Kevin Leavitt uncovers kale crops in his greenhouse in West Gardiner. Federal funds that Leavitt expected to use to pay for improvements he’s already made to his farm have been frozen — a move that threatens to shut down his business, Farmer Kev’s Organics. Anna Chadwick/Morning Sentinel

Kevin Leavitt was just three days away from getting a $45,000 check from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for the newly installed solar array at his organic vegetable farm in West Gardiner when the Trump administration abruptly froze federal funding.

The 33-year-old farmer had already signed a Rural Energy for America Program cost-sharing contract with the USDA. He secured a $90,000 bank loan, cobbled together $15,000 in cash and hired a contractor to install the array. Although the work is done, the USDA is now refusing to reimburse him.

“I have a signed contract!” Leavitt said. “Forget politics, forget about changing policy, a contract is a contract. You can’t take it back. Without that reimbursement, it all falls apart for me. I can’t get my loan. I can’t pay the contractor. I can’t see a way forward.”

Leavitt is one of thousands of U.S. farmers, including Mainers, hit hard by President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting directives. One order froze funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, which paid farmers to conserve soil and water and adopt renewable energy.

A federal judge has ordered Trump to release the funds, but Leavitt and others have yet to be paid.

A Thorndike farmer is on the hook for $2,500 spent planting pea shoots and oats to prevent erosion. A Brunswick farmer is out $6,000 for outfitting a truck to mulch 70 acres of blueberries against drought. A Dresden farmer relied on the funds to replace his old gas-powered irrigation pump with a new $16,000 electric pump.

“We’re getting hung out to dry,” said Seth Kroeck, the manager of Brunswick’s Crystal Springs Farm. “If they want to close down the program, so be it, but they can’t step back in time and nullify existing deals. They’d hold us to our end if we tried to renege. They should be held to their end.”

These farmers have stopped work on the rest of their contracted projects until they are reimbursed for what they have already spent. That means any savings they’d hoped to realize in energy efficiencies are delayed and contractors they’d lined up are suddenly out of work.

Carl Johanson, right, and his brother Goran Johanson use a bin dumper to separate beets during a day of winter work at Goranson farm in Dresden on Thursday. Anna Chadwick/Morning Sentinel

NEW AGRICULTURE SECRETARY

The Maine farmers tapping into the grants hail from both sides of the political aisle. The Natural Resources Conservation Service touts state Rep. Russell Black, R-Wilton, as a success story after he used a grant to upgrade the evaporator that cooks maple syrup sap, reducing his boiling time and wood use by half.

A department spokesman said USDA is following the president’s order to review all Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds. That review should speed up now that the Senate has confirmed Brooke Rollins, a conservative lawyer from Texas, to be agriculture secretary.

The Senate voted Rollins in Thursday with a 72-28 vote; Republican Sen. Susan Collins voted yes, while independent Angus King voted no. At her confirmation hearing, Rollins said it was critical that federal aid reach farmers quickly, but she didn’t offer much hope for those awaiting conservation-related funds.

“The president has been clear in his priorities on climate programs and whether taxpayer dollars should be supporting those,” said Rollins, who admitted that her own family had enrolled their Minnesota farm in one of USDA’s voluntary conservation grant programs.

The funding freeze was announced on Jan. 27 when the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo requiring agencies to identify and pause funding to programs that violated Trump’s executive orders on topics ranging from foreign aid to “woke ideology” and the “green new deal.”

After repeated calls, the USDA told Leavitt that his check was being held up by a REAP diversity review. Leavitt said that made no sense to him because REAP has been around since 2002, survived Trump’s first term without incident and was available to all farmers, regardless of skin color, gender or income level.

