The Agriculture Department said Monday it’s canceling the Biden administration’s $3.1 billion program to promote farm products and timber grown through climate-smart practices.
Calling the climate-smart agriculture grants a “slush fund,” the USDA said it would still reimburse recipients for expenses prior to April 13, and redesign what’s left of the program to target payments more specifically to farmers, rather than to corporate or nonprofit partners.
“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a news release. “The concerns of farmers took a backseat during the Biden Administration.”
Former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack created the program in 2022, drawing on funds from the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corp. Competitive grants went to farm organizations and nonprofit groups as well as universities and corporations, which in turn agreed to enroll and pay farmers for practices that cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
As part of the projects, goods including meat, vegetables, livestock feed and timber — among others — would be marketed as “climate-smart,” a label Vilsack said would appeal to consumers in the U.S. and abroad as demand for such products grows.
From the start, the program faced criticism that it was tilted toward “big agriculture” interests and corporate sponsors like Archer Daniels Midland. But it generated more applications than the USDA could award.
The department said its ongoing review of the program revealed that the majority of the projects had ”sky-high administration fees,” which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers.
In a news release, the USDA said it would rename the program to erase any reference to climate change, calling it the “Advancing Markets for Producers Program,” and ensure that at least 65 percent of federal funds go to producers.
In addition, grant recipients must have made payments to at least one producer as of the end of last year for the projects to continue, the USDA said.
No new funding will be made available for the projects, the department said.
