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Austin Unruh is an advanced practitioner of patience. As the founder of Pennsylvania-based agroforestry business Trees for Graziers, he helps farmers plant saplings like honey locust, apple, and mulberry, which take years to reach their full potential.
While Trees for Graziers had been growing even before the Climate Smart Commodities Program, 80 percent of the projects Unruh had planned for this spring were supported by those now-canceled funds.
“Everything just happens fairly slowly with agroforestry because of the nature of the beast—we’re working with trees,” he said.
Given enough time and care, Unruh continues, agroforestry—farming with trees—can become a keystone of resilient, profitable, and climate-conscious land management. In silvopasture systems like his, which bring trees onto pasture for livestock, cows can beat the summer heat under shade-giving honey locust trees while grazing on their seed pods. Besides keeping animals happier and lowering farmers’ feed costs, silvopastures can sequester carbon as the trees draw carbon dioxide from the air and, through their root systems, deliver it deep into the ground.
Other agroforestry practices such as windbreaks, hedgerows, riparian buffers, and alley cropping can help retain topsoil, prevent nutrient pollution, and provide wildlife habitat. According to the final installment of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report in 2023, agroforestry is one of humanity’s most feasible options for reducing climate risks.
Agroforestry’s Growth Spurt
The USDA’s 2017 Census of Agriculture was the first to include a question about agroforestry. Over the next five years, the number of farms using agroforestry increased by 6 percent, even as the overall number of American farms fell by 7 percent. Practitioners formed a professional network, the Agroforestry Coalition, in 2022.
As Civil Eats has reported, the federal government gave agroforestry a major boost that same year through the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, awarding over $153 million to agroforestry work. Many of the organizations interviewed said the funds helped them hire staff, share knowledge, and implement agroforestry practices on thousands of farms.
An Appalachian Sustainable Development visit to a forest-farming site. (Photo courtesy of Appalachian Sustainable Development)
Unruh said that while Trees for Graziers had been growing even before the program, 80 percent of the projects he had planned for this spring were supported by Climate-Smart Commodities funds.
For nonprofits that support agroforestry, such as Virginia-based Appalachian Sustainable Development, the funding provided greater capacity for technical assistance and market development. Katie Commender, who directs the group’s agroforestry program, was working with one employee in 2020, trying to serve a backlog of hundreds of farmers who had requested site visits for agroforestry advice. Through Climate-Smart Commodities and other grants, she was able to hire four additional staffers and start whittling down the waitlist.
In January, when President Trump took office, that expansion began losing momentum. His administration froze already approved federal grant funding, including Climate-Smart Commodities grants. Farmers said they couldn’t pay for materials during the critical spring planting season, nonprofits began cutting the hours of their technical advisors, and experts were no longer able to attend events where they’d planned to share knowledge.
The administration received multiple court orders to lift the freeze; Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released $20 million for certain conservation initiatives in February, as well as an unspecified amount for rural energy work in March. Some USDA grant programs were fully unfrozen, while payments for others remain suspended.
An additional roadblock appeared earlier this month, when the USDA announced it would cancel the Climate-Smart Commodities program. While some projects may continue under a different name if they meet certain criteria, the program’s largest agroforestry grant—the $60 million Expanding Agroforestry Project (EAP), led by The Nature Conservancy—was decisively terminated. The future of other individual projects remains uncertain.