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These 7 neighborhoods are competing visions of a more sustainable future.
I’m a serial cheater, emotionally, on New York City. As much as Queens is my home, one of my favorite ways to lose track of time is by going down the Zillow rabbit hole and imagining all the other lives I could live somewhere else. If I had $2 million, would I move into a houseboat to live out my Sleepless in Seattle dreams? (You laugh, but at least a floating home is floodproof!). Or maybe I’d go to California to be closer to my extended family? (Never mind — I’d never be able to afford the fire insurance).
Recently I’ve become especially captivated by “intentional communities,” of which there are thousands worldwide and hundreds in the United States alone. These are experimental master-planned neighborhoods that revolve around shared values that often pertain to things like sustainability, communal living, green spaces, and minimizing individual impact — things that might be necessary to adopt in some form on a wider scale in the coming years.
Some of these communal neighborhoods are pretty out there (think aquaponics that runs off a “VillageOS”). Others are so alluring that without even realizing it, I found myself browsing their availability pages. Oops — don’t tell New York.
Here are a few of the innovative neighborhoods that caught my eye:
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Courtesy MVSA Architects
You’ve joked about running away to go live in the woods, but what if you didn’t have to make the choice?
Designed by Stefano Boeri of Verticle Forest fame and Roberto Meyer of the Dutch firm MVSA Architects, Wonderwoods is a 200-apartment, two-tower project in Utrecht, the fourth-biggest city in the Netherlands. The pair of structures, set to open in 2024, look in the renderings like something nature has reclaimed. But the 10,000 plants and 300 trees that will eventually cover the buildings’ balconies, roofs, and facades aren’t just there to look cool.
By decking out Wonderwoods in the equivalent of one hectare of forest, the designers aim to maximize the known benefits of urban tree planting: Plants suck up CO2, help filter out environmental pollutants, and can even generate microclimates that will be important in a warming world (the cooling effects of plants will also help reduce the energy demand of air conditioners).
Wonderwoods’ co-designer, Boeri, has been called “perhaps the most famous name in green architecture,” and he is both prolific and influential: The Dutch project is just one of the dozens of plant-coated buildings that have been, or are being, constructed around the world.
Not all of these experiments have been successful — rumor has it the Qiyi City Forest in Chengdu is overgrown and bug infested — and some scientists have downplayed the greenhouse gas-mitigating effects of so-called biophilic design. Still, if we’re to survive in a hotter, more concrete-covered world, we’ll need to bring plants along with us.
Would I live here?: I’ve always been jealous of people who junglefy their living spaces with lots and lots of plants (Hilton Carter, please decorate my home!). Tragically, I don’t always have the greenest thumb — I’m an overenthusiastic waterer — but the good news is, Wonderwoods has a team of rappelling gardeners who will maintain the exterior vegetation for you. Getting to enjoy the lushness of a rural forest in the heart of urban Europe without having to do any of the work? Count me in — I’d live here for sure.
Live, Work & Play at Wonderwoodswww.youtube.com
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Courtesy Culdesac
Forget electric vehicles: Residents of Culdesac, a rental community just across the river from Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona, are “contractually forbidden from parking a vehicle within a quarter-mile radius of the site.”
While that might sound practically un-American to some, it’s a paradise for others. The 17-acre, $170-million project includes 761 apartments, a light rail stop (which is free with residency), communal courtyards, a coffee shop, restaurant, gym, grocery store, soon-to-open coworking space, car-share pick-up and drop-off, and, yes, visitor parking.
Culdesac isn’t the only car-free community in America, as Jalopnik reports. But while the communities tend to be popular, especially with young professionals (40% of the people on Culdesac’s opening waitlist were from outside of Arizona), “these kinds of developments often aren’t legal to build in large parts of the country due to mandatory parking minimums,” Jalopnik adds.
That doesn’t deter its founders. The long-term “vision of Culdesac,” Ryan Johnson, Culdesac’s chief executive, told The New York Times, is to eventually “build the first car-free city in the U.S.”
Would I live here?: One of the biggest deterrents against leaving New York City is being saddled with car payments — not to mention that my husband doesn’t drive. Despite being located in the heart of the Phoenix sprawl, Culdesac seems genuinely committed to making a car-free lifestyle work for its residents, offering benefits like free rides on the metro, bike parking, $5-an-hour car-sharing, complimentary Lyft Pink, and rentable Bird scooters on site. Coming from the New York real estate market, its prices also seem reasonable — available one-bedroom units start at $1,390 a month. I know because I was tempted enough to look. If only I liked the heat a little more …
Culdesac Tempe: The First Car-free Community Built From Scratch in the USwww.youtube.com
Location: Vienna, Austria
Anja Pfeifer/Getty Images
Vienna is one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, which has created a massive demand for housing. In order to meet the demand, Vienna is building a city within a city — and taking it as an opportunity to do things right.
