Faced with a White House that doesn’t care much for big-city farming, a federal advisory panel committed to urban agriculture appears to be going out with a bang.
“We have been met with nothing but roadblocks,” said Kaben Smallwood, the panel’s chair and president and CEO of Symbiotic Aquaponic, a McAlester, Oklahoma, company that combines fish farming and growing plants in water.
The Advisory Committee on Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production — established by the 2018 farm bill and convened during the Biden administration — met three times in September. That alone was an accomplishment, a result of pressuring the Trump administration to meet the legal requirement of three meetings per year, Smallwood said.
In what’s looking like a parting gesture, the committee defied the Trump administration by calling for urban agriculture grants frozen by the Agriculture Department to be released immediately and for the program — proposed for elimination under the administration’s budget request — to be made permanent.
USDA didn’t immediately return a message Tuesday seeking comment on the program or the committee’s work. Although the advisory committee is mandated through the 2018 farm bill, President Donald Trump’s administration could try to cancel, sideline or dismantle it.
The program encourages agriculture on city lots and rooftops, among other practices meant to bring food production closer to urban populations, particularly lower-income, disadvantaged communities more sensitive to food inflation.
Those goals aren’t in keeping with the new administration, which has pledged to direct resources toward traditional farming and to bar any programs with a hint of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Committee members learned early on that their role would be diminished, Smallwood said. “We received no guidance at all about how to proceed with the new administration.”
Because the committee was specifically required by the five-year farm law, it remained intact, if in limbo, Smallwood said.
The 11-member committee’s designated federal officer — a government liaison that’s typical for advisory committees — took USDA’s deferred resignation offer earlier this year, Smallwood said. An acting replacement then “went to bat” for the panel to ensure meetings would be held and recommendations forwarded, he said.
After persuading the administration to allow the legally required meetings to go forward — on three consecutive Wednesday afternoons — the committee unanimously approved the resolutions to be relayed to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins just as the federal shutdown hit, Smallwood said.
Smallwood said he’s not sure the panel’s suggestions will ever reach the secretary’s office, so committee members have turned to farm policy groups to advocate with lawmakers who might buck the administration.
An array of organizations support more funding for the program. In May, about 200 groups jointly wrote to congressional appropriators, requesting $25 million in annual funding plus $5 million more for a related program to collect data on urban agriculture across the country.
“For many beginning farmers, urban and suburban agriculture is one pathway to start farming, gain experience, and expand operations into rural communities,” said the groups, including Bread for the World, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture and the Izaak Walton League of America.
Eliminating the programs, Smallwood said, would be an “absolute travesty,” especially when food assistance efforts like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are becoming more vulnerable to partisan jockeying.
Although Republican appropriators in the House were initially in lockstep with Trump on eliminating funding, they amended their annual spending bill for the current fiscal year to provide $4 million in discretionary money to the urban agriculture office — down from $7 million the prior year — and requiring grant recipients to provide 50 percent in matching funds.
The Republican-led Senate Appropriations Committee proposed $6 million. Congress has yet to finalize spending for fiscal 2026, which began Oct. 1.
If Congress passes a new comprehensive five-year farm bill anytime soon — the last one expired in 2023 and was extended — the urban agriculture programs have an ally in House Agriculture Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), who provided for them in a version his committee passed in 2024. Some farm bill programs involving mandatory funding were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed in July.
The committee-passed farm bill would have expanded the urban agriculture program into conservation. It also allowed for cooperative agreements between USDA and nonfederal partners.
But the political landscape has also changed sharply since Trump took office, and the administration is looking to reorganize USDA as well. The department’s various agencies that worked on aspects of urban agriculture and coordinated with the advisory committee have gone quiet, Smallwood said.
“Those channels and avenues are nonexistent now,” Smallwood said. “We did what we could, you know?”
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