On March 23, the USDA issued termination notices for 49 of 50 Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access (ILCMA) projects – innovative, community-based, and locally-led projects designed to tackle the greatest barriers that young, beginning, and underserved producers face in the U.S. Terminations, effective on March 26, totaling nearly $300 million across 40 U.S. states and territories.
Termination letters claim that “most of the awards did little to improve land access” and that there was “excessive spending on outreach and technical assistance.” What the letters omit is that current USDA leadership spent over a year systematically undermining the program – freezing funding, cutting off communication with awardees, and withholding the approvals grantees needed to move forward with land acquisitions, farmland down payment assistance, low-interest loans, and other core project activities.
The terminations also abandon years of public investment. The LCM program took significant time and taxpayer dollars to design, fund, and launch. Awardees spent that time building partnerships, hiring staff, and laying the groundwork these projects required – work that will now go unrealized, just before many grantees expected final clearance to begin their core activities.
“The Trump administration actively blocked awardees from delivering critical resources to the next generation of U.S. farmers and ranchers — then cited the absence of progress as grounds for termination,” said Amanda Koehler, Manager of the Land, Capital, and Market Access Network. “After years of public investment in this program, the administration is cancelling contracts as it’s finally ready to meet its potential and calling it fiscal responsibility. The waste here is theirs.”
“We have six farmers who were waiting for down payment assistance to purchase small farms, and now that opportunity may never come to fruition. I know it will impact our communities in ways that are deeply felt and not always fully understood,” stated Dr. JohnElla Holmes, CEO and President of the Kansas Black Farmers Association. “We come from a legacy of resilience forged through hardship – generations who endured injustice and yet still built, cultivated, and contributed so much to this country. Still, we find ourselves fighting for access to the very opportunities that others are encouraged to pursue freely.”
“Over our 35 years of supporting farmers in the southeast, we have seen time and again that land access is one of the most long-standing and daunting barriers to success in agriculture,” said Kavita Koppa, Co-Executive Director of RAFI, an awardee of a now-terminated ILCMA grant. “Farmers – and therefore our food system – exist on the knife’s edge of crisis due to natural disasters, inadequate access to fair credit, and volatile markets. ILCMA was a promise to use taxpayer dollars to support the farmers that support all of us by addressing their most fundamental needs. Its termination not only impacts farmers of today but hampers our ability to grow farmers into the future.”
“In Iowa, we’ve seen firsthand how the ILCMA program helps bridge the gap for beginning farmers who are ready to step into land ownership but face steep financial barriers,” said Breanna Horsey, Executive Director of Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, an awardee of a now-terminated ILCMA grant. “Terminating these projects undermines the progress communities have made to keep farmland in production and in the hands of the next generation. At a time when land costs are at record highs, pulling support from locally‑led solutions is not just harmful to farmers, it’s harmful to the resilience of our rural communities.”
“The ILCMA Program is the result of more than a decade of farmer advocacy for land access for the next generation of working farmers,” said Michelle Hughes, Co-Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition. “Regardless of geography or whether they grew up on a farm, secure access to farmland is the single greatest barrier facing new farmers and ranchers—and the number one reason producers leave agriculture. ILCMA is USDA’s only program designed to address the land access crisis, providing a much-needed investment in young and beginning farmers and ranchers. Terminating these contracts is irresponsible and short-sighted, and doing so at a time of record land costs, limited markets, and rising operating expenses will cause irreparable harm to the security and resilience of our nation’s farm and food systems.”
