Trump administration ends programs funding local farm food for Pennsylvania school meals

Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $1.13 billion in fiscal year 2025 funds for a pair of programs to help schools, child care centers, and food banks obtain locally sourced foods. After schools and other facilities had begun working out arrangements with local farmers, President Donald Trump’s administration informed them on March 7 that the programs had been canceled, according to Politico.

A USDA spokesperson told the outlet that the $660 million Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the $472 million Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program would be canceled because “these programs, created under the former Administration via Executive authority, no longer effectuate the goals of the agency.”

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Fox News on March 11 that these were “COVID-era programs” and were not reaching their intended targets, saying that the Biden administration was “trying to spend more and more money”: “Right now, from what we are viewing, that program was nonessential, that it was a new program, and that it was an effort by the Left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.”

‘You can’t teach a hungry child’

Nicole Melia is the public policy and legislative chair of the School Nutrition Association of Pennsylvania, a nonprofit coalition of school nutrition professionals. In a phone interview, she told the Pennsylvania Independent that the USDA’s cuts will mean about $23 million less for Pennsylvania schools and child care facilities and will disrupt plans for the commonwealth’s schools and food producers: “This hits hard because that really was funding that was doing two things: One, it was allowing schools to bring in local produce, locally produced, locally grown, minimally processed food products that would go directly to the students. So it was benefiting our local Pennsylvania farmers and it was benefiting our kids. So having that funding cut is significant.”

Melia continued: “But it hits us hard too, because we’ve known that these funds were coming, so we’ve been planning. Food service directors have been reaching out to farmers. They have been figuring out ways that they’re going to buy local. So we’re working with organizations like the Common Market out of Philadelphia — they’re basically distribution for local farmers.”

“You can’t teach a hungry child. If a child is hungry in the classroom, they’re not focusing, they’re feeling tired, they’re just not ready to learn, they’re not absorbing what the teachers are imparting to them. So it’s super important that students have access to high-quality nutritious meals in school,“ Melia said.

A registered dietician, Melia also serves as director of food services for the Norristown Area School District. Because a high percentage of the families in the district have lower incomes, all students receive free school breakfasts and lunches.

“My gosh, when you walk in and you see all the kids participating in lunch — they don’t have to worry about whether they have money on their account. They know they’re going to get a meal every single day — it is fantastic,” Melia said. 

She noted that the Local Food for Schools program has enabled the district to have a mutually beneficial partnership with the Frecon Farms apple orchard in Boyertown. “The general consumer wants a big, big apple that’s really the perfect-looking apple. But in schools, we need smaller apples. We have little kids. So for Frecon, they will save their smaller apples for schools, and that gets sold to schools. … This funding helped support those diversifying markets for farmers, and this is a loss.” 

Without the expected funding, she said, school districts will be forced to try to make up the gap at a time when supply chain challenges have made foods more expensive. 

The struggles of a Pennsylvania farmer

For years, Greg Edelman juggled working in construction and running a 10-acre vegetable farm in Northampton with his family. He dreamed of spending his days at Terra Fauna Farm, which he has owned since 2009, but there was just never enough money for him to do so.

Then, last year, he was able to work on his farm full-time due to the income coming in from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. The program provided funding for Pennsylvania food banks to purchase produce from small and mid-sized local farms.

Now, with the cancellation of the program, which was set to send $13 million to Pennsylvania in fiscal year 2025, Edelman is going back to construction to make ends meet. 

“I feel like it’s very tough to farm full time,” Edelman said. “We started from zero; we didn’t inherit a farm. That’s one thing, that it’s really tough to get into farming starting from nothing, and then to farm for a living. So I really feel like farms are very important for our nation, and we have to support farms any way we can really.”

With the program’s cancellation, Edelman’s farm now needs to find new buyers for the extra produce, including strawberries and sweet potatoes, that he had already ordered when he expected to be part of the LFPA. 

“I would say we’re definitely not going to financially do as well as we did last year,” Edelman said. “We’ll just be scaling back. We were scaling up big time last year, and now it’s like, OK, well, scale back down.” 

Participating in the LFPA allowed Edelman, who runs the farm with his wife, mother, and 12-year-old son, to both grow and sell more, as well as to make use of all the produce on their farm.

