USDA staff cuts leave farmers unable to obtain loans and grants

Navajo farming couple, Mary and Zachariah Ben, sought a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for
their dream property last fall in Aztec, New Mexico, but quickly learned that only half a dozen loan specialists remained to process claims for the entire state. Approval of their low-interest loan had been on hold since November’s government shutdown, but after learning about the staffing shortages — which would have held up their loan even longer — they turned to private lenders, reports Linda Qiu for The New York Times.

The Bens are not unique. “Across the country, farmers and rural residents describe struggling to obtain the basic services the Agriculture Department is meant to offer, including loans and grants, technical assistance and financing for housing and utilities,” Qiu reports.

This comes after President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency push for USDA employees to voluntarily resign, to “trim a bloated agency” with too many employees hired in the previous administrations. 

More than 20,000 workers of the 110,000 in the USDA left in the first half of 2025. In the division of the Farm Service Agency, which the Bens hoped would approve their loan, there is no staff left in dozens of counties, which Qiu writes has forced “farmers to travel long distances for assistance or to simply give up.”

In the Rural Development subagency of USDA, nearly 1,700 workers — one-third of its staff — have left under the Trump administration. More than 2,700 workers have left the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a branch helping farmers practice sustainability. Queries wait for weeks, charities that had been approved under Biden are now waiting years for federal funding, and Oui reports that farmers “turn to expensive private consultants for advice.”

It's unclear whether staffing cuts have been a factor in Rural Development cuts, but far fewer loans and grants have been financed in the past year.

Trump’s budget proposed a nearly $5 billion cut to the USDA in the next fiscal year, which Qiu writes will essentially eliminate “programs for beginning farmers, conservation and rural aid.”

What it’s like to be disabled in a rural community as Medicaid cuts hit?

Trillions of dollars will be cut from Medicaid over the next 10 years because of the One Beautiful Bill Act, which will have a major impact on rural families who relied on the program for healthcare. Marsh Naidoo, a physical therapist, advocate and mother of a child with cerebral palsy, sat down with Madeline de Figueiredo of The Daily Yonder to discuss navigating life with her son, Kellen, amid today’s political landscape.

Naidoo, of Dyersburg, Tennessee, said the American healthcare system is extremely complicated to manage with a child who has a disability. “The advocacy part came around when we [realized] that there were so many policies being shaped by legislators who didn’t actually know what it meant to be in the lives of families experiencing disabilities.”

Her community has embraced her son, Naidoo said, but there are still barriers in place. There isn’t always access to efficient healthcare providers when it’s needed, patients are not without the administrative burden of multiple appointments in different locations, and telehealth is not always the answer.

“But the fact is not all rural communities are set up with broadband, nor is internet access always a given,” Naidoo told de Figueiredo. “I also see this in my experience as a healthcare provider. My physical therapy patients would rather come in to see me than communicate through a screen.”

With fiscal cuts for the coming years, Naidoo said families like hers aren’t sure how the loss will affect them. Medicaid is the largest healthcare payer source in the United States, but “Being the richest nation on earth, where 17% of our GDP goes toward healthcare, and not knowing you have healthcare security when you have a child with complex medical needs is frightening.”

Trump deems Digital Equity Act illegal on basis of racially designated grants; new applications will be required

“Rural residents live sicker and die younger on average than people in the rest of the country when they live in counties lacking high-speed internet access and healthcare,” reports Sarah Jane Tribble for KFF Health News. “While 81% of white adults surveyed said they subscribed to broadband at home, only 71% of Black adults and 68% of Hispanic adults said the same.”

Congress allocated $2.75 billion for the Digital Equity Act under the Biden administration in 2021. The money was for skill development under the broader “Internet for All” infrastructure initiative. “The Digital Equity Act lists exactly whom the money should benefit, including low-income households, older people, some incarcerated people, rural Americans, veterans, and members of racial or ethnic minority groups,” Tribble reports.

