The U.S. Department of Agriculture will no longer take a farmer’s race or gender into consideration for many of its loans and benefit programs.
The decision was announced on Thursday by USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who terminated the practice under President Donald Trump’s mandate to slash diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
In recent decades, the USDA has taken efforts to reform its history of discrimination through programs meant to support “socially disadvantaged farmers” — which includes Black people, women, and veterans. Yet, the USDA ruled last week that it already “sufficiently addressed” past discrimination and that continuing to practice “race- and sex-based remedies” are no longer necessary or legal.
“We are taking this aggressive, unprecedented action to eliminate discrimination in any form at USDA,” Rollins said in a statement. “It is simply wrong and contrary to the fundamental principle that all persons should be treated equally.”
Although veteran and beginning farmers will still be explicitly considered for some programs, the move is the latest blow to federal resources for underrepresented farmers and ranchers across the country.
Since taking office in January, the Trump administration’s USDA has taken aim against hundreds of DEI programs and grants worth millions of dollars. Many have been paused for review or terminated — including in mid-June, when the agriculture department announced more than 145 awards worth $148.6 million were cut.
Mike Lavender is the policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which represents more than 160 agriculture organizations across the country. The coalition’s goal is to advocate on Capitol Hill for policy reform, but Lavender said the past few months have introduced more uncertainty for the overall U.S. food system and the farmers who rely on USDA funding and opportunities.
“They already have to deal with weather. They already have to deal with pests and input prices. Limiting their variables, limiting the uncertainty, is always a good thing,” Lavender said. “Unfortunately, what we've seen from the first six months or so from this administration, is the injection, consistently, of uncertainty for farmers by freezing contracts that farmers lawfully held, by terminating contracts, by terminating projects unexpectedly, by canceling market opportunities for farmers.”
Local farms and gardens
Since the 1990 Farm Bill, the USDA has categorized “socially disadvantaged” farmers and ranchers as those who identify as “African Americans, American Indians or Alaskan natives, Hispanics, and Asians or Pacific Islanders.”
That helped pave the way for the USDA to create grants to support these groups, including the 2501 program, which expanded in 2014 to include veterans. Between 2010 and 2023, the USDA awarded more than 615 grants worth nearly $200 million. These grants are meant to provide training and outreach assistance to local and rural producers. The Trump administration’s directives could end that.
“It really seems to be geared at supporting one type of agriculture rather than supporting a broad-based push to really bring along and support farmers and ranchers nationwide,” Lavender said.
Ultimately, the U.S. Congress has a say in USDA spending. In response to the USDA’s actions, Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) has called on legislators to hold the agency “accountable.”
“This move isn’t about fairness or efficiency. It’s about erasing history and stripping the tools that help level the playing field,” Brown said in a press release.
Izula Maximillen, who does small farm outreach for Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, said the end of DEI grants will hurt local farms, gardens and the people who’ve been able to receive fresh produce as a result of their efforts.
“The majority of industrial agriculture has been exported. It's usually corn, soy, wheat. And the majority of the corn that's even grown in the country is not there to feed the people, it's there to feed livestock,” Maximillen said. “So we're really dependent upon small farmers, urban farmers, to be able to provide a diverse array of nutrition, produce, berries, nuts, to be able to feed their communities.”
Maximillen, who works with producers around the state, said it can take up to 160 hours to write a grant for the USDA. It’s a long process that takes vetting and planning, particularly for farmers and gardeners. So when the USDA started to terminate or freeze programs for review, it hurt many of the farmers at the beginning of the season, Maximillen said.
“They were not able to secure the funding that they needed to be able to get their seeds, their fertilizers, their soil amendments, ready for planting season,” Maximillen said. “So I saw a little bit of a staggered delay in how people could even plant their food, in relation to where funding is going to come from.”
’Less food for the community’
The Ivanhoe Neighborhood Farmers Market in Kansas City is one organization where local community and food producers could have benefited from a USDA grant, but are now missing out.
Alana Henry, the executive director for the neighborhood council, said the market is one of the council’s most popular community resources. After applying for the USDA’s Farmers Market Promotion Program, the farmer’s market was slated to receive approximately $165,000 over three years to help bring on additional part-time staff, Henry said. But the funding was terminated in February before the market could make a hire.
“What that means, in terms of our specific program, is less food for the community. And it means less resources for the people who are in need,” Henry said.
For Henry, it feels like the USDA is choosing to prioritize commodity crops over the specialty crops that feed people, particularly in urban communities.
“Urban agriculture and even peri-urban agriculture really doesn't get the respect or the nod that it deserves,” Henry said. “There's just a lot of concern about what the future looks like for sustaining urban agriculture here in Kansas City and across many urban areas, in light of the funding cuts that are happening.”
Among other groups who are feeling the loss of DEI-focused grants and programs is the Kansas Black Farmers Association, which represents more than 120 members across the state.
Last year, the nonprofit was awarded $8.5 million through the USDA’s Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program. That grant process was part of a collective effort between Maximillen in Missouri, as well as many other underserved farms and nonprofits in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas.
But the grant was put on hold for review earlier this year.
JohnElla Holmes, the CEO and president of the Kansas Black Farmers Association, said she worries the farmers she represents won’t be able to find other funding opportunities or requests for proposals. Many of their farmers’ current grants, including the 2501 Program, will expire at the end of the fiscal year on Sept 30.
“There's been no new grants for us to write,” Holmes said. “And by this time, in a regular administration, we would have had an RFP so that we could have been writing to continue these programs.”
Holmes said she recently considered changing their website to make it “look neutral and not equitable” in order to protect the organization and help the grants move forward. Earlier this year, the USDA announced that recipients could voluntarily “revise” such language from some of their grants, including those aimed at clean energy solutions.
However, as a fifth-generation descendant from the Kansas town of Nicodemus — the oldest Black settlement west of the Mississippi — Holmes said that farming is in her heritage. After thinking it over, she’s choosing to keep the group’s website as is. Instead, she said the USDA should quit discriminating against Black and brown people.
“I hope that they will stop and recognize that we're farmers, just farmers,” she said.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
