This farmer was promised a $20,000 grant to go solar. USDA changed the rules

A couple of dozen milk cows have stopped grazing and are intently staring at Ron Rusk, who’s standing in the middle of their pasture, giving a tour.

“They come out in the morning, and they spend most of the day out here just eating grass and making milk,” said organic dairy farmer Ron Rusk. “They’re watching me because I’m not supposed to be out here. It’s their place.

Ron and Susan Rusk have been farming since 1980. Their dairy farm is about 60 miles west of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In a separate pasture, away from the many watchful eyes, there’s a brand new stretch of about 100 solar panels.

“We just got it online. It’s a 32K setup. It should supply about 80% of our power,” Rusk said.

Rusk had wanted a solar array for a couple of decades. He liked that it’d save him money, make renewable energy, and fit in with the farm’s no-plow, organic ethos.

“We rely on the sun to provide grass for our cows to make milk. And the solar array is just an extension of that,” he said.

But the total cost came to about $86,000; that’s more than he nets most years. Most small family farms are at “high financial risk,” according to the USDA. Profit margins are in the single digits, and a spell of bad weather or a spike in gas prices can make for a devastating year.

So, the government offers financial support of various kinds to help keep those farms afloat.

Cases like Rusk’s are why, back in 2002, Congress funded the Rural Energy for America Program with bipartisan support. It’s designed to help farmers make their energy use cleaner, more efficient, and cheaper.

So, Rusk contacted Veronica McFadden, who runs Sun Grants Consulting. She helped him apply for the program grant. “I have to show that he exists as a business — it’s legit,” she said. “He has to come up with the matching funds.”

McFadden shepherds the application through the process, and eventually, Rusk would get enough money to cover about a quarter of the cost of his new solar array. The remaining three-quarters is the matching funds Rusk had to come up with himself.

“Every REAP grant dollar is generating about $8.75 in total project spending,” said senior attorney Jessica O’Donnell at the Environmental Law and Policy Center. “That is boosting the economy in these rural farming communities.”

The whole process takes over a year. Rusk, the dairy farmer, got all the way through the process and was just waiting for a check for more than $20,000. Then, in March, McFadden received word that grants were no longer being awarded. Rusk didn’t get his money.

That’s because the USDA changed the rules for which projects qualify. According to its website, the new rules “disincentivize solar and wind systems on cropland.” The USDA says this protects taxpayer dollars.

The Environmental Law and Policy Center is co-plaintiff in a lawsuit that aims to reverse the changes. The suit claims the department can’t rescind grants that it already awarded and that the rules aren’t even its to change.

“USDA has a pot of money that they're supposed to be implementing in accordance with the criteria that Congress has specified,” O’Donnell said.

Since the plaintiffs filed the lawsuit at the end of September, McFadden said a few farmers whose grants she helped apply for were reinstated.

In the meantime, Rusk has to pay for his entire project. He said he wouldn’t have installed the solar array if he knew that would happen.

“That money that we had to pay for the rest of that system could have been used to update equipment, just your regular expenses that are on a dairy farm, which are constant,” he said. “There’s always something that you need to spend money on.”