CRANSTON, R.I. — The farmers bent over trays of tender seedlings of Swiss chard, little habaneros, slips of kale, basil, and collard greens, gently shifting the tiny shoots into soil where they can thrive.
They don’t know whether anyone will be able to buy the produce they’re planting.
In the sunlit warmth of a greenhouse at Urban Edge Farm, Ben Torpey, the farm manager from Southside Community Land Trust, delivered the news last week to some of the small farmers who grow their crops there: More than 400 miles away in Washington, D.C., the US Department of Agriculture cut more than $1 billion in funding for two programs that provide money to food banks, child care centers, and schools to purchase locally grown food.
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That included nearly $3 million to Rhode Island, funding that affects about 100 small businesses in the state that supply local produce, meat, and fish to Rhode Island schoolchildren, food banks, and communities in need.
The sudden cancellation jolted the farmers who are gearing up for the growing season.
“It’s too much. We don’t know what to do,” said Garmai Mawolo, a Liberian immigrant from Providence, as she planted seedlings. “I turn on the TV [news] and it makes my heart race. How will we pay our rent? How will we pay our bills?”
It also left people who connect farmers with those in need scrambling for solutions.
“It’s outrageous,” said Margaret DeVos, executive director of the Southside Community Land Trust in Providence. “Never before have we not been able to get behind as a country to help the farms and the hungry.”
At the farm incubator’s Food Hub, DeVos and Torpey walked inside a large empty cooler that, during the growing season, is filled with the harvests from about 40 small farms, which are distributed to centers that feed 9,000 to 10,000 people in need.
They don’t know what comes next. “We’re looking at foundations to pick up the slack. We’re looking at our donor base, our members,” Torpey said. “But really, there’s nothing that easily replaces federal funding.”
In a virtual town hall on Friday with the Rhode Island Community Food Bank and the Economic Progress Institute, Rhode Island’s congressional delegation deplored the cancellation of the USDA programs and warned of drastic cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, food benefits, and Medicaid.
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House Republicans passed a budget resolution last month, directing the Energy and Commerce Committee to find $880 billion in mandatory spending cuts over the next 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office determined that it will be impossible to reach that without cuts to Medicaid.
That will force states to pick up the expenses. In Rhode Island, where 324,000 residents were enrolled in Medicaid last year at a cost of $3.4 billion, the cuts will cost the state $300 million, according to EPI estimates. The 40,000 Rhode Islanders who are enrolled in HealthSourceRI will see their premiums jump by 85 percent when the federal support expires at the end of this year.
Republicans are also targeting SNAP with 25 percent cuts, or roughly $230 billion over 10 years. In Rhode Island, where there are 144,000 residents in 90,000 households receiving SNAP benefits, that is a cut of $85 million per year in the program. The average monthly benefit for a household is $320; the cuts will bring that down to $240.
Senator Jack Reed said the Trump administration was being “penny wise and pound foolish.”
“In essence, they are consciously and deliberately and harmfully going after the most important aspects of the development of children, and that’s good nutrition and good health care,” Reed said. “It is short-run savings, and in the long run it’s going to cause us many, many problems.”
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has defended cutting $1 billion from the programs that filled food banks and schools with locally grown food. In an interview on March 11 on Fox News, Rollins, who was president and CEO of the Trump-aligned think tank America First Policy Institute, said the programs were “nonessential and ... an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.”
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That stunned Jesse Rye, executive director of Farm Fresh Rhode Island, which managed the grants.
“Portraying the work of local food systems as politically aligned with one party or another is really short-sighted, narrow-minded, and it really undermines the work that needs to happen in our country,” Rye said. “If we actually want to think about food security and being food independent, if we want to reduce food miles, if we want to have farms that are thriving all across the country ... we need to support this work so that farmers have a fighting chance.”
Farm Fresh put together partnerships with nonprofits including the Southside Community Land Trust, the African Alliance of Rhode Island, the Commercial Fisheries Center of Rhode Island, and the Rhode Island Food Policy Council, which in turn connected their communities across the state to schools, community food banks, and agencies helping relieve hunger in Rhode Island.
The school districts got an allotment of funds that they could spend on products from local farmers, including ground beef, shredded cheese from Narragansett Creamery, frozen broccoli grown in Maine, and kid-sized apples grown at Steere Orchard in Smithfield, R.I., all of which was served in school cafeterias, Rye said.
Rye called the programs “common sense.”
“This is about connecting people who need food and getting it to them from local sources so that we can support a local supply chain,” Rye said. “And it’s so frustrating when you think about what’s going away, because ... if we’re going to be more food independent as a region, as a nation, these are the sort of things that we need to be supporting right now.”
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The uncertainty has been destabilizing for the farmers and fishers.
Some are immigrants, such as the independent growers at Urban Edge Farm. Some, like John Steere, are multi-generational farmers; his family has grown apples at Steere Orchard since the 1930s.
“It’s a shame. It’s been a great program and helped us move more apples,” Steere said. “And, it only makes sense to feed schoolchildren better food.”
While schools can still buy locally, realistically, it will be tougher without the federal funding. School budgets are tight, and locally grown food is sometimes more expensive than products coming from large corporations or imported.
“If the food’s not coming from local farmers, it’s coming from this global food system that is owned by very few individuals,” Rye said. “So, the USDA is really showing that they don’t care about small farms, that this is really just a way of diverting more funding into larger corporate backed farms.”
“With all of the rhetoric that goes around ‘Make America Healthy’ and all of the rhetoric around caring about farmers, they’re doing exactly the opposite,” he added. “This is harming so many family farms.”
Amanda Milkovits can be reached at amanda.milkovits@globe.com. Follow her @AmandaMilkovits.