By Luisa Loi
La Conner Community News
Wednesday, a federal district court issued an order restoring the grants of Viva Farms and 23 other organizations and local governments that sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the “unlawful” termination of grants that had been awarded to them under the Increasing Land, Capital and Market Access Program (“ILA” for short).
Viva Farms, a nonprofit farming incubator and training program based in Skagit and King counties, was selected in 2023 as an awardee for a $2.5 million grant that would have helped budding ag businesses take root and flourish.
In March, however, the associate administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency announced the cancellation of $300 million in grants for 49 out of 50 award recipients — with Viva Farms among the casualties.
Judge Beryl Howell ordered the USDA to update the court on efforts to reinstate $127 million in terminated grant awards by Friday, July 3. In his opinion, he stated that the plaintiffs demonstrated the termination of the grants was “likely contrary to statute” and that it would cause them “irreparable harm.”
The grant
Small beginner farmers have a hard time acquiring land in Washington, a state with one of the highest per acre cost for farmland in the country, according to a report published by the state Department of Agriculture in February.
Viva planned to give almost 90% — or nearly $2 million — of the ILA funds directly to at least 25 farmers in the form of down payment assistance and low-interest loans (with a target interest rate of 2%) to help them buy a minimum of 250 acres of land over a five-year period, according to Director of Farm Viability Anna Chotzen. The remaining 10% would have covered the cost of staff time.
ILA, launched in 2022 during the Biden Administration, was meant to fund projects that help “underserved producers” move “from surviving to thriving,” supporting farmers in acquiring land, planning their business and preparing for succession, according to the USDA.
Viva Farms supports aspiring and limited-resource farmers by offering 1-year renewable leases on incubator farmland for up to 10 years. This allows them to start out their business before acquiring land and becoming fully independent. Viva also provides training in organic farming practices, as well as access to infrastructure, equipment, marketing and capital, according to its website.
Claims put into question
After signing an award agreement with the USDA in October 2024, Viva worked on developing policies to launch the program. The nonprofit waited a year and a half for the USDA’s final approval due to delays in communication from the agency, according to Viva Farms Communications Manager Elma Burnham.
Under the Trump Administration, the USDA was directed to review existing awards “to ensure they reflect the Department’s priorities of unity, equality, meritocracy, and color-blindness.” In the end, it concluded that 49 out of 50 awards did not align with the department’s priorities and that ILA was “rife with DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) preferences.”
The termination letter states that USDA programs must never discriminate based on immutable characteristics like race, ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation, and that Congress had amended the program’s eligibility criteria from “socially disadvantaged” (based on those distinctions) to “underserved” farmers “living in high-poverty areas.”
In its proposal to the USDA, Viva specified that the ILA grant would have served “a diverse target audience of historically underserved producers,” including beginning farmers and “socially disadvantaged farmers, including women.”
Viva also stated that it would “place particular focus on Latino and Hispanic immigrant farmers,” who despite making up at least 83% of the nation’s farm labor force, own less than 3% of U.S. farmland.
“The request for proposal to which we applied specifically said it wanted this program to serve historically underserved farmers, so we were responding directly to that call,” Chotzen said.
The USDA’s termination letter, however, concluded that Viva’s award beneficiaries were “limited to” certain groups.
“Nowhere in our proposal does it say that our target audience would be limited to certain groups, only that we would focus on those groups,” Burnham wrote in an email.
The letter also claimed most of the awards “did little to improve land access” and that they enabled “fraud, waste and abuse,” though Viva was not directly named among the offenders.
Grist, an environmental media organization, spoke to numerous grant recipients, none of which claimed to have made any of the “excessive or frivolous expenditures” — like buying gazebos, massages, RVs and, in one case, over $130,000 in office supplies — that the termination letter mentioned.
Moving forward through challenges
Viva remains committed to supporting its farmers with accessing land and capital, and is actively seeking opportunities to connect retiring farmers to potential successors, Chotzen said.
Still, for some farmers, it’s hard to make long-term plans for their farms without a clear path to long-term land tenure, Chotzen wrote in an email.
“The farmers that we work with are among the most profitable and successful (beginner farmers) in the Valley probably, and yet, farmland prices around here are really high,” she said.
Sarah Stoner, who coordinates Skagit County’s Farmland Legacy Program, said finding a piece of land that suits the needs and budget of a beginner farmer is “nearly impossible.” Even if the opportunity does arise, she said, it can take one to two years for farmers to line up all the funding sources they need, and with competition from wealthier buyers (often nonfarmers who may take the land out of production), sellers may not be willing to wait that long.
The number of mid-sized farms has also been declining, and the large-sized ones are too inaccessible for farmers who are just getting started and have limited financial resources, Stoner said.
If beginner farmers can’t access land and more land is taken out of production, there will be less food grown on prime soil, she said.
The entire community suffers
Chotzen believes the termination wouldn’t have just affected farmers, but the entire community: If small-scale farms can’t be viable, rural economies like Skagit’s will struggle to remain financially resilient.
According to the 2022 Census of Agriculture (expected to be updated sometime this month), the number of U.S. producers aged 65 and older is four times the number of producers aged 34 and younger.
“When farmers retire without a next generation in line, land is more likely to be sold for development than kept in agriculture,” according to the report.
The next generation’s ability to take the baton and keep ag land in production will depend on the resources available to them, Chotzen said.
“If you are a resident of the Skagit Valley, or the surrounding areas, the food that you eat, this beautiful valley we live in, is in many ways thanks to the fact that we have vibrant farms,” she said. “For farms to remain successful, they need access to land.”
Luisa Loi is a general assignment reporter for La Conner Community News.
