The Agraria Center for Regenerative Practices in Yellow Springs has joined 24 plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, calling for terminated grants to be reinstated.
The USDA terminated nearly all of its Increasing Land, Capital and Market Access Program grants, totaling around $300 million.
"This was a federal program designed to help farmers access land, capital and markets and our project brought the resources directly to farmers in southwest Ohio," said Tia Stewart, director of Agraria's BIPOC initiative. "Obviously, the program was terminated, but the work is not going away. So we are still working to help farmer's access land capital and market."
FarmSTAND, Earthjustice, Farmers Justice Center and the Southern Environmental Law Center are leading the lawsuit.
That includes Hannah Wolf, a staff attorney for FarmSTAND.
"There's land opportunities lost, there's technical assistant providers who have been laid off," she said. "Farmers who counted on support are left without resources and it's kind of already a fragile economy for a lot of farmers out there."
Deputy Managing Attorney for the Sustainable Food and Farming program at Earthjustice Carrie Apfel said these terminations are continuing what she considers to be an unlawful and unjustifiable cancelation of funding by the USDA for programs across the board.
"This administration continues to hurt — not help — American farmers," Apfel said.
Initial suit after grants cancelled
An initial suit in August 2025 resulted in the U.S. District Court in D.C. granting a preliminary injunction that restored six grants to Agroecology Commons, the Institute on Agriculture and Trade Policy, Providence Farm Collective, and Urban Sustainability Directors Network.
The court additionally suggested that other similar grants canceled could be eligible for the same relief.
Wolf said it almost seemed like the USDA did a keyword search to find programs that mentioned the climate or DEI and canceled them in mass. She said this harmed those getting the grants but also other programs they were working with.
"So there was a real trickle down effect of canceling these grants," Wolf said.
Another round of plaintiffs
This second round of plaintiffs are challenging the legality of the USDA’s termination of funding after the department said the programs offered “little improvement to land access and excessive spending.”
But leaders of the programs that were designed to secure affordable farmland, capital and markets for next generation farmers said this is false.
That includes Agraria, which wants to restore $500,000 to its program, the George Washington Carver Project for Equity and Access.
"We did join the suit because we believe that the grant was improperly terminated," said Sarah Hall, a board director with Agraria. "The project had been approved, the funding was awarded, we were actually working. Work was underway, and the lawsuit is seeking to restore those grants."
Stewart said without these funds, they can’t offer as much technical assistance or education to farmers in need.
"We also had to cut our programming almost in half," she said. "So we had anticipated having two incubation sites up and running this summer and we had to cut that down to one site and cut down some of our offered workshops and classes as well."
She and Hall hope this suit will reinstate the program’s funding to assist farmers in a time of need.
“There are a number of partners on our project, and we were in the middle of implementing those plans, and so our hope at this stage would be to implement the project that we had designed.”
A spokesperson for the USDA declined to comment on the pending litigation.
Wolf said they are in the early stages of this second lawsuit, waiting for the court to make a decision on whether or not they will allow 24 new plaintiffs to be added to the lawsuit.
If those funds are reinstated, Wolf said they would argue for a quick redistribution of that funding to support farmers across the nation.
"The Trump administration has said that their priorities for USDA are maximizing and promoting American agriculture and ensuring a safe nutrition, nutritious and secure food supply, enhancing rural prosperity," she said. "So on one hand, they're saying this. And on the other hand, they're canceling hundreds of millions of dollars of funding that was specifically being spent to address those things. And I just think that there's a real conflict there, and that's why we think the suit is really important."
