ALBANY COUNTY — Under President Donald Trump, the United States Department of Agriculture is turning its back on climate change, depriving local farmers of resources to fight against a scientifically-proven force that threatens their livelihoods. 

On Jan. 30, the USDA ordered its staff to tag all webpages focused on climate change and submit them for review; nearly a month later, many department webpages referencing climate change that can be fetched by search engines are locked down on the site, with a message saying the visitor is “not authorized to access this page.” 

This move prompted several advocacy groups, including the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, to file a lawsuit against the USDA. 

In addition to arguing that the removal of webpages with climate-change resources was illegal, it alleges that the government had also, “in violation of multiple court orders,” stopped paying farmers and organizations “money they were promised under USDA conservation and climate-smart agriculture programs.” (On Feb. 20, however, Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA would honor the $20 million in environment-related contracts made with farmers.) 

Removed webpages had information on climate program funding and best practices, as well as datasets the lawsuit argues would be important to farmers while they’re forecasting, as well as to climate researchers and organizations that support farmers by amplifying all of the above information.

The order came the same day that Trump signed an executive order that more broadly signalled his administration’s opposition to climate change by withdrawing the United — the second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency — from all climate agreements within the United Nations, and mandating that “American prosperity” be prioritized over climate concerns in international relations. 

Climate impacts

All of these decisions portend trouble for farmers across the country, whose own prosperity is entirely dependent on the weather and land. 

Sheep farmer, former professor, and current chairman of the Knox Agricultural Advisory Committee Gary Kleppel told The Enterprise this week that climate change has already had an impact on local farms. 

A friend of his who owns an orchard had “four years of continuous crop failures because of hail storms, frost — wild, wild weather,” Kleppel said. “When you’ve got four years of it, you’re starting to see not something day-to-day,” but a larger climate pattern. 

According to a study on climate impacts in New York published in December by the New York Academy of Sciences, extreme precipitation, extreme temperatures, and changes in animal and insect cycles have all been observed in the state, and contribute to lower productivity on farms, and socioeconomic stress for farmers and their staff. 

It says that, broadly, farmers are reporting more uncertainty with weather and impacts on their operations. 

“We’ve had periods where we’ve had extremely hot weather when you wouldn’t expect it,” Kleppel said, “with sort of awful results in our livestock. One would expect something similar to be happening in crop farming as well.” 

After a heat wave in 2021, The Enterprise spoke with Knox dairy farmer Ken Saddlemire about how the high temperatures impact milk yields, and require more resources.

“Instead of milk production, energy is used to regulate body temperature,” Saddlemire said at the time, adding that his cows went from drinking 20 to 30 gallons a day in colder weather to 50 in the extreme heat.

Information sources

Although the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change is apt to have direct impacts on farmers, the loss of information related to climate on the USDA website is probably not going to be of enormous consequence to farmers day-to-day, both Kleppel and Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Beginning Farmer and Market Development expert Stephen Hadcock suggested to The Enterprise. 

Kleppel said he couldn’t speak to how commonly the USDA was used as an information source for farmers he knew.

“If you just look at our committee, there are farmers who know everything that’s going on right now, and others who are just farming and pay very little attention to what’s going on,” he said, explaining that he personally gets an independent agricultural news digest sent to his inbox each morning.

Hadcock said that farmers have lots of informational resources at hand, including each other. 

“Honestly, farmers still rely … on their peers to provide advice and support, so they will call up and chat with each other and swap ideas,” he said. 

And, of course, plenty of organizations supporting farmers operate independently of the federal government, including Cornell Cooperative Extension, which Hadcock says draws its information from studies and projects at the university, including those related to climate change. 

That said, an institution like Cornell, which is a land-grant university that does receive ample federal funding, is technically vulnerable to the Trump administration’s whims, and it remains to be seen whether the administration’s ideological intensity so far will have a broader chilling effect on those opposed. 

But for now, the co-op, Hadcock said, is a high-quality alternative for farmers who need assistance.

Funding

The most immediate impact on farmers, then, would be the loss of any funding related to climate change, since that funding is meant to boost resiliency and keep unavoidable climate consequences from putting farmers out of business entirely. 

Kleppel said he doesn’t think any Hilltown farmers have received climate resiliency funding, but he believes farmers elsewhere have.

Funding is considered a crucial aspect of preserving agriculture in the state, and highly sought after when comparing demand to availability. 

According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, federal climate funding in New York had an application acceptance rate of just 19 percent in 2023, with $2.4 million distributed to the successful applicants. 

With farms already under stress due to labor shortages and tight profit margins — New York State lost 14 percent of its farms and 9 percent of farmland between 2012 and 2022 — the Academy of Sciences study calls climate change a “threat multiplier,” and says it is “clear there’s a need for greater funding” to mitigate the effects.

Although the USDA will honor existing funding agreements, a search for climate-related funding on the USDA site turns up no results. 

“If you ignore the obvious, you’re not going to benefit,” Kleppel said.