When the USDA froze grant funds, a local nonprofit — and small East Coast farms — were left holding the bag. Now they’re suing.

Throughout February and March, the workers at Pasa Sustainable Agriculture faced a conundrum: They hadn’t been paid and they were out of money. They also weren’t allowed to stop working.

If they did, they would violate the terms of their grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the organization that owes them $3 million.

“They say they have no idea when we’re going to be paid,” Pasa executive director Hannah Smith-Brubaker said late last month, letting out a long sigh. “The idea that we could have this binding agreement with the U.S. government — which usually is good as gold — that can just arbitrarily be terminated ... it’s just very, very challenging.”

The Harrisburg-based farming nonprofit has not been paid in over 60 days. Last week it furloughed 60 employees — many of them farmers — leaving just 10 on staff. The $3 million in outstanding reimbursements stems from work Pasa has done under the banner of a multimillion-dollar, five-year USDA grant to help farmers implement climate-friendly practices on their farms.

In the wake of the funding freeze, the 34-year-old nonprofit drained its carefully saved rainy-day reserves by compensating farmers who had already spent money on projects the government had agreed to pay for.

On top of that, hundreds of small East Coast farmers are recalculating after having sunk time, money, and effort into planning ecological and infrastructural improvements to their land.

“It is so hard to make farming work,” Smith-Brubaker said. “There definitely will be farmers who will lose their farm as a result of this.”

In March, Pasa joined a lawsuit filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center to restore the funding, which the Trump administration froze via executive order in late January. Two federal judges have since ruled the funding freezes unlawful and ordered the government to deliver the money it promised, to seemingly no effect.

Formerly the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, Pasa now operates from Maine to South Carolina, coordinating farmer-led educational events, training programs, and research studies while working with farms to implement sustainability practices like cover cropping and agroforestry.

The nonprofit has built a network of dedicated East Coast farmers with an interest in stewarding the environment while analyzing ways to run farms more efficiently.

In 2023, the USDA awarded Pasa a $55 million, five-year grant, one of several the federal agency awarded under the $3.1 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. The money would help Pasa provide financial and technical support to thousands of small farms across 15 states, combatting erosion, improving soil health, protecting water quality, and boosting resilience against extreme weather, as well as helping farmers with important data collection and marketing strategies.

Historically, the lion’s share of federal farm subsidies have gone to the largest, wealthiest farms, which often grow just a few commodity crops (e.g.: corn, soybeans, cotton). Pasa aimed to reach as many as 2,000 small- to medium-size farms growing highly diversified crops with the $55 million, a task it was well-poised to do.

“The USDA basically asked us to leverage our community relationships with farmers that they weren’t reaching,” Smith-Brubaker said. “So now here [the small farmers] were finally being offered dollars that felt relevant. They thought they could trust the program, because it wasn’t coming directly from USDA; it was coming through us.”

To assist farmers, Pasa hired people like Teddy Moynihan, who has run Plowshare Farms in Pipersville, Bucks County, for 12 years. The farm may be familiar to restaurant buffs, not only because its produce appears on local restaurant menus but also because Plowshare has hosted many high-profile chefs for farm dinners over the years.

A former ninth-grade English teacher in the Philadelphia School District, Moynihan got his start in farming partly thanks to one of Pasa’s annual conferences, where he first met Plowshare’s eventual landlord.

 Years of both educating and farming made him well-suited to the Pasa position. He scaled down production on his own land to focus on the full-time job, winnowing Plowshare’s restaurant sales by about 75% in 2024 and holding just one farm dinner, as opposed to eight the previous year.

Over the course of the last year, Moynihan estimated he worked with 40 farmers to spec out various projects — all designed to have a positive impact on the environment and, eventually, the farmers’ bottom lines.

He worked with a sheep dairy in Northampton County to develop a grazing plan that would increase milk production while delivering higher-value grasses and legumes. In Lehigh County, he consulted with an organic vegetable farm to reduce tillage (which helps prevent erosion) and plant a hedgerow to reduce chemical drift from a neighboring farm, preserving the farm’s organic certification. In Southwest Philly, he helped implement crop rotation and a soil nutrient management plan for an urban community farm.

Each project was time-consuming, requiring lots of back-and-forth with governmental agencies. But the work felt well worth it to Moynihan. “I just wanted to have a bigger impact on the farming community and really on the environment as a whole,” he said.

Now Moynihan is furloughed, and the projects in progress are on ice, if not scrapped indefinitely. That’s the case at 663 East Coast farms that Pasa was working with at the time.

“We have about about $2 million in projects that were considered shovel-ready,” Smith-Brubaker said. “Local people who were planning on these contracts are also impacted — think about the fencing company, the seed company. Particularly in rural areas, the downstream effects in the local economy are really big, too.”

Moynihan is turning his attention back to Plowshare. Farmers are accustomed to dealing with sudden changes, he said, hardened by years of managing whatever weather and pests come their way. But he’s sure this experience will leave a bad taste in some mouths.

“There are certain farmers who, for good reason, are deeply distrustful of the U.S. government and the USDA,” Moynihan said. “We had been told many, many times, ‘We want to bring those farmers into the fold. We want to increase trust of the USDA and [the Natural Resources Conservation Service] among underserved farmers.’ And we did a lot of work to that end.”

Those same skeptical farmers “just, again, had the rug pulled out from under them,” Moynihan said. “It’s almost worse than if we just hadn’t done any of this.”