A Virginia Tech-led agricultural program backed by the largest grant in the university’s history is continuing its work, with officials confident that it complies with new Trump administration requirements.
The Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture directly pays farmers in four states, including Virginia, for environmentally friendly practices such as no-till farming, conservation crop rotation and precision nutrient management.
The three-year program was awarded an $80 million U.S. Department of Agriculture grant in 2022 for the program to start in September 2023. The Alliance consists of about 20 partner organizations that administer the program and work with farmers.
“As farmers work to meet the needs of a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, it’s clear that supporting them in adopting climate-smart practices is not just an environmental imperative — it’s an economic necessity,” Tom Thompson, the project’s principal investigator and the associate dean of Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, said in a Jan. 7 news release.
Last month, new U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the USDA was canceling Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, the program that had awarded grants to the Alliance project and more than 130 others.
Nonetheless, the USDA said that grant recipients could continue their work if their programs met three conditions: At least 65% of the money must go directly to farmers, the recipient must have enrolled at least one farmer by the end of 2024 and the recipient must have made at least one payment by the end of 2024.
Thompson said in an interview last week that the Alliance had already met those goals.
Its budget calls for about $57 million, or 71% of the total funding, to go to farmers, with the rest going to program administration, research and outreach activities. More than 1,300 farms have already enrolled, and the Alliance has paid out about $8 million so far.
“We had knocked it out of the park,” Thompson said.
In a news release, the USDA called Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities a “Biden era climate slush fund” and said that “the majority of these projects had sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.”
“During my short time as Secretary, I have heard directly from our farmers that many of the USDA partnerships are overburdened by red tape, have ambiguous goals, and require complex reporting that push farmers onto the sidelines,” Rollins said.
Program aims to reach more than 4,000 farms in four states
The 1,300-plus farms enrolled in the Alliance program represent 202,000 acres in Arkansas, Minnesota, North Dakota and Virginia.
In addition to the USDA funding, Virginia and Minnesota agreed to share costs on another $22 million in payments to producers, Thompson said.
Participating farmers are paid $100 per acre or animal unit, up to 320 acres or animal units per farm, to use farming practices designed to boost crop yields while protecting the environment. An animal unit is a standardized measurement that can be used to compare different species of animals.
Producers designated as socially disadvantaged or with limited resources can receive $125 per acre for up to 160 acres. A farm’s enrollment lasts for a year, and direct payments for that higher rate can total up to $20,000 per operation, university spokesperson Sarah Jameson said in an email.
Other examples of “climate-smart” practices include comprehensive management of manure and prescribed grazing, which is designed to keep pasture land from being overused.
In Virginia, the Alliance focuses on localities in the Richmond, Charlottesville and Williamsburg regions and other parts of Eastern Virginia, via the involvement of soil and water conservation districts serving those areas.
Those areas were chosen “based on their capacity to provide technical assistance to producers, as well as to capture a variety of ecologies, commodities, and producer demographics,” Jameson said.
The program’s goal is to reach 4,400 to 4,800 farms totaling 475,300 acres or animal units, paying out about $57 million directly to producers, Jameson said.
The grant also funds research such as measuring the impact of climate-focused practices on greenhouse gas emissions and investigating whether the public is willing to pay for products that carry various “climate-smart” labeling.
Green light followed federal funding pause
For a couple of months after President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, Virginia Tech heard nothing from the USDA except that the federal agency would no longer pay invoices, Thompson said.
At that time, the university had paid about $6.5 million to producers and anticipated reimbursement from the USDA, he said.
Then last month, the USDA told Virginia Tech that the agency had reviewed the program for compliance with the new requirements and had decided that the Alliance’s work could continue.
Furthermore, the agency has now paid Virginia Tech most of the $6.5 million.
“I, and a lot of people above my pay grade at the university, have been breathing a lot easier since that happened,” Thompson said.
Thompson said program officials now are trying to determine whether they will be able to secure producer payments from the USDA in advance.
He had already submitted a request late last year to extend the three-year program by one more year, to September 2027. The delay from the funding pause has only reinforced the need for more time.
Scope of federal program cuts remains unclear
Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities was a $3 billion program that, as of September 2024, had awarded money to 135 projects.
The USDA has not published a list of which projects meet the new criteria to continue their work and declined to provide a number when asked.
“We will not comment on matters relating to litigation,” a USDA spokesperson said in an email to Cardinal News.
The unnamed spokesperson did not specify the litigation in question, but multiple Trump administration initiatives have been challenged in court.
Among those challenges was a lawsuit filed in February against the USDA over its removal of climate-related webpages, including that of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program.
This week, the Justice Department told a federal court that the USDA “will restore the climate-change-related web content that was removed post-inauguration,” according to the Associated Press.
As of Thursday, the Partnerships website continued to display a message, “You are not authorized to access this page,” in lieu of its previous content. A fact sheet published in 2022 remains online via the USDA’s website.
Separately, multiple farmers’ groups have sued over the Trump administration’s reorganization of the federal government, including cuts to USDA programs, The Burlington Free Press of Vermont reported in February.