With over 11,000 new homes (including the world’s second-tallest timber building), the neighborhood of Aspern Seestadt is nearly net-zero, relying on technology and cutting-edge construction techniques to lower its footprint. Excess heat and electricity in one building can be sent to another, for example, while 80% of its residents reportedly travel by bike, foot, or public transit.
But what sets Aspern Seestadt apart from other green, pedestrian-friendly communities around the globe is its emphasis on centering women’s and families’ needs. For one thing, all of the streets and public spaces in the neighborhood are named after women, but the attention goes beyond the symbolic — the pavement is also wide to accommodate strollers, and ramps are included alongside staircases; parks and other gathering spaces have plentiful public toilets; pram parking and storage are readily accessible. There are also extra safety measures, like more lights in dark spaces, abundant alarms and assistance buttons, and extra guards during nighttime hours.
Buildings in Aspern Seestadt also mix housing with nurseries, shops, and coworking spaces so “women, as well as men, can … better reconcile professional and personal life,” Germany’s Gettotext.com reports. It’s a model more intentional communities should take note of.
Would I live here?:Vienna has repeatedly been cited as the city with the highest quality of life in the world although the picture might not be as rosy if you aren’t Austrian. The expat resource website InterNations lists Vienna as the “worst-rated city” in the world when it comes to the “ease of settling in” due in large part to it also being in last place for “local friendliness.” As amazing as it’d be to be integrated into a community like Aspern Seestadt — especially, eventually, as a mother — it’d probably be terribly isolating to get the cold shoulder from my new neighbors. For the “new girl in the high school” vibes this is giving me, I’d potentially pass.
Vienna is Building a $6BN "City Within a City"www.youtube.com
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Pol Albarran/Getty Images
One of the major criticisms of intentional communities is that they’re not actually all that “green” since they require new construction, which in turn uses up resources and adds to emissions. Additionally, many of the neighborhoods featured in this article simply aren’t scaleable to the necessary degree; 4.4 billion people live in cities and moving all of them into net-zero villages or buildings would be next to impossible.
But what if existing neighborhoods could retroactively be made greener and more habitable? That’s the radical idea behind Barcelona’s superilles, or superblocks, which began reclaiming city streets for pedestrians back in 2013. The basic idea involves cordoning off 3x3 city blocks, diverting thru-traffic around the “islands,” and limiting the roads within the blocks to six-mile-per-hour residential traffic. This transforms the interiors of the superblocks into safe places for pedestrians to walk and kids to play; the new green spaces help eliminate the urban heat island effect and boost mental health; and the walkability encourages increased foot traffic, in turn reducing emissions.
The experiment has been an enormous success: NO2 pollution has dropped 33%; noise in superblocks dipped by 9 decibels, and local businesses have seen increased sales as residents opt to shop within walking distance, a positive illustration of the urban planning concept known as the 15-minute city.
Today, there are only six superblocks in the capital of Catalonia, but the goal is to expand the concept city-wide to potentially as many as 500. In the next decade, it aims for every resident to have a public square and a green street within 650 feet of their home.
Would I live here?:Psst, New York City, can’t you take a hint? The COVID-19 pandemic gave New Yorkers a taste of what it might be like if our city prioritized the needs of pedestrians over drivers with its “open streets” program, although most of that progress has been rolled back. Barcelona is proving we could be better if only we had our priorities in the right place. Sure, it’s a sí from me when it comes to moving to Spain, but it’d be even neater if we could bring the superblock experiment back home.
Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking city streets back from carswww.youtube.com
Location: Near Amsterdam, Netherlands
Courtesy ReGen
“The Tesla of Eco-Villages” might not sound quite as appealing as it once did. But if you want to live minimally but aren’t quite ready to give up your Apple Watch, then ReGen Villages might be for you.
While other projects I've highlighted reimagine urban living, ReGen Villages wants to reinvent the “neighborhood development outside of cities.” The 50-acre community of 300 homes is planned for a rural region about a half-hour drive outside of Amsterdam and aims to combine vertical farming, aquaponics, renewable energy, and waste-to-resource systems to form an almost entirely self-sustaining, closed-loop community.
But this isn’t your hippie aunt’s crunchy, off-the-grid living. Conducting the complicated system will be the “Village OS” software, which eventually will use AI to “optimize living conditions, energy use, and overall efficiency,” and even potentially communicate with other future ReGen Villages around the planet, Insider reports.
