Back in March, the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture abruptly canceled funding for programs that help schools buy locally grown food for student meals. It helped pay farmers for a range of goods, including ground beef for burger patties and fresh veggies for the salad bar. The cuts left school districts — and the local farmers they were working with — in a lurch. 

That includes Manny Encinias, who runs Buffalo Creek Ranch in Moriarty, New Mexico. 

“We’re 13th-generation New Mexicans. We've been ranching, you know, as a business for the last five generations,” Encinias said. 

Encinias and his family market their beef locally, to restaurants and at farmers markets. 

But a few years ago school districts joined his customer base, with funding from the USDA. 

“That was a game changer,” Encinias said. “That’s given us market access during the fall and the winter time.” 

That’s when direct-to-consumer sales tend to slow down for Encinias. He gradually scaled up to supply that new market. And when the funding was cancelled, so were a lot of his contracts.

“I mean, the rug’s been pulled out from underneath us,” Encinias said.  

Encinias had to break from his usual business model, and auction off some of his cow calf pairs, leaving him with a smaller return than he was expecting through contracts with the schools. 

“It’s probably going to cost us anywhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 to $85,000, and I think that’s pretty sizable,” Encinias said.

This is how a lot of small-scale farmers spent their summer: looking for new buyers for food that was supposed to feed local kids. 

At the same time, schools scrambled to fill holes in their menus.

“Two of the hardest jobs you can have in this world are farmer and school food provider,” said Sunny Baker with the National Farm to School Network.

Baker said school districts are getting squeezed by multiple federal cuts, plus higher food prices across the board. 

“They’re often going back to highly processed foods to just get the kids simply fed,” Baker said. 

The Trump administration’s USDA has revived one farm-to-school grant program after canceling it earlier this year, and a pair of bipartisan bills making their way through Congress aim to restore funding for the Local Food For Schools program. 

But there’s no guarantee those bills will become law. And Jennifer Gaddis, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, said it may be too late to restore some farm to school partnerships. 

“I think it just left a lot of people feeling kind of burned that they had spent a lot of people hours trying to start something new in terms of these relationships, these new supply chains,” Gaddis said. 

In New Mexico, Manny Encinias is willing to give it another go if local school districts are. 

“Let's just get the food back into the hands that need it,” Encinias said. 

But even so, Encinias builds his herds and makes business plans a year or more in advance. If those markets are coming back, he needed to know yesterday.