Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre family farm was swamped by floodwaters in June.Courtesy of Chelsie Ver Mulm
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to overtake Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre plot of land, she rushed into action, rapidly evacuating her family’s gaggle of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and goats to higher ground. When the floodwaters receded, Ver Mulm returned to find much of her family’s farm, equipment, and pasture destroyed. In the days and weeks that followed, more than a dozen animals died from stress and diseases contracted from the flood.
From there, the costs of rebuilding continued to climb. Because the flood had ravaged the surrounding areas, Orange Creek Farms also lost many of its customers, who were grappling with damages of their own and could no longer afford to buy local food. All the while, Ver Mulm kept applying to emergency USDA loans and disaster relief programs—only to be denied again and again as the tiny operation confronted burdensome application issues and eligibility restrictions.
Because of the steep costs of recovery, the farm has fallen behind on its bills, and caring for a bigger herd became too expensive. Now, Orange Creek Farms is down from 40 cattle to just four. All told, the flood put the business in a “really, really bad spot,” according to Ver Mulm.
So in April, almost a year after the flood, she made a last-ditch effort to turn things around, applying for a USDA Rural Development grant that she was hoping could help them offset their losses and keep the business afloat.
When the government shutdown began more than a month ago, the USDA furloughed the vast majority of the remaining workforce and brought most services to a sudden halt. Ver Mulm still hadn’t heard back about her application—and now the waiting is itself becoming the problem.
As the shutdown nears a historic, yet grim, milestone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it has already created financial losses of at least $7 billion for the US economy. Battling some of the most consequential impacts of these losses are those who grow and sell the food we eat—especially the farmers and ranchers also dealing with the compounding effects of extreme weather and an eroding federal safety net.
Approximately 20,000 Department of Agriculture staffers have lost their jobs this year—a rapid and radical transformation of the agency resulting in administrative struggles, overworked employees, and significant delays in processing of payments and financial assistance applications.
This summer, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a controversial reorganization plan that experts expect to result in further staff reductions and a skeleton workforce. The USDA announced last week that approximately 2,100 county-level USDA Farm Service Agency offices would be reopened beginning Thursday, October 23, with two staffers reinstated per office, to help farmers get access to $3 billion in aid from existing programs, though further details about what programs, payments, and services will be resumed and to what extent remain unclear.
All the while, small farmers and ranchers have spent the last 10 months facing off against mounting pressures wrought by major administrative changes to food and agriculture policy that have exacerbated the nation’s exceedingly volatile farm economy.
The impact on producers, whose businesses require advance planning—in a time of the year normally filled with finalizing future growing plans, buying seeds and other resources, and shoring up winter reserves—will only grow the longer the shutdown persists.
And so will the broader economic and societal ripple effects unfurling nationwide: The Trump administration initially declared that it would not tap into billions of dollars in emergency funding that Congress set aside to maintain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during times of crisis. Without that funding, the USDA said that SNAP benefits, used by nearly 42 million Americans who struggle to afford groceries, would be suspended on November 1. (SNAP is also a crucial source of income for many small farmers.)
Last week, after more than two dozen states—and, separately, a coalition of local governments, nonprofits, and religious groups—sued the USDA, two federal courts ruled that the department must tap into those contingency funds to cover at least some of the SNAP benefits for November. On Monday, the Trump administration said it would comply, but would not fund the program further—and that there would be only partial payments this month.
Prior to the rulings, Secretary Rollins blamed Democrats for the shutdown and possible loss of benefits for millions of Americans, while stating (falsely) that the department did not have the legal authority to distribute the agency’s contingency funding. In a Friday press conference, she criticized SNAP, remarking that the shutdown exposed a program that, under the purview of the Biden administration, became “so corrupt.”
The USDA did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, Hill policymakers have continued to sling accusations across the aisle in their budget standoff over federal healthcare. Trump has urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the shutdown by getting rid of the filibuster, an unprecedented move by the president, though many GOP senators remain in support of the rule. If Congress is still at an impasse come early next week, it would mark the longest shutdown in US history.
Every day of delay brings more prolonged uncertainty to farmers like Ver Mulm. Even if lawmakers manage to vote to reopen the government in the near future, the second-generation Iowa farmer worries that the backlog USDA staffers will be facing after all the time spent furloughed, compounded by the already-strained workforce, will translate to further bottlenecks.
Over the last year, Ver Mulm has drained her savings to stave off having to sell the farm, living off of credit cards. Now, her credit score is shot, and Orange Creek Farms is on the cusp of insolvency. And with each day that passes with the government remaining in limbo, the small window to save their farm gets smaller. Ver Mulm is emotionally preparing herself for what’s to come—a growing likelihood that her family will soon need to close the chapter on feeding their community. “We’ve exhausted all of our options,” she said. “This grant is our last chance to keep the farm going. It’s our last lifeline.”
This story was updated from the original version to reflect the latest news related to the emergency SNAP funding.
