Cultivate Kansas City will continue running the farm (also called New Roots, though not affiliated with IRC), but it will likely be forced to scale down the program, especially the market access component long provided by Catholic Charities staff, who connected refugees with opportunities to sell their produce at farmers’ markets and through community-supported agriculture (CSA).

The news left farmers in the program “extremely concerned that they will not be able to sell the produce they’re growing,” Cultivate KC Executive Director Brien Darby said. “There’s clearly some trust that’s been broken.”

In Anchorage, Alaska, the Fresh International Gardens cooperative and the Grow North incubator farm, both run by a Catholic Social Services program called Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services (RAIS), have also been affected. This year, a $300,000 USDA grant was not renewed, and the termination of refugee resettlement funds caused key vacancies at the farm programs.

In recent years, the garden co-op and incubator farm have served refugees from Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as Afghans who worked with the U.S. military before fleeing Afghanistan in 2021. “We have experienced drastic funding cuts that have resulted in staff losses,” said Keenan Plate, refugee enterprise and agriculture program director at RAIS. “We anticipate lower revenue this year because we have less staff.”

The Trump administration’s termination of USDA programs such as Local Food Purchase Assistance, which gave food banks money to buy fresh produce from local farms, and its indefinite pause of the similar farm to school program, has impacted many small farms, including refugee incubator farms. The two grant programs were “instrumental in supporting the farmers we work with,” said Jennifer Hashley, director of the New Entry project in Beverly.

New Entry, founded in 1998, receives about 70 percent of its funding from federal grants, Hashley said, most of which pays for staffing. “We have to have a minimum number of staff to operate,” she said. Without new funding streams, she added, the farm “could be in trouble for the future.”

Aside from grants already terminated by the Trump administration, a major concern for refugee incubator farms is that the USDA has not requested applications for dozens of other grants—including some for beginning farmers and farmers from underserved populations—for the coming fiscal year. “Those are the bread-and-butter support for a lot of the refugee incubators,” Joseph said.

Typically, the application window would have opened several months ago. The Office of Refugee Resettlement has similarly not sent out application requests for an agriculture grant that provides $100,000 per year to many of the incubator farms. As the September deadline for the federal agencies to award grants draws nearer, program directors worry those funds have vanished, too.

“It’s a tense time,” said Plate, the RAIS director in Anchorage. The government’s slashing of agriculture grants and support for refugees, he said, has left all refugee farm programs “wondering how they can continue.”

Program directors said they are working to diversify their funding sources, primarily by pursuing state grants and philanthropic donations. However, federal grants are typically larger and can last multiple years, Hashley said, so they are “difficult to replace easily or quickly.”

As this article goes to publication, many of the federal grants that refugee incubator farms rely on remain under review amid an ongoing purge of federal initiatives that serve marginalized populations. “USDA continues to weed out DEI from our programs as we continue our review of the entire department,” the agency said last month in a press release. A USDA spokesperson said in a statement that the department was “working diligently to ensure all funds can be obligated by the end of the fiscal year.”

Do Refugees Compromise Resources?

However, those running the refugee incubator farms see them as an example of refugees’ entrepreneurial spirit and their positive contributions to their communities.

In 2010, refugees from Burundi helped start the Global Greens program, administered by Lutheran Services in Iowa. The goal was to provide an outlet for refugees unable to meet the physical demands of meatpacking plants, where many Burundians who resettled in Iowa found work.

“It gives them something really positive to do,” said Firmin Ntakimazi, community resource navigator at Global Greens, which is based in Des Moines. (The program relies on federal grants—and, so far, has not been significantly impacted.)

Today, Global Greens operates a community gardening program with around 300 participants, as well as a four-year training program that has enabled more than a dozen graduates to begin farming for a living. Ntakimazi, who helped start the farm, said people drive from across the country to fill vans with Global Greens’ cassava leaves and African eggplant, which stock home freezers and specialty grocery stores from New York to Arizona—enriching and enlivening restaurant and home cooking alike.

In West Sacramento, refugees turned a dusty lot into “an oasis,” Khatiwoda said, providing fresh produce to local schools and grocery stores, as well as to community members through farmers’ markets and a CSA box. Last year, more than half the fruits and vegetables sold through New Roots’ programs across the country were bought by low-income residents using food benefits.

In Kansas City, each of the metropolitan area’s 23 farmers’ markets has at least one farmer who either participates in or graduated from the local refugee incubator farm.

To a person, program directors interviewed for this article said that if funding cuts force these farms to scale back further or to shut down altogether, refugees won’t be the only ones affected.

“These farmers are very important to the community,” Hashley said. “They’re part of the future generation of farmers in this country, and they should be recognized as such.”

This story was updated to correct the location of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, which is headquartered in Beverly, Massachusetts.