A few months into Trump’s second term, he called the DEA program “illegal.” This came in the wake of two executive orders dismantling DEI and the 2023 Supreme Court decision invalidating affirmative action.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates sided with the administration in an opinion, stating “that it was unconstitutional for the government to use race or ethnicity as the basis to award money under a program created to expand internet skills and access.”

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration halted DEA grant programs after the decision, heavily impacting the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. The NDIA serves rural and marginalized communities, providing programs where community workers teach internet and technology skills.

With Bates’ decision, federal attorneys said the government would reinstate NDIA competitive grants without racial classifications. A new grant application is expected for release in December, and the NDIA must reapply for the grants they once had.

Farmers, groceries and midterms: Diesel prices hit record-highs, leading to widespread cost increases

Diesel prices in the United States have continuously hit all-time highs in September. As of Sept. 10, diesel costs $5.98 on average, $2.31 more than when the U.S. and Israel began their war on Iran in February, reports Tik Root for Grist.

The surge in diesel prices comes just before November's midterm elections, and as domestic inventories are at their lowest since 1982.

Farmers and truckers who use more diesel in autumnal harvest seasons will be significantly impacted. Though most Americans don’t buy diesel, they still pay for it. The cost of diesel used to cultivate crops and transport those harvests to market is linked to the grocery prices one sees at the store.

“Early on, much of the cost increase gets absorbed along the supply chain through existing freight contracts and retailer margins,” David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, told the Associated Press. “But as contracts reprice and fuel surcharges take hold, more of that cost makes its way to the grocery store.”

This year, the Strait of Hormuz — through which 10% of imported diesel travels — was closed by Iran, which caused prices to surge. The last time gas prices soared this high was when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, which also shut Russia out of the global diesel market. 

Apart from higher prices for farmers and at grocery stores, a challenging winter is likely. Heating oil is essentially diesel, Root writes, and “the millions of U.S. households that still rely on it can expect unprecedented bills.”

Commentary: AI is making food more abstract to restaurant-goers; Wendell Berry said it already was in 1989 essay

Brady Brickner-Wood writes for The New Yorker about how the role of food in our lives is becoming increasingly abstract as restaurants begin to sell from AI-generated menus, presenting never-before-seen “horrors” and “slop.” He compares this new trend to the ways Victorians shot stills of their fruit draped with hunted game, and how advertisements in the 2010s drew in millions for the ‘aesthetic value’ of food rather than its actual quality.

“From Minneapolis to Hexentanzplatz, restaurants are plastering menus and promotional materials with A.I.-generated renditions of shrimp scampi and quiche, chicken nuggets and burritos, Italian subs and bacon, egg, and cheeses,” writes Brickner-Wood. “Anyone with even the mildest case of trypophobia—the sense of revulsion from tiny clusters and holes—should avert their eyes.”

Outrage at the recent “food slop” is a protective instinct, Brickner-Wood explains. AI came for music, art and jobs — food was only a matter of time. Food, however, is a physical necessity sustaining human life, so ‘slop’ offends “the materiality of the living in a way that A.I.’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not. These images violate science; they mock life itself.”

Brickner-Wood says this trend of disconnection from the food we eat is a new phenomenon, but Kentucky agrarian champion Wendell Berry proposed in his 1989 essay, "The Pleasures of Eating," that the origins of food for the urban consumer were already abstract. Brickner-Wood simply argues that in the age of AI, food production is abstract to us all, and is no longer real, making it completely disconnected from rurality and the processes of farming. 

As Berry wrote: "When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous." Berry, 92, died on Aug. 31. 

Wood explains that many are choosing AI menus to save on costs — it is expensive to take photos, hire a real artist or sacrifice anything from your small business. According to Berry’s interpretation, though, the industrial society is a surrendering of one’s own freedom; it is a relentless system where choice matters less than artificial cravings.

Farmers enter conservation easements to protect their land for the future

John Boyer repurchased 131 acres of his childhood farm in rural East Jordan, Michigan, and entered it into a conservation easement with the Little Traverse Conservancy, hoping to prevent future development from destroying family land, reports Vivian La for Grist. The future rights of his property will belong to the conservancy.

