The motley crew of scientists, conservationists, and agricultural producers set out to begin in earnest. Spring was well underway in Hood Canal, Washington when the team assembled on the shores of Baywater Shellfish Farm, armed with buckets. Before them, floating mats of seaweed were strewn about, bright green clumps suffocating clams, geoducks, and other intertidal creatures while swallowing the gear laid out to harvest them.
Excess seaweed is a seasonal nuisance along the bays and inlets that twine throughout Puget Sound. But the issue has magnified as excess nutrient runoff has fueled sprawling blooms. It has become a bona fide threat to the business of Washington shellfish farmers like Joth Davis.
In the past, Davis has attempted to harvest the seaweed by hand to reduce the surging number of macroalgae menacing his catch. Alas, there is the “age-old problem of scale,” he said. “It is difficult work, and time available during low tides to tackle the problem is limited, with everything else we need to accomplish when the tide is out.”
A couple years before the team got to work last May, researchers at the University of Washington approached Davis to see if he’d be interested in partnering with them to develop a new supply chain. The plan was simple: Harvest the seaweed from Davis’s farm, give it to small and mid-sized crop farmers in the area as a soil-building replacement for chemical fertilizer, and along the way study the effects — reduced emissions from a shortened supply chain, steady yields from shellfish and terrestrial farms, changes in soil chemistry, and possibly a way to sequester the carbon stored in the seaweed itself. They were also aiming to investigate the impacts of seaweed removal on shellfish survival and growth.
A Department of Agriculture program established by the Biden administration, and funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, offered exactly the federal support they needed to make the vision happen. In February of 2022, the USDA launched the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, or PCSC, which former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the time would “provide targeted funding to meet national and global demand and expand market opportunities for climate-smart commodities to increase the competitive advantage of American producers.”
Davis, who has a background in marine science, seized the chance.
The aptly named “Blue Carbon, Green Fields,” project was selected by the USDA in 2023 to receive roughly $5 million of the climate-smart commodities money in a five-year agreement. In addition to Davis’s team at Baywater and the scientists from UW, the partnership consisted of researchers from Washington State University and Washington Sea Grant, conservationists from the nonprofit Puget Sound Restoration Fund, and the local farm incubator Viva Farms. In their first year in the field, the team harvested a little over 15,000 pounds of wet seaweed, which was stockpiled and distributed to four crop farms throughout the region. By laying the groundwork for the agricultural supply chain, the team was on track for the unthinkable — a quadruple win of sorts, where everyone involved benefitted, including the planet.
Instead, not even halfway through a federal contract, their drying racks and other seaweed harvesting equipment are at risk of just gathering cobwebs on Davis’s farm; each unused tool a daily reminder of the progress they lost at the behest of President Donald Trump’s cultural politics. The supply chain, fragile in its novelty, is splintering apart.
Almost a year after the team began their field work harvesting seaweed in Puget Sound, the USDA announced that it would cancel the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative. In a press release issued on April 14, the agency called the $3.1 billion funding pot a “climate slush fund” and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins decried it as “largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers.” The USDA said that it axed the initiative due to the “sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.”
Robert Bonnie, the former Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation at the USDA under the Biden administration, rejects this claim. He contends that the reason some projects reported higher administrative fees than others is because roughly half the awards were intended to boost markets for smaller projects. “You would expect those projects to have higher administrative costs because those farmers are harder to reach,” he argued. “Take the Iowa Soybean Association, or Archer Daniels Midland, where they’ve got established relationships with farmers, where they’ve got high demand amongst many of their farmers, you’re going to expect those projects to have lower administrative costs as a percentage because they’ve already got an extensive network. So we wanted to provide flexibility across projects to make sure that the door was open to everyone,” added Bonnie.
In any case, USDA’s use of the term “cancel” was something of a misnomer. In the same announcement, the agency shared its plan to review existing projects under a new set of scoring criteria, to ensure that they align with the new administration’s priorities. The release noted that the program would be “reformed and overhauled” into a Trump-era effort to redistribute the pool of IRA money. So as the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program sunsetted, the Advancing Markets for Producers initiative was born.
