufacturers, seeking alignment on a path towards the elimination of fossil fuels in buildings.
DR Richardson is a co-founder of Elephant Energy, a platform that aims to simplify residential electrification for both homeowners and contractors. The company provides personalized electrification roadmaps and handles the entire installation process, including helping homeowners take advantage of all the available local, state, and federal incentives.
It depends on the cookware you currently own, but you will almost certainly need to replace some items. Induction stoves work with pots and pans that are made of magnetic materials like cast iron and stainless steel, but not those made of glass, aluminum, or copper. You can check to see if your cookware is induction compatible by seeing if a magnet will stick to the bottom, or if the induction logo is present on the bottom.
Everyone has their own affinities, but what we can tell you is that both traditional electric stoves and newer induction stoves are more energy efficient than gas stoves, and when it comes to temperature control, induction stoves are the clear winner. They allow you to make near instantaneous heat adjustments with great precision, while gas stoves take longer to adjust and are less exact to begin with.
Cooking on a new stove will undoubtedly come with a learning curve, what with all the new knobs and buttons and little sounds to get used to. Many cooks are used to relying on the visual cue of the flame to let them know how hot the stove is, but now you’ll be relying on a number on the screen, instead. Especially if you go with induction stove, be assured that you’ll be in good company among some top chefs.
This is indeed a key question — more on this one below.
If you don’t know already, it’s not too hard to find out. When you turn on the stovetop, is there fire? That, folks, is a gas stovetop. It will have a gas supply line that looks like a threaded pipe that connects to the back of the appliance. Gas stovetops are tricky to clean, not particularly sleek, and most prevalent in California, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington DC, New York, and Nevada.
If you have an electric range, the stovetop will be flat with metal coils either exposed or concealed beneath a ceramic glass surface. The coils will glow bright when they’re on. Electric ranges plug directly into 240-volt outlets (newer versions have four prongs, older ones have three), with a cord that looks like a heavy vacuum plug or a small hose. Electric stovetops are always paired with electric ovens — this is the setup that the majority of Americans already have according to the Energy Information Administration.
“So if you have an electric range and you like it, that's wonderful. You should keep it. But generally, when we're talking about transitioning from a gas experience to something else, induction is a much more analogous cooking experience,” Apaliski said.
If you have an induction range, it was probably a very intentional choice! According to a 2022 Consumer Reports survey, only about 3% of Americans have an induction range or cooktop, so big ups if you’re a part of that energy efficient minority. But if you just wandered into a new home and are wondering if it’s got the goods, you might have to turn on the stove to tell. Unlike an electric stovetop, you won’t see the cooking area glow because the surface isn’t actually getting hot, only the cookware is. Induction stoves also plug directly into 240-volt outlets.
But wait! There’s a chance you’re cooking with both gas and electric on a dual-fuel range. The telltale sign will be if your range connects to both a gas supply line as well as a 240-volt outlet (remember that plug?). But if it’s difficult to determine what’s going on back there, here’s what else to look out for: A metal device at the bottom and/or top of the oven’s interior that glows bright when the oven is on indicates that it’s electric! Sometimes these heating elements will be concealed, though. In that case, look for telltale signs of gas: An open flame when the oven is on or a visible pilot light when off. Newer gas stoves might not have either, but rather use an electronic ignition system that you can hear fire up about 30-45 seconds after turning on the oven. If you’re still confused, there’s always your user manual! (You kept that, right?)
If you’re going from an all-gas range to electric or induction and your stove is located on a kitchen island, for example, this could make installing the necessary electrical wiring more complex. It’s something to ask potential contractors about when you get to that stage.
Whenever you add a new electric appliance to your home, there’s the possibility that you’ll need to upgrade your electric panel to accommodate the new load. A new panel can cost thousands of dollars, though, so you’ll want to know ahead of time if this might be necessary. First, check the size of your current electric panel. You can find this information on your main breaker or fuse, a label on the panel itself, or your electric meter.
According to Rewiring America, if your panel is less than 100 amps, an upgrade could be necessary. If it’s anywhere from 100 to 150 amps, you can likely electrify everything in your home — including your range — without a panel upgrade, although some creative planning might be needed (more on that here and below, in the section on finding contractors and installers). If your panel is greater than 150 amps, it’s very likely that you can get an electric range (as well as a bevy of other electrical appliances) without upgrading.
As of now, federal incentives for electric and induction ranges, cooktops, and ovens are not yet available. But Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates programs, established via the Inflation Reduction Act, will roll out on a state-by-state basis over the course of this year and next, with most programs expected to come online in 2025. These rebates could give low- and moderate-income houses up to $840 back on the cost of switching from gas to electric or induction cooking.
