What happens to the food supply when farm aid offices vanish?

Seth Kroeck needs a bigger water pump for an irrigation project on his fruit and vegetable farm in coastal Maine.

When he started the project three years ago, he hoped to build a well that could extract 150 gallons of water per minute. 

Recently, he found he could draw much more than that to sustain the carrots, Brussels sprouts and wild blueberries he grows in Cumberland County. However, the Natural Resources Conservation Service had approved and funded the project; Kroeck needed their sign-on for upgrades.

Therein lies the problem.

The NRCS is part of the USDA, which lost at least 20% of its staff since January 2025, and nearly 30% in Maine, according to a tally by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the advisory management firm Prospect Partners. By some measures, those percentages may be even higher. The Congressional Research Service estimated in April that the USDA had 71,000 workers in February, down from more than 100,000 prior to the start of the second Trump Administration.

Nearly 90% of the workers who departed through attrition or downsizing imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency worked in NRCS or Farm Service Agency field offices, according to the tally, which used data from the Office of Personnel Management and public records requests. 

What happens to farmers after big federal staffing cuts?

“For a long time there was only one person in the NRCS Cumberland County office, and that was the director,” Kroeck said. “There wasn’t anyone to answer the phone or even an email.”

Forty-two U.S. counties finished 2025 with no local FSA office at all, Prospect Partners found.

“Those are counties where conservation could be helping farmers manage drought,” said Jesse Womack, a NSAC conservation policy specialist. “If you don’t have anybody on hand to distribute money for water-saving conservation, you are taking it to a lot of farmers’ tool belts.”

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Farmers like Kroeck who run the specialty farms growing fruits and vegetables that stock your local grocery store were hit especially hard, experts say. They are most in need of money for infrastructure upgrades and are now the least likely to receive USDA grants.

Farmers and their advocates described calls and emails to USDA workers that went unanswered or included inexperienced staff lacking the crucial knowledge to work in rural communities. The cuts came at the worst possible moment, said NSAC policy analyst Rebecca Schewe.

“We’re seeing massive staffing losses at the time when farmers are under really unprecedented levels of strain,” she told Straight Arrow.

Schewe rattled off a list of challenges vexing America’s food producers: Tariffs; labor shortages; natural disasters and spiraling costs such as the price of diesel, which recently hit an all-time high. The tumultuous confluence of challenges has contributed to a rise in farm bankruptcies.

Why that money is important

Parched fields are a fact of life for modern farmers, as even regions renowned for their waterways suffer from drought.

Cumberland County, Maine is blanketed with an expanse of white and red pines growing from lush soil spread between its rivers and lakes. The county abuts the Atlantic Ocean and tourists flock to the region every summer to lay on its beaches and swim in its lakes.

But the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that the county’s coast — where Kroeck’s farm is — is in a period of drought. Still. 

“We’re in the second year of a severe drought,” he said. “If we didn’t have this irrigation system, we would be severely limited in the crops we could get off our acreage.”

Kroeck isn’t alone in his need for irrigation, said Eric Venturini, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine.

“The state has lost a handful of key agricultural engineering positions,” he told Straight Arrow. “These folks provide the capacity to execute what for our sector is one of the most important supports the USDA can provide: help with developing sustainable water sources.”

That work is more complicated than installing a water pump, Venturini said.

“You need an engineer to come in and figure out what your needs are and develop a water-management plan,” he said.

A USDA spokesperson referred Straight Arrow to a Des Moines Register op-ed written by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, which outlines an initiative to improve farmer relations with department staff.

Rollins will ensure the NRCS and FSA “have the resources and personnel they need to continue serving the American people,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Farmer-facing services at the state and county level continue uninterrupted.”

Kroeck is still fighting for his water pump. But he’s also fortunate his irrigation project began before the USDA began cutting staff.

An assessment by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found that 24% of applicants to the NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program were approved in 2025, compared with 43% in 2024. At the same time, the share of applicants approved for the agency’s Conservation Stewardship Program fell from 54% to 37%. 

Schewe attributed the decrease directly to layoffs.

READ MORE: How record land prices threaten the next generation of American farmers

“When there are fewer staff, they are less able to deal with the influx of applications for conservation programs, and are less able to support farmers, particularly small farmers with diversified farms,” she said.

The percentage of USDA grant money going to counties with a high percentage of wealthy farms doubled in the past year while the share going to counties with a high percentage of low-income farms was cut in half, said Bernie Kluger, managing director for Prospect Partners.

“Everyone is down, but small farms are down by a lot,” he told Straight Arrow.

The USDA did not address the discrepancies in grant awards, but Kluger said the difference could stem from wealthier farms having more resources or a focus on awarding larger grants.

Fighting cuts

Farmers successfully fought some cuts.

DOGE targeted the FSA office in Bakersfield, California for closure last year.

The city of 403,000 is an urban oasis ensconced in unending fields of citrus, grapes and nuts. Anyone venturing outside of Bakersfield is greeted with farmland stretching as far as the eye can see.

“Without the [Bakersfield] office, people would have had to travel to Visalia,” said Steven Fenaroli, managing director of public affairs and communications for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

That city is a roughly hour and 15 minute drive from Bakersfield along Route 99.

Following an intervention from the region’s Congressional delegation, including a headline-grabbing press conference featuring California Sen. Adam Schiff, DOGE reversed course.

The region’s farmers haven’t declared victory, Fenaroli told Straight Arrow.

“I always hear comments from members about challenges with staffing and expertise,” he said. “Sometimes having enough folks isn’t the issue. It’s the fact that there are more junior people on average now compared to even just a few years ago.”

Other farmers agreed.

Nicole Berg, who grows wheat in southern Washington State, said it’s hard to find people at her local USDA offices who know how to help her.

“I think there are enough people, but they’re new people and they need to have training and succession planning,” Berg told Straight Arrow.

Why the bureaucrats are important

Congress, for its part, largely ignored the Trump Administration’s requested USDA funding cuts.

That didn’t stop DOGE from cutting staff in a flurry of downsizing in the early months of Trump’s presidency.

Much of the administration’s ire was aimed at perceived bureaucratic bloat, but Schewe said someone in the capital needs to ensure that money ends up in the right place.

“Congress can create programs, it can allocate funds to programs, but if those agencies are not adequately staffed, the programs cannot function in a way that farmers need,” she said.

Advocates for farmers worry the problem could worsen if a plan to move USDA employees from Washington, D.C. to local offices is allowed to proceed.

That plan is on hold as a lawsuit brought by unions representing government workers makes its way through the courts.

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