On Kevin Marshall's farm in Edmond, there are greenhouses and garden beds filled with fruits and vegetables.
"We have a variety of stuff. We have some Swiss chard, collard greens, kale, onions, fingerling potatoes," Marshall said. "There's some bok choy, kohlrabi, turnips, beets - on the other side of those are some lettuce."
Marshall is a small-scale producer at his farm, Indigo Acres. He sells a lot of lettuce at farmers' markets and does online deliveries. A large chunk of his sales go to local food banks and schools as part of the OKC Food Hub.
But, he and others are having to make changes to their operation because of recent cuts to the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Programs.
The Local Food for Schools program awarded states money to buy local food for schools and child care institutions. The Local Food Purchase Assistance program provided tribal, state and territorial governments money to purchase locally grown food. The USDA canceled the programs in March and has frozen other federal funds, cut back employees and ended the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program.
"But there are a lot of other programs we want to participate in, would like to participate in, but they seem to have gone away," Marshall said.
He said the loss of those programs means it comes out of the farmers' pockets, making production more expensive, increasing the cost of food or could result in producers shuttering their doors because of increased costs.
When the USDA canceled the programs earlier this year, the department provided notices to participants that the programs were not available and agreements would end 60 days after the notice.
"These programs, created under the former Administration via Executive authority, no longer effectuate the goals of the agency," a USDA spokesperson wrote in March. "LFPA and LFPA Plus agreements that were in place prior to LFPA 25, which still have substantial financial resources remaining, will continue to be in effect for the remainder of the period of performance."
At this time, tribal nations in Oklahoma also saw the cut. For instance, the cut led to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes losing $300,000 and ending two full-time positions. The Cherokee Nation had a $3.5 million grant for fiscal year 2025 canceled.
For a small farm, Marshall said every dollar counts.
Because of the cuts, he said he had to prune back some staff and production and is searching for other grant opportunities. The farm is also looking into switching up what's grown, and it might hold a mini farmer's market to find new customers.
"And that's hard on a farmer because honestly, we do this a lot out of love, not because we have a bank full of money to do this," Marshall said. "And it becomes a hardship for farmers when these programs are pulled out from underneath us."
Jenna Moore, director of the food hub, said her organization will also try to pivot to other markets, such as schools.
The hub is a nonprofit focusing on increasing market access and support for small or mid-size farmers and getting fresh produce to low-access areas. It works with tribal nations, food banks, producers and a number of organizations.
"But it takes a unicorn to survive, really as a small farmer, because there's just not enough supports for beginning farmers to get started," Moore said.
She said the organization has seen a handful of grants frozen on top of the cooperative agreement cuts.
"And so it's a very uncertain time, and it's confusing because what we're trying to do is feed our communities and make people healthy," Moore said. "These things seem like universal goals. So it seems like there should be support there, and so it's confusing."
On the eastern outskirts of Oklahoma City, Ben Birdwell runs his operation, Ralph's Ranch, a regenerative farm focusing on vegetables and cut flowers.
Birdwell has already made a concerted effort to diversify. In addition to growing rows of bright flowers like zinnias and produce like blackberries and spinach, he's opened up an event space, hosts a monthly pop-up farmers market and more.
On his farm, it's taken a lot of work to build the soil up to grow healthy plants that will eventually serve people. He said the food hub has been an important partner in the past.
"As much as we would love to keep, you know, selling 85, 90% of what we grow to that program," Birdwell said. "You know, it's not going to exist. So we have had to make a lot of changes."
He said working with the food hub as part of the federal grant programs jump-started the farm. But finding other revenue sources was and is important.
Because of the changes in grant funding, the farm has upped the amount of flowers it is growing this year, but is still raising vegetables. For Birdwell and others at the farm, it is their passion to grow food to feed their community
"The one silver lining, we've been trying to find silver linings in all of this, and hopefully this encourages people to buy local and to recognize that small farms have been very reliant on grants," Birdwell said.
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
