Amid the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been unable to award most of their grant money, and local farmers are feeling the impact.
Last month, the USDA announced that they were releasing $20 million dollars of previously approved grants to farmers across the country, but that’s just a tiny sliver of the program’s more than $200 billion in funding, according to Reuters.
Howard Berk, president and co-founder of Ellijay Mushrooms, applied for two grants through the USDA. His farm’s future is now left in limbo without the needed federal funding.
Ellijay Mushrooms produces more than 5,000 pounds of shiitake, lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms every week. Their crop is sold at their farm store, in Whole Foods, Ingles and distributed to restaurants all across Ellijay, Blue Ridge and around 60 in Atlanta.
A value-added producer grant they applied for would be used to make their shitake mushrooms into other forms, like sliced or differently packaged, to be able to expand to more retailers and grocery stores. This is a matching grant, meaning that the farm needs to scrape together around $200,000 to match the needed federal funding, Berk explained.
The other federal funding they applied for is an equipment grant, which would be used to purchase more cooler space for mushrooms, as they continue to expand their farm and outgrow their current equipment.
“All those things are on hold right now, which puts us in a little quandary, figuring out how we’re going to get that money to continue our growth,” Berk said.
The USDA has already awarded his farm two grants, one to purchase fruit trees to diversify their crop, and a natural resources conservation service grant that they were able to use to build a well before the funding freeze kicked in, but still need to build a compost facility. However, steps to obtain the rest of that federal funding are on hold as well.
“We kind of got lucky that we didn’t start building [the compost facility], because we would have had to bridge the gap with money that technically we didn’t have before they paid us,” he noted.
Other farmers Berk knows in the community were not as fortunate, thinking they would be reimbursed with federal funding. Now, they are scrambling to come up with solutions to pay for their projects already in the works, he said.
Ellijay Mushrooms is currently looking for investors to help offset the funding they are no longer getting from the USDA amidst the freeze. They are also selling shares of the company.
“We want somebody that believes in our vision,” he said. “Every dollar spent here at Ellijay Mushrooms really goes back to our team and community, and allows us to grow and have the tools to make us bigger and better.”
Berk was hoping to hire three more employees, as they work on new projects they needed funding for, noting that as their business grows, their community grows within Gilmer County.
“[The federal funding freeze] has put on hold the people we were gonna hire for this new project … and it also put on hold the age of our development, meaning product offering,” he said. “Right now we’re limited on what packaging we can offer because everything’s done by hand, we don’t have the equipment yet.”
Without the federal funding, he mentioned that they are in a bit of a “hovering place,” where they can’t expand to offer mushrooms to more retailers in the region or continue increasing opportunities for their employees.
“We just want to get things done, we want to get the funding,” he vocalized. “We’re not asking for anything free … If we can get that funding, even with us having to match some of the funding, it will help advance us.”