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U.S. Farmers Lost Conservation Experts in Trump’s Federal Cuts. Now They’re Hurting for Help

(9/12/26) Harvest Public Media reports that cuts to the federal workforce have made it harder for farmers to get assistance in adopting conservation practices. Highlights:

•  The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) was founded almost a century ago in response to the Dust Bowl. But it lost nearly a quarter of its staff nationally in 2025 after President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce.
• Nationally, 144 counties were left without any NRCS staff after the cuts, former USDA senior staffer Bernie Kluger said. Farmers may be able to get assistance from their local Soil and Water Conservation District, but those are often underfunded, he said. Federal cuts have also wiped out programs and positions that were designed to assist farmers from underrepresented groups, including women, urban growers, and people of color
• The agency’s flagship initiative, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, had a 38% decrease in grants awarded from 2024 to 2025. The Senate’s version of the Farm Bill proposes a nearly $2 billion cut to EQIP. That’s left a growing number of farmers competing for dwindling funding. EQIP alone saw an 11% increase in applicants from 2024 to 2025.
• Minnesota crop farmer Adam Griebie was recently working on a project to prevent soil erosion, but then the NRCS staffer he was working with at his local office in McLeod County left the agency. He was pushed to offices in two other counties to find help, he said, one of which isn’t even adjacent to McLeod County. That sometimes left him driving an hour away, where he felt like he was starting from square one with new NRCS staff.

Earlier this year, Adam Griebie accompanied other LSP members to Washington, D.C., to advocate for a more sustainable approach to farm policy. An LSP Ear to the Ground podcast features Griebie talking about his use of various farm conservation programs.

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Do Rural Residents Have the Power to Say No?

(8/27/26) Barn Raiser describes how current promises that data centers will bring jobs and economic development to farm communities echoes a time four decades ago when concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOSs) were first billed as saviors of rural areas. Lessons learned from organizing against CAFOs can now be applied to the data center issue. Highlights:

•  According to Pew Research Center, of the more than 1,500 data centers proposed or under development, 67% are in rural communities. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 14% of respondents would support a data center being built in their community.
• Data center hyperscalers are copying the CAFO playbook as best they can. West Virginia has stripped its counties and towns of the power to regulate data centers; similarly, the state’s right-to-farm law prohibits local governments from bringing civil or criminal action against an agricultural operation as long as it meets state and federal laws, permits, and regulations. When Hill County, Texas, passed the state’s first county moratorium in May, a developer sued for $100 million and the county rescinded within a week, because Texas counties can zone against neither a data center nor a feedlot.
• “Everything CAFO country learned, it learned too late, after the wells were ruined, after the smell lowered adjacent property values and health outcomes, after the statutes were written,” write Raj Patel and Jim Goodman. “Data centers are arriving early enough that the questions can still be asked in time, even as the hyperscalers find friends in Washington D.C., and in statehouses around the country, who’ll say yes to them so that local communities won’t be able to say no.”

An LSP blog describes how rural citizens in several communities across the Upper Midwest are fighting against controversial developments such as CAFOs. CURE, an LSP ally, is organizing rural residents around the issue of data centers. More information on those efforts is here.

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Timothy Pigford, Who Fought Bias Against Black Farmers, Dies at 74

(9/21/26) Timothy Pigford, a North Carolina farmer whose lawsuit against the USDA for systemically denying loans to Black farmers resulted in the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history, has died, according to The New York Times. Highlights:

• Pigford was an embattled corn and soybean tenant farmer in southeastern North Carolina, tired of years of being turned down for loans by local white USDA officials, when he signed on with several other Black farmers to the landmark lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman in August 1997. The suit was an attempt to redress the department’s long history of racism, which the historian Evan Bennett said in an interview was “baked in from the beginning.” The USDA  had “willfully discriminated” in processing loan applications from 1983 to 1996, the suit said.
• As a result of the lawsuit, more than $2 billion was eventually doled out to tens of thousands of Black claimants, many in increments of $50,000. The lawsuit’s legacy was somewhat tarnished as fraud claims surrounding the suit’s thousands of claimants piled up.

• But Pigford’s stubbornness and his insistence — along with several other plaintiffs — that the USDA be held accountable for its history of racism and discrimination, transcend the fraud findings, Bennett said. “His greatest legacy was taking on an entrenched bureaucracy that refused to acknowledge its long history of denying Black farmers the same benefits it extended to white farmers,” said the historian.

LSP is a sponsor of the 21st Annual Emerging Farmers Conference, being held Nov. 13-14 in Brooklyn Center, Minn.  

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The Sheep That Stop Wildfires

(9/18/26) The New Yorker describes how community grazing cooperatives in California are utilizing livestock such as sheep and goats to control the kind of vegetation overgrowth that can contribute to wildfires. Highlights:

• Land managers note that grazing animals not only prune highly flammable invasive plants but also fertilize the soil, giving fire-resistant native species a better chance at surviving.
• According to Lynn Huntsinger, a rangeland-ecology professor emerita at the University of California-Berkeley, the California could slow the spread of fires by actively fostering mosaics of grassland, woodland, and cropland—and, she argues, grazing by cows, sheep, and goats ought to be part of the solution.
•  The state’s wildfire-resilience plan calls for scaling up the approach. Wildfire-preparedness initiatives have increasingly brought livestock into public parks and nature preserves. The University of California Cooperative Extension set up a website called Match.Graze to help connect landowners with graziers who have livestock for hire.

