America Has A Farming Crisis By Jeff Young Environment and Sustainability Editor Newsweek Is A Trust Project Member news article 71 The Pennsylvania-based group Pasa Sustainable Agriculture has been working to help small-scale farmers for nearly 35 years. With a history of community organizing, the group is quite literally a grass-roots institution, Executive Director Hannah Smith-Brubaker explained. Members focus on soil health and crop and pasture management practices that promote both bountiful harvests and healthy ecosystems. “Seven or eight years ago, we started really hearing from farmers, ‘Look, the climate is impacting our ability to continue to farm, and we need support,'” Smith-Brubaker told Newsweek . Warming due to climate change has caused seasonal shifts in plant-growth patterns and changed the boundaries of the hardiness zones that farmers follow to know which plants will thrive in their area. Precipitation patterns have also changed dramatically in parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions that Pasa serves, bringing swings between periods of drought and heavy, damaging downpours. “It was really out of that need that we decided to pursue the Climate Smart Commodities grant,” she said. The Trump administration’s freeze on grants meant to support climate resilience in agriculture has left small farmers in the lurch. The Climate Smart program is a Biden-era initiative to support practices that promote clean energy and climate resilience in farming, forestry and ranching through grant programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For the small-scale farmers Smith-Brubaker works with, that meant opportunities to expand grazing areas to reduce impact from concentrated livestock, reseed pastures with native grasses more resistant to drought, plant trees to provide additional shade for animals or switch to crops that required less soil disturbance and thus caused less erosion. The grants promised to help farms expand while contributing a little […]