From left, members of the North Country Creamery team Margali Grenier, Shahong Lee, Ashlee Kleinhammer, Steven Googin, Jack Ciardullo, Ilyssa Brown and Nico Brossar. (Provided photo — Ashlee Kleinhammer)

When grass is healthy, it’s full of protein and easy for cows to digest. Sometimes the summers are unbearably hot, and the grass dries up and energy is sent instead to the seed. The grass becomes less nutritious and the cows don’t produce as much milk. If the summer then becomes unusually wet, the withered grass will struggle to recover.

Over her 12 years as owner of the North Country Creamery, Ashlee Kleinhammer has seen these unusual weather patterns become more common. To make their pastures and their 100% grass-fed herds more resilient in any kind of weather, Kleinhammer embarked on a project to plant trees. The trees help enrich the soil, protect from erosion and give the cows someplace to escape the sun — and resulting heat stress — that can affect their milk production. They even provide an alternate snack for the cows to munch on.

The funding that was promised by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to buy these trees is now on hold, perhaps indefinitely — just one example of how farmers and nonprofits that work to support the pieces of the fragile food system in the Adirondack region are now facing uncertainty, loss of funding and layoffs resulting from USDA cuts.

Jon Ignatowski works with a team at the Adirondack North Country Association that oversees programs related to food systems. ANCA serves as the lead manager for three USDA grant programs that benefit a variety of small businesses and farms in the North Country.

North Country Creamery is one of eight farms that ANCA is working with as part of the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program. This program supports $3.09 billion for projects across the U.S. and $1.08 billion in New York, according to a USDA dashboard. These North Country projects are agroforestry projects like Kleinhammer’s.

“At the end of the day, we’re really improving the bottom line of our farms over many, many years,” Ignatowski said. “It wasn’t just an investment in this year, next year, even in the next handful of years — it was really a hedge against increasing change and really making sure these farms could be resilient 10, 20 years out.”

These grants have been effectively frozen since January, and farmers are in a holding pattern. Even if the funding is eventually restored, the projects have been delayed for possibly another summer. For North Country Creamery, there are some other funds available and they might still be able to plant some trees, but for now, they are waiting on a project that they wish they started 10 years ago — trees take time to grow.

“It’s just not something that has a quick or very concrete, financial return,” Kleinhammer said. “No farmer has the capital right now to invest in this on our own, and that’s why the funding is so critical.”

ANCA also has a Technical Assisstance Grant for the USDA’s Rural Energy for America program. This program is designed to lower energy costs for farmers and small businesses by implementing various clean energy or efficient energy projects.

ANCA’s payment — which is to support the organization in its role helping businesses apply for actual REAP grants — was frozen for a while, but on March 28 they received word from the state coordinator that they would be paid. However, the upcoming Sept. 30 deadline for new grants is now closed. So for the time being, ANCA can’t actually help anyone apply for these programs.

Many of these projects also involve the employment of contractors, so the potential economic impact of cuts goes beyond the farms, Ignatowski said.

“We’re seeing the potential for a pretty sizable ripple across the regional economy,” he said.

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Nonprofits in crisis

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Francesca McClure loved her part-time job working for a small nonprofit that helps provide mentorship, education and resources for organic farmers, or farmers interested in sustainable farming practices. It was much better than her previous job as an organic certifier, where she was mostly sitting at a computer and inspecting paperwork. With her job at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, she got to talk with farmers and help them navigate the arduous paperwork required in becoming a certified organic farm.

That was until March 24, when she and two of her colleagues were laid off because the USDA grants funding their positions were cut. NOFA-NY only had 10 employees.

There’s a chance that some or all of the funding from these USDA programs might be restored, but for some organizations and the farmers they work with, the damage has already been done. McClure knows of other nonprofits that NOFA-NY partners with who have laid off or furloughed even more staff.

“This administration has already done so much damage, even in pausing them for a certain amount of time,” she said. “Situations like that just make me think about all of the institutional knowledge that is lost now, even if the money does come back. The programs aren’t going to be able to be the same, or it’ll take time to recover.”

McClure’s job was funded by the Transition to Organic Partnership Program, which also included a mentorship program that matched more experienced organic farmers with new farmers. The mentors got a small stipend out of it, and the mentees got free education. McClure felt it was important for farmers to get to meet each other at the events they organized.

“Those moments are really important for knowledge sharing, peer-to-peer, farmer-to-farmer,” she said, “and then also just as a community building aspect.”

NOFA-NY is also impacted by the apparent loss of the Climate Smart Commodities program, specifically the Climate-Smart Farming and Marketing Program.

“That program — in terms of direct money going directly to farmers — is a big, big loss,” McClure said.

McClure is in a bit of a holding pattern herself. She’s looking for seasonal work to buy herself some time until the fall, hoping the situation will be a bit more clear by then. Just a few years out of college, where she studied environmental science, she is having a quarter-life crisis of sorts and wonders if she needs to pursue something else.

“I think a lot of the positions similar to mine that I’d be interested in for the same reasons are at nonprofits that are getting federal funding,” she said. “How many of those types of positions are going to be around in the future?”

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Straw on an already broken back

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Josh Stephani is the director of the Adirondack Food System Network, a coalition of agencies in the North Country that collaborate to work towards and advocate for a stronger food system. Stephani said the pandemic revealed the lack of resiliency in the North Country food system. It also revealed the importance of a strong, interconnected local food economy.

This kind of economy is at the center of the mission of Essex Food Hub. EFH serves as a resource for local farmers and their customers by helping aggregate, store, process, distribute and market local food. For example, they’ve offered cold storage rentals — freezer space is normally really expensive and farmers were sometimes going as far away as Vermont to find space.

In 2023, EFH was the recipient of a $500,000 grant from the USDA through New York Food for New York Families. This grant was to help them purchase food from local farmers to donate to food-insecure families through partner organizations like food pantries and headstart programs. At the beginning of March, it appeared the grant was frozen and that the hub might not be reimbursed for work they had already done with local farmers. They started preparing for the worst.

This grant reimbursement has since been reinstated, but it appears that USDA funding for these kinds of local food purchasing programs may not be continuing past 2026, Stephani said Friday. This money was originally funneled to the state as a type of COVID relief funding. Now, the fate of New York Food for New York Families is in the hands of the state Department of Agriculture and Markets.

It was never a given that COVID relief funds would continue, but any decrease in USDA funding will hurt the region. Stephani said the North Country has a long way to go before the food system is resilient, just and equitable. The region is in dire need of capital funds and infrastructure, and Stephani said the organizations that work in this space are already stretched to the limits.

“It’s just adding more straw to the camel’s back — that’s already broken,” he said.