The Trump program’s criteria required grant awardees to ensure that a minimum of 65 percent of their funds go directly to farmers, that they enrolled at least one farmer in their program by December 31, 2024, and that they have made a payment to at least one farmer by that same date. According to a former senior USDA official, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity, the USDA grouped the 135 PCSC grantees into three buckets: Fifteen projects were told they could keep going, as they met the new thresholds; five recipients were told they could continue on the condition that they modified their projects to meet the new priorities; and 115 were informed that their projects were terminated as they did not meet the new policy priorities and were invited to resubmit. A few weeks later, the official said that projects that initially received cancellation letters were told something different – that the termination would be rescinded and they could just modify their proposals to meet administration priorities.
The group behind Blue Carbon, Green Fields was among the 115.
In the USDA’s official termination notice to the University of Washington, shared with Grist, the team was told that their project “failed to meet the first of three Farmer First policy priorities identified by USDA” — that at least 65 percent of the funds must go to producers. A second notice stated that because of that, “the award is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, Department priorities.”
Sarah Collier, the UW assistant professor leading the initiative, remembers how the news of the termination hit her. When she got the letter, “everything had to come to a screeching halt.” She jumped into crisis-mode, notifying the 25 or so people working on the project, including students whom Collier said saw their “dissertation research derailed.” She then reached out to notify the farmers who had been receiving the seaweed fertilizer. The timing couldn’t have been worse: the team had just completed a round of farmer recruitment, and were in the middle of signing contracts with five more small and mid-sized farmers.
“I have days where I am like, I can’t,” said Collier. “I can’t handle one more conversation where all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do about this, because this isn’t the way that things are supposed to go. This isn’t the way that federal grants are supposed to work.’”
In May, the USDA sent a letter to grantees who had received cancellation notices informing them of how to submit revised applications. According to the letter, which was also shared with Grist, grantees would need to arrange one-on-one meetings with Natural Resources Conservation Service representatives and submit a new budget narrative and statement of work incorporating Trump’s policy priorities. They had until June 20th.
When they first learned that their funding had been culled, Collier’s UW team, as the main grantee, wasn’t sure they were going to resubmit — or whether they even could. At the time, nothing further had been disclosed about what it would entail, so Collier decided to wait to talk with the NRCS to find out more. After that meeting, they moved forward with resubmission, in a bid to salvage what funding they were able to. That required Collier to create “a very revised” narrative and restructure the budget, in addition to regular meetings with the NRCS.
The former USDA official noted that specific details of the resubmission process have since largely been kept quiet, since the vast majority of former PCSC grantees are fearful of speaking out about their experiences in case of retaliation by the administration. The closed-door nature of it all, with a lack of clear communication from the Trump administration and changes in guidance leading up to the submission deadline, the official said, has sown confusion and distress among former grantees.
Although no official verdict timeline has been communicated — Collier has heard everything from 60 days to sometime in September — she expects to be waiting on the final funding decision for at least two more months. Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director at the nonprofit Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, or Pasa, has been told something similar about her pending resubmission. Another PCSC grantee, Pasa also reapplied to the new USDA program after being informed they didn’t meet one of the Trump administration’s priorities. Doing so required a total revamp of what their old project had been structured to do.
“In the end, we decided to completely rewrite our proposal rather than just alter our original proposal. We had already said goodbye to the old program and knew it wouldn’t be able to fit the new reality,” said Smith-Brubaker. She says she “lies awake at night” concerned over the outcome, including whether the USDA may choose to deny their resubmission because of Pasa’s involvement in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze.
“It’s hard to say right now which decisions and actions might unintentionally result in things going awry,” said Smith-Brubaker. “Even though we still feel it was not in farmer’s best interest to have this degree of disruption, and fear for what a new reality could mean where every change in administration could involve a complete dismantling of stability and promises, we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to still leverage these funds for what our farmers need most.”
In a series of separate recent actions, the USDA provided a peek into how leaders at the nation’s highest food and farming agency have taken strides to comply with the president’s executive orders targeting climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In mid-June, the agency announced the termination of more than 145 awards totaling $148.6 million of “Woke DEI Funding.” Then, on July 10, the USDA posted a final rule in the Federal Register revoking a longstanding provision that ensured “disadvantaged” producers have equitable access to federal support, by allowing for carve-outs designed specifically for groups, such as Black and Indigenous farmers, that have historically faced discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the agency also revoked guidelines implemented during the Biden administration that mandated schools administering federal meal programs to ban discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Some observers say that in the USDA’s rushed campaign to gut federal funding while erasing footprints of the Biden administration, the termination of the climate-smart project happened much too fast, and much too soon. For one, Bonnie, who helped design and implement the PCSC initiative, believes that the USDA’s invitation for grantees to resubmit their applications signals the administration’s initial lack of understanding about the bipartisan backlash to the decision.