ReGen Village has run into a number of roadblocks since it was first announced — construction on the complex was originally slated to begin in 2017 but it has encountered zoning, permitting, and funding problems and its website says the company is “in [the] process of raising a Series-A round of investment” to build out the operating system to test in “pilot communities.” But if the Amsterdam location doesn’t work out, stay tuned; ReGen is a California-based company and it reports interest in the concept is high in the U.S., particularly the Northeast.
Would I live here?: I’m all for off-the-grid living but something about ReGen Villages feels a little … cult-y? Maybe it’s the all-seeing AI, or the active discouragement of owning a car while living in a rural area, but something about this whole scheme sounds like the starting premise of an Ari Aster film. I’ll keep my cell reception, thanks.
ReGen Villages - Index Award 2017 Finalistwww.youtube.com
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Screenshot/YouTube
A desert oil state might seem like an unlikely place for a sustainable city; in 2003, the United Arab Emirates had the highest ecological footprint per person of any nation (and it’s not much better now). But as part of a region-wide effort to convince the rest of the world that climate objectives are compatible with fossil fuels, the UAE is hosting COP28 and touting lofty goals like making Dubai the city with the smallest carbon footprint in the world by 2050.
The 120-acre, $354 million Sustainable City is one of the crown jewels of that ongoing effort. Constructed 18 miles in the desert outside of Dubai by Diamond Developers, which built the city’s famous marina, the Sustainable City is intended as a model net-zero neighborhood, complete with self-sufficient greenhouses and biodomes, recycled water, solar panels, and intelligent design (the villas, home to some 2,500 residents, all face north, which the developers claim cuts air conditioning usage by 40%). Cars are banned inside the compound and a shopping plaza, complete with a mosque, serves all the residents’ needs.
Critics are highly skeptical of the Sustainable City, arguing the project is an “‘island’ of specialized consumption and lifestyle … that does not actually take on the challenge of sustainability.” Supporters, on the other hand, describe it as a “living laboratory” where developers are learning in real-time how to make habitable one of the most climate-threatened places on Earth. True, the Sustainable City might not be the solution to Dubai’s problems — at worst, it might represent another instance of the UAE’s greenwashing. But if its experiment is successful, the solutions it discovers could help inform better-living for everyone.
Would I live here?:There is a reason most of the homes on this list are variations on high-density living; dense urban housing tends to be far more energy efficient. While having your own villa in the Sustainable City would be pretty sweet, it does give the impression that this is just another gated community surrounded by all the other gated communities also touting their green bona fides in Dubai. On top of the human rights violations I’d have to turn a blind eye to in order to live in the United Arab Emirates, I’m not sure the Sustainable City would be right for me.
Sustainable City | Fully Chargedwww.youtube.comSc
Location: Austin, Texas
Screenshot/YouTube
Bringing people in closer harmony with the Earth is the goal of many sustainable communities. Whisper Valley, a 2,000-acre development in Austin, just takes it a little more literally.
At first, Whisper Valley looks like many innovative developments popping up across America: The 7,700 homes come with solar panels, Google Nest thermostats, nearby community centers, and ample public green spaces (in this case, a massive 600-acre park that doubles as flood control). But what sets the community apart is what you can’t see: Whisper Valley sits on the largest geothermal grid in the world.
Drawing on the steady temperature of the deep Earth, geothermal is gaining popularity as a means of slashing energy costs and emissions associated with heating and cooling homes. In combination with solar panels, monthly energy bills in Whisper Valley run residents only about one dollar.
But the low energy impact and savings are not the only things that make Whisper Valley a model neighborhood for the future. Because of its reliance on geothermal energy, the community had no problem staying warm when a 2021 energy surge during the deadly Texas Snowpocalypse left millions of people without heat for days. “As extreme weather gets more destructive,” Fast Company writes, geothermal solutions like that in Whisper Valley may be “a way for communities to withstand their own version of Snowpocalypse.”
Would I live here?: The suburbanite in me loves a lot about Whisper Valley — the stand-alone energy-efficient homes, the communal gathering spaces, the emphasis on healthy outdoor-oriented lifestyles, and the charging stations that come already installed in the garages. For most Americans, the development likely represents a feasible way to lower the family footprint while not compromising on many of the things we’ve come to take for granted, such as having our own space and the freedom that comes with owning a car. As far as daydreams go, Whisper Valley is perhaps a little underwhelming compared to living in a sky-forest or a luxury villa. But in terms of places that real Americans might actually be convinced to live, Whisper Valley is as exciting as it gets.
Whisper Valley - East Austin's New Zero-Energy Capable Communitywww.youtube.com
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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.