Rising land values, climate change and a non-farming younger generation is changing farmland around the country, forcing farmers to make tough decisions about what to do with their land. Some are consider whether they should protect it. 

Between 2017 and 2022 farmland in Michigan, “where the majority of operations were family-owned, decreased nearly 470,000 acres … ” In that same timeframe, non-traditional farm ownership increased, with the state seeing an additional 22,000 acres of easement-protected land.

Easements allow farmers to own property, sell it to others down the line or transfer it generationally. The conservancy behind an easement acquires land and protects it, holding rights in case of future development. Farmers still own their land, but the conservancy protects it.

“An easement can be a hard decision for farmers because land is typically their greatest asset, something that can pay for retirement or a college fund,” said Joe Graham, chief financial and operating officer for the Little Traverse Conservancy. “We’re offering them another alternative. We’re offering a way to capture some of the equity and the value they have in that land without having to sell it and see it leave their ownership.”

Pressure to preserve farmland could be especially strong in Northern Michigan, La writes. “Farmers there are already confronting the effects of climate change, including more extreme precipitation, crop disease, and temperature swings, but some local farmers said those impacts are relatively easier to deal with than elsewhere in the country.”

Letting forests burn in a controlled way could be the only way to stop mega-wildfires from continuing

The United States is losing the battle against mega-wildfires, and the only way to reverse course might be through fire itself in the form of prescribed burning, reports Mark Betancourt for Grist. While the nation's wildfires have blazed their way into urban areas in recent seasons, most wildfires burn in the rural West.

"Over the past decade, so-called megafires — characterized not only by their size, often bigger than 100,000 acres, but by their severity, speed, and impact — have become more common. They now account for the bulk of the money spent on firefighting, with the federal government spending 10 times more on suppressing wildfires than it did 30 years ago," Betancourt reports. 

He writes: "This summer’s fire conditions have already been extreme. Nearly 73 percent of the Intermountain West is experiencing severe to exceptional drought, with temperatures breaking records across the country. Add to that last winter’s meager snowpack, which has left forests ready to burn. So far in 2026, the U.S. government has reported more than 53,000 wildfires that have burned over 8 million acres — about 3 million acres more than average over the past decade."

Betancourt reports that many fire scientists say letting smaller fires "run their course" and burn away excess fuel — like dead grasses, underbrush, and small trees — in forests across the West could help prevent future megafires from erupting. "Once the extra fuel is gone," Betancourt reports, "a semblance of balance is restored," which will allow humans to "make friends with natural, lower-severity ground fires by hardening human communities against them and letting them be."

Read more about the practice of prescribed burning, which Betancourt writes has been a part federal policy in some form or fashion since the 1990s, here.

Proposed EPA rule would not require public input before construction of new pollution-causing facilities, most of which are in rural places

A newly proposed federal Environmental Protection Agency plan would eliminate the requirement that states seek public comment before issuing new air pollution permits for AI data centers and other industrial facilities, Matthew Daly reports for The Associated Press. 

If approved, this change would mean the public would have less say in construction of new data centers, which would impact rural areas more than most since the "nation’s largest data centers are being planned in marginalized and vulnerable rural communities," according to Sarah Alexander Melotte of The Daily Yonder. Pew Research found in April 2026 that 67% of planned data centers were in rural areas, with most of those being built in the South and Midwest.

"Critics say the move could thwart local residents from learning about proposed data centers or making their voices heard before projects are approved and construction begins," Daly reports. A former deputy director of EPA’s air quality office told him that "the plan could create 'an unlevel playing field where citizens in one state are kept completely in the dark about new data centers and heavy industrial emissions in their backyards, while neighboring states maintain oversight.'"

The plan could mean that the EPA could fast-track permits without requiring facilities to inform the public about where new facilities are being located. "'Data centers and other industrial sources should not be able to get their air pollution permits in secret,'" Keri Powell, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Daly. SELC represents almost 200 "environmental, health and community groups that filed comments with the EPA opposing the plan."