“The Trump administration was surprised at the amount of support for not only this program, but for climate-smart agriculture more broadly,” said Bonnie. Leadership at USDA were, he added, “under pressure to satisfy the far-right, to be anti-climate and anti-woke.”
“They try to paint with a broad brush about this being the Green New Deal,” Bonnie continued. “Most people that knew this program, knew that they were blowing smoke.”
While the Blue Carbon, Green Fields team is hopeful that, in time, an iteration of the project may continue, work on the ground has stalled. If they do receive a new round of funding from the USDA, Collier said, one change to their budget proposal will have considerable impacts on how the project will be carried out. To satisfy the requirements for resubmission, nearly two-thirds of the funds for the award will have to go directly to participating producers — rather than to the partners like the UW team, which is how it was originally structured.
“That does mean that, pending what we learn as we engage with USDA on this, that if we’re able to go forward, participants will have to seek out their own services to support the practices that they’re implementing, rather than having those services provided by the project partners, as part of the grant,” said Collier. “Instead, they will receive funds to seek out the services that they need, like technical assistance, or like harvesting and transporting seaweed.”
That modification, though seemingly minor, is rather significant, particularly for small farmers who already struggle with limited time and resources to allocate to anything beyond their day-to-day operations, some of whom say it presents an unjust burden. According to fellow PCSC grantee Smith-Brubaker, such a structural change will make things harder for them. “It’s really too bad to have to make it even more complicated for farmers to get the services they want and need,” she said.
Ellen Scheffer, who co-operates a 20-acre organic vegetable and grain farm in Fall City, Washington, is a small farmer involved with the Blue Carbon, Green Fields project. The funds “being yanked away” makes Scheffer “feel really defeated about the future.” A downside of USDA’s resubmission process, she noted, is that “any positive benefit that might help the future of our environment is going to have to be a side benefit, rather than the direct goal of the research. It feels very, very frustrating, especially as someone who is living every day trying to grow food in a way that is good for our planet.”
Others, like project partner Viva Farms, the nonprofit farm incubator that connected producers in their network with the seaweed researchers, feels as if the group’s chapter together has already come to a close. “It did feel like the momentum was really a sheer drop-off,” said Viva Farms’ Elma Burnham. “We were about to prepare to onboard all sorts of new farms, to have seaweed drying here, to sort of get them more action of the program, instead of more of this, like, planning. And, yeah, it was challenging to see it sort of come to a halt,” she said.
The likelihood of revival, according to Burnham, feels low. “Of course, we would love to see more organic, small-scale farmers pursue this research, we would love to see more innovation and collaboration happening in the Puget Sound region. But it feels over,” said Burnham. “This particular project feels over.”
Davis, the shellfish grower, says he struggled to come to terms with the time and workload that would be demanded of him in the revised program — and what the restructuring of the proposal to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities altogether represents. “I just thought it was kind of backwards, to be honest. It just didn’t seem like the right way to do it,” he said. For instance, directing most of the grant money to the farmers rather than project leads, he added, “didn’t make sense.”
Instead, he’s going his own way. Davis has begun planning out an even shorter seaweed supply chain in tandem with his daughter Hannah and Emily Buckner, one of her colleagues at the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, just two of the six original partners. They’ve been busy identifying producers in the Chimacum Valley to collaborate with, all within a twenty mile radius of his farm. By narrowing the geographic range and foregoing much of the soil chemistry research, the scope of Davis’s new venture is limited compared to Blue Carbon, Green Fields, but, he said, “At the end of the day, I was, and I am, too invested in the parts that [the USDA] didn’t want.”
Still, not all the equipment that the USDA funds bought is laying idle around the farm, at risk of catching cobwebs: Davis is currently testing out a raft-based suction system to vacuum up the excess seaweed clustered around sensitive geoducks.
“We’ve got the equipment, and we’re going to harvest it and dry some and see where this can go,” he said. “We want to move forward with that, just to see if it works.”