While many details have yet to be released, it’s important to note that qualifying customers won’t be required to pay the full price and then apply for reimbursement — rather, the discount will be applied upfront. Once the program becomes available, your state will have a website with more information on how to apply. If you’re cash-strapped today, it could be worth waiting until the federal incentives roll out, as rebates will not be retroactively available.
Many states and municipalities already have their own incentives for electric appliance upgrades though. Unfortunately, there’s currently no centralized database to look these up, so that means doing a little homework. Check with your local utility, as well as your local and state government websites and energy offices for home electrification incentives. If you happen to live in California or Washington state, you can search for local incentives here, via this initiative from the Building Decarbonization Coalition. The NODE Collective is also working to compile data on all residential incentive programs, so keep checking in, more information is coming soon!
Assuming you currently have a gas stove or a dual fuel range, this is the first big choice you’ll have to make. For customers interested in upgrading from electric to induction, let this also be your guide, as an induction stove is indeed the higher-end choice. Here are the main differences between the two:
Electric
Induction
*According to Rewiring America
** According to this paper
Heatmap Recommends: Spring for the induction stove if you can. Not only will it provide a superior cooking experience, but it’s safer too. Induction stoves only heat up magnetic pots and pans, so if you touch the stove’s surface, you won’t get burned. Most will also turn off automatically if there’s no cookware detected.
“Induction is definitely the upgrade in basically every sense, if you can afford it. Induction is a way better cooking experience. It's got way more fun heating and cooking control. It's much more energy efficient. It's much faster,” said Richardson.
If you’re curious about what it’s like to cook with an electric or induction stove, you can buy a standalone single-pot cooktop for well under $100; it will plug straight into a standard outlet. Additionally, Apalinksi says that many libraries (yes, libraries!) and utilities allow residents to borrow an induction cooktop and try it out for a few weeks, completely free of charge.
New electric and induction ranges and cooktops will only be eligible for forthcoming federal incentives if they’re certified by Energy Star, a joint program run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the DOE that provides consumer information on energy efficient products, practices, and standards. You can check out what models of ranges and cooktops qualify here. But to get a handle on the actual look and feel of various options, you should try and find a showroom or head to a large retail store.
“Go to your local big box retailer, whether it's a Home Depot or Best Buy or Lowe's, they tend to have a bunch of models on the floor. Their representatives can talk to you about all the different options out there. But you have to research a little bit ahead of time, otherwise they're going to point you to the latest gas appliance,” said Richardson.
If you learn that making the switch is going to entail particularly cumbersome electrical upgrades, Apaliski said there are some innovative companies such as Channing Street Copper andImpulse Labs that make induction ranges and cooktops that plug into standard outlets. They’re much pricier than your standard range, but if you can afford it, one could be right if you’re looking for plug-and-play simplicity and sleek design.
“So this is great, for example, if you are a renter, or if you are someone who has limited capacity on your electrical panel, or if you are someone who has one of these kitchen islands that is just impossible to get a new electric cord to,” Apaliski said.
If you buy your new range or cooktop from a big box retailer, they’ll typically haul away your old appliance and deliver and install the new one for you at either low or no cost. Don’t assume this is a part of the package, though, and be sure to ask what is and isn’t included before you make your purchase.
But if you’re moving from an all gas range or cooktop to an electric or induction range or cooktop, the complicated part isn’t the installation process, it’s everything that must come before. That includes capping and sealing the gas line for your old stove (this is a job for a plumber) and installing the requisite electric wiring to power your new stove (this is a job for an electrician).
As noted, making the switch could also mean a costly electric panel upgrade. You should ask potential electricians about this right away, as well as about creative solutions that would let you work with your existing panel. If you’re running out of space, you could buy a circuit sharing device like a smart splitter or a circuit pauser, which would allow multiple loads, such as an EV charger and your stove, to share a circuit, or ensure that specific appliances are shut off when you’re approaching your panel’s limit. Richardson recommends getting opinions from a couple different electricians, seconding the idea that if your panel is 100 amps or more, an upgrade is likely not necessary.
Above all, you should make sure that the gas line and electric work is taken care of before the stove installer comes to your home. Richardson said that occasionally, retailers will provide plumbing and electrical services as an add-on option, so it never hurts to ask. But most likely you’ll be sourcing contractors and compiling quotes on your own. If you don’t already have a go to person for the job, ask friends, family, and neighbors for references. Google and Yelp reviews are always there too.
New electric ranges do not usually come with a power cord. You must purchase your own power cord prior to installation.
Once you get time on the calendar with a trustworthy, knowledgeable and fair-priced plumber and electrician, it’s time to schedule the installation of your new range or cooktop. And after that it’s time to metaphorically fire up those resistive coils or electromagnetic fields and make yourself an electrified meal for the ages.
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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.