A recent LSP Farm Beginnings profile featured a livestock grazier who is using sheep to revitalize an overgrown landscape in southern Minnesota. In the “Avian Ag” blog, we provide five examples of farms that are using regenerative grazing and other techniques to support wildlife habitat.

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New Food Hub Helps Prairie Five Address Growing Food Insecurity

(8/28/26) The West Central Tribune describes the opening of a new food hub by Prairie Five Community Action to address food insecurity in its five-county area in western Minnesota. Highlights:

• Prairie Five invested approximately $1.1 million to refurbish a former body shop and car dealership building as its food hub. The facility features a consumer choice food shelf where users are able to select the foods they need. It also holds a modern commercial kitchen to produce hot and frozen meals.
• Prairie Five operates a fleet of trucks to deliver hot and frozen meals to rural residents in the counties of Big Stone, Chippewa, Lac qui Parle, Swift, and Yellow Medicine. Access to nutritious foods can be a challenge in the rural region: There are only 15 grocery stores in the 3,000-square-mile area. Of those served, 64% live in communities of under 500 people.
• Local support for addressing food insecurity is as important to the Prairie Five nutrition programs as is the new facility. Hedman said the food shelf offers a growing selection of fresh produce thanks to local help. God’s Garden, a group of volunteers associated with the churches in Clara City, maintains a large garden to produce fresh produce to donate to the food hub. The volunteers provide hundreds of pounds of fresh vegetables each year. Prairie Five recently launched a pilot program with Countryside Public Health. It is making it possible for vendors at the Montevideo Farmers Market to donate leftover produce each week to the food hub.

LSP has been working with Prairie Five Community Action and other groups to develop a community-based food system in western Minnesota. For details, click here.

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Can Big Food Make Good on Promises of Regenerative Agriculture? 

(9/14/26) Civil Eats describes how large food companies are increasingly using the term”regenerative” in their marketing materials, but questions remain as to whether such language is an example of greenwashing, or whether it can have a significant positive impact on the future of farming. Highlights:

• In a survey by Consumer Reports, nearly a quarter of respondents said they had heard the term “regenerative farming or regenerative agriculture.” That was up from 18% three years ago, representing a statistically significant increase. But while awareness has risen over several years, the exact definition of the term remains up for debate, and its use is unregulated.
• JBS, the world’s largest meat company, has a public goal to “support farmers with their adoption of regenerative practices,” while Keurig Dr. Pepper says the company has “supported regenerative agriculture and conservation” on close to 200,000 acres since 2022.
• “Regenerative” methods large food companies often say they would like to support include cover cropping and no-till, which have proven environmental and economic benefits within the current commodity system. Some experts and advocates believe the term regenerative applied in this scenario is a misnomer, because while the practices are valuable, they’re being applied to a system — and in many cases by the same companies — that created the environmental problems in the first place. Growing commodities in systems where just a few crops are planted across hundreds of millions of acres while calibrating inputs and outputs primarily based on yield improvements is exactly what degraded the soil the same businesses are now so intent on restoring.

Check out LSP’s Myth Buster on Big Ag and its tendency to rely on “greenwashing” when it comes to environmental issues.

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Meatpacking Groups Say ICE Arrests Could Lead to Higher Prices and Revenue Loss

(9/25/26) The Associated Press reports that meat industry groups are raising concerns that recent heightened immigration operations in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma have caused employees to miss work, leading to problems at meat-related businesses that could ultimately raise prices for consumers. Highlights:

• The Texas Cattle Feeders Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, and Kansas Livestock Association said in a statement that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations have prompted delays in the shipment of thousands of cattle, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue. The groups say ICE operations have disrupted operations at feedlots, dairy processors, feed and grain companies, and transportation hubs.
• Several meatpacking plants in the Kansas cities of Dodge City, Liberal, and Garden City typically process thousands of cattle every day, but some had to shut down temporarily and send cattle back to feedlots.
• Amy Soberanes, a 25-year-old community organizer in Dodge City, Kan., has been helping deliver food to people who are afraid to leave their homes. She said cleaning crews stopped showing up at some locations, forcing plants to close. “I have worked with so many moms who have told me that they don’t know what they’re gonna do because their provider has been taken,” Soberanes said. “I have seen kids cry to me because their mom and dad are gone. It brought a lot of hurt, and a lot of pain, and a lot of trauma for our community.”
• The Trump administration has repeated claims of targeting immigrants with criminal histories, but recent data suggests more than half of those arrested in July had not been convicted of any crimes and were not facing any criminal charges.

LSP’s latest Ear to the Ground podcast features a conversation with a farmer and an organizer in central Minnesota who got involved with efforts to support their immigrant neighbors.

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