Although even with the LFPA funds gone, Terra Fauna Farm will still be able to donate produce to food banks, as it has done in the past, it’s unlikely that food banks will have the resources to continue purchasing produce from small local farms at the same scale that they previously did with the aid of the federal program, Edelman and others involved in the program explained. Every week, Terra Fauna Farm was donating about $1,000 worth of produce to local food banks.

“We had zero waste last year,” Edelman said. “There was zero waste because it was all just going to the food banks.”

The future of Pennsylvania’s small farms

While the majority of farms in the United States are small, it’s the large operations that dominate sales. According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s analysis of the 2022 Census of Agriculture, which the federal government publishes every five years, 74% of the country’s farms were small, but those accounted for just 2% of sales in 2022. Large farms, meanwhile, comprise 1% of the country’s farms but made 42% of all sales in 2022, up from 35% in 2017.

In this environment, small farms simply weren’t able to compete with the larger operations that typically landed contracts with the USDA for school food, said Haile Johnston, the co-founder of the Common Market, a nonprofit that, as part of the LFPA, connected farmers in Lancaster with food banks and schools. Food banks, too, often didn’t have the funding they needed to partner with local farmers who couldn’t offer the same prices as their larger counterparts. 

“Small and mid-scale family farms make up 95% of the farmers in America; yet, previously and historically, a very, very small percentage of them have been able to participate in school food as a viable market opportunity, and that’s despite all of the energy and positivity within the farm-to-school movement and the USDA’s Farm to School grant program,” Johnston said. “So the creation of LFS program, and LFPA for that matter, has created profound market opportunities for small and mid-scale family farms.” 

Through the two programs, smaller Pennsylvania farms were finally able to sell their produce to schools and food banks, Johnston said. Now those same farms that were once expanding because of the federal programs are scrambling to find buyers for the food that they expected to send to schools and food banks. 

It’s not only the farms that are struggling because the  the programs have been canceled, Johnston explained. The economies of the rural areas where the farms are located will also be hurt.

“The ability to have confidence that you have a secure market for your product has been pretty significant, I think, for the growers,” Johnson said. “So that being kind of ripped away in the way that it has been, I think, has been devastating for these rural economies, for these growers that have already made commitments themselves to buying seeds, to investing in soil improvements, you know, preparing to grow this food for these two programs.”

These challenges due to the programs’ cancellation come at a time when small farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to operate in the face of climate change, tariffs, and supply chain disruptions rooted in Trump’s trade wars, said Lindsey Shapiro, who owns Root Mass Farm in Bally, Berks County, and is a Farm Bill campaign organizer with Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that works to support local farmers. The end of the programs is especially demoralizing when, under the Biden administration, it seemed like the federal government was beginning to understand how to better support small farmers, Shapiro said. 

“There were all these different pathways in which it seemed like there were efforts to make USDA services more relevant to a broader range of farmers, and in the past few months, it seems like there has been just a complete reversal in that commitment,” Shapiro said. “And we’re seeing a lot of those opportunities being canceled and clawed back.”

Now the future for small farmers looks difficult, Johnston said. The USDA programs are unlikely to be replaced, and farmers are increasingly distrustful of a federal government that is hurting them, he said. 

“With these resources gone, all of this work will cease to exist,” Johnston said. “There is no replacement that’s going to happen. It’s a loss for not just communities who are recipients of the good-quality food, it’s a profound loss for the rural communities and economies that are producing it.”

Gov. Shapiro fights back

On March 25, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced his administration is appealing the USDA’s decision to end the LFPA contract with the commonwealth.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding sent a letter to the USDA asking it to reverse its decision to cancel the $13 million contract for the LFPA program in Pennsylvania. The Shapiro administration noted in a press release that the contract supports 189 farms and 14 food banks across the commonwealth.

Redding’s letter argues that the USDA has no legal basis for ending the LFPA program.

“Indeed, it is hard to imagine a program that better furthers the statutory priorities of USDA than one which—as LFPA does—supports local farmers, helps promote supply chain resiliency, and provides healthy food to the neediest residents,” Redding writes.