On its opening weekend in early May, the Reunity Resources farm stand in Santa Fe, New Mexico was doing brisk business in vegetable seedlings. 

“In front of us here we have a lot of plant babies. Chiles, tomatoes, herbs, flowers,” said Juliana Ciano. “We basically try to grow a giant kitchen garden here.” 

Ciano co-founded this non-profit farm and compost yard with her husband. They grow fruits and vegetables on 1.5 acres in Santa Fe’s Agua Fria village. 

“Our mission as a farm is to grow food for our neighborhood and for people who need access to fresh healthy food regardless of their economic status,” Ciano said. 

So, Reunity Resources does some business at the farm stand, but distributes about 40% of what they grow through community partnerships. For the last two years, that included one that used USDA grant funds to buy locally grown food for New Mexico food banks. 

“This program was just like a full circle home run,” Ciano said. “It’s supporting local farmers, it’s supporting food support agencies and it’s supporting our community members who are struggling.” 

But in March, the Trump administration abruptly canceled the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, which began in 2021, calling it an outdated relic of the COVID era. 

Ciano said that news came after her farm expanded and adapted its growing plan with the program in mind. About 30% of the produce planted at Reunity Resources this year was destined for a local food bank. 

“The compost has been spread. It's been tended, watered, weeded. All of this love and labor has already gone into it,” Ciano said. “The momentum is there. To have those funds pulled really disrupts farmers in a huge way.”

Ciano is scrambling to find a new home for thousands of pounds and about $30,000 worth of stray tomatoes, lettuce, radishes and other produce. She’s not sure that food will make it to the plates of people who need it most, or if she’ll have to accept lower prices than she was expecting to entice new buyers. And her small farm’s margins are already razor thin. 

President Trump has called himself a “great friend” to American farmers. But his policies supporting the farm economy, including $10 billion in crop subsidies his administration paid out in March and the trade war bailouts it’s reportedly considering, mostly benefit large-scale, export-oriented commodity producers. 

“We're not seeing the same type of attention or discussions with these small and medium sized farmers,” said Shoshanah Inwood, who heads up the agriculture innovation center at The Ohio State University. 

During the pandemic, Inwood said the USDA invested in shortening and strengthening food supply chains with programs supporting farmers that serve local markets. 

“It's difficult for those producers to make a complete living in an industry that is very capital and labor intensive and where markets can be hard to develop,” Inwood said. “These programs were meant to increase opportunities for farmers to retain more of the value of their dollar.” 

As the Trump administration rolls those programs back, Inwood said small scale and early career farmers are feeling it the most. 

“At a moment where we desperately need a strong, vibrant farmer population, I’ve heard from farmers who have said they will likely go out of business,” Inwood said. 

Javier Zamora fears his fruit farm, called JSM organics in Watsonville, California, will be in trouble if the federal funds he’s counting on don’t come through. Late last year, he won a grant under the USDA’s Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Grant Program, which was intended to help farmers provide better conditions for migrant workers. 

“I was awarded $200,000,” Zamora said. “We have not seen a single cent.”

Zamora supported the H-2A visa application process for 10 workers from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador and paid for travel and housing for several of those workers believing he would be reimbursed by the USDA. 

“At this point in the [growing] season, I don’t have the cash flow to cover that,” Zamora said, so he’s borrowing money from family and racking up credit card debt.

“There's all these expenses that are being just mounted,” Zamora said. “The credit card bills are going to come, and you know, how am I going to pay them?”

The Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection program is reportedly frozen. In an email, the USDA told Marketplace that payment processing for grants that had been invoiced started resuming payments on April 18th. But Zamora still hasn't seen any funding or gotten a response to multiple emails to the agency.

If the promised funds don’t come through, Zamora said he’ll be in a “very difficult situation.” 

“This is something that you can't really be playing with. In farming, you have a couple of bad years and you're out of business,” he said. 

Zamora applied for the help believing the federal government would be a stable business partner, but said he won’t take that risk again.

This story was updated on May 15, 2025 to include comments from the USDA.