Kevin Leavitt awaits his federal reimbursement of $45,000 for the solar array seen behind him that he had installed on his property in West Gardiner. Without the funding, Leavitt is unable to apply for a bank loan to pay off his share of the solar installation, which might force his business to go under. Anna Chadwick/Morning Sentinel

UNPRECEDENTED CONFUSION

The frozen Inflation Reduction Act cost-sharing contracts could affect more than 25,000 conservation contracts worth $1.8 billion and $1.7 billion in rural energy grants, according to the last summaries of their impact shortly before the Biden-Trump transition.

The funding freeze has caused unprecedented confusion in Washington and within farming communities, said Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District. Maine Farmland Trust, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, Maine Farmland Trust and Maine Farm Bureau visited Washington this week to discuss it.

Pingree said she’ll give Rollins another week before she starts demanding all farm funding be released.

“New secretaries want to do new things, but not to the level of blocking funding already approved,” Pingree said. “You might be someone really excited about this level of cutting government spending, but you don’t expect it to hurt the farmer down the road. And what hurts the farmer hurts us all.”

The funding uncertainty has made it harder for farmers to plan for the year, affecting decisions on seed and equipment purchases, how many people to hire to do the work, and what prices they could offer to their own buyers, especially before the growing season begins in earnest.

Pheonix O’Brien had $40,000 in Natural Resources Conservation Service funds under contract to build an access road to the fields and install a sediment control basin to the packing house where he washes produce grown at Hall Brook Farm. But that’s all on hold now.

As is the $64,000 REAP grant that O’Brien got last year to buy and install a $120,000 solar array that would have supplied electricity to his entire Thorndike operation, including the greenhouse. He’d lined up a solar contractor to do the work, but nothing had yet been purchased or installed.

“Thank God,” O’Brien said. “It would be hard enough for us to absorb the $2,500 (cover crop) loss if I don’t get reimbursed, but I’m not sure we could survive if we got caught holding the bag for the entire solar project. That’s not the kind of thing a small business can just bounce back from.”

Carl Goranson checks on the spinach crop that his farm grows in one of its many unheated high tunnels. Anna Chadwick/Morning Sentinel

Goranson Farm, a 100-acre organic vegetable operation in Dresden, has 10 months to figure out how to absorb the cost of the electric pump if its $10,000 USDA reimbursement request is denied, said Carl Johanson, the third generation of his family to work this land.

FARMING ALREADY A RISKY PROPOSITION

Johanson is also a victim of the tariff war looming between the U.S. and Canada. He had planned to buy a new greenhouse for summer cucumber and tomato growing from a Quebec supplier, but he could not tolerate the possibility of a 25% price increase during the three-month manufacturing period.

Instead, Johanson is ordering a cheaper greenhouse. It’s not ideal — without the extra vent included in the costlier version, Johanson will have to use shade covers and fans to help greenhouse workers stay comfortable in the summer heat — but it’s better than nothing, Johanson said.

“A farm can only tolerate so much risk,” he said. “We believe in treating our employees well. We believe in the environmental mission behind these grant programs. These projects were going to help take care of the environment, our workers and, over time, our bottom line. But we have to pay our bills today.”

Trump campaigned on a promise to lower grocery prices, but that has yet to happen. According to Kroeck, the Brunswick farmer, withholding federal payments to farmers will only drive prices up. Farmers will have no choice but to pass their losses on to consumers.

“It’s certainly not going to help,” Kroeck said. “It’s bad for the environment because of all the work that won’t get done. It’s bad for farmers because we can’t pay our bills. Some will lose everything. And it will increase prices, which is bad for consumers.”

If federal funds don’t start flowing soon, Leavitt said he will probably close Farmer Kev’s Organics.

Since he founded it in 2009, Leavitt has grown Farmer Kev’s from a farm stand based on an acre of leased land in Winthrop to a robust farm share that delivers vegetables grown on his 30-acre farm.

“Farming is risky enough as it is,” Leavitt said. “We’ve done well, but between the weather and the markets, a lot can go wrong. We need the federal government to have our backs, not make it worse; otherwise, the whole system’s going to fail and take us all down with it.”

Note: This story was updated March 6 to correct Carl Johanson’s name.