For a struggling Iowa ranch, the government shutdown may be the last straw
Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to engulf Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre property, she rushed into action, quickly evacuating her family’s herd of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses and goats to higher ground. When the floodwaters receded, Ver Mulm returned to find much of her family’s farm, equipment and pastures destroyed. In the days and weeks that followed, more than a dozen animals died from stress and diseases contracted during the floods.
From there, rebuilding costs continued to mount. Because the flood had ravaged surrounding areas, Orange Creek Farms also lost many of its customers, who themselves were dealing with the damage and could no longer afford to purchase local food. All the while, Ver Mulm continued to apply for USDA emergency loans and disaster relief programs — only to be denied again and again as the small operation faced heavy application challenges and eligibility restrictions.
Due to high recovery costs, the farm fell behind in paying its bills and caring for a larger herd became too expensive. Today, Orange Creek Farms has gone from 40 cattle to just four. Overall, the flooding has put the company in a “very, very bad situation,” according to Ver Mulm. So in April, nearly a year after the flood, she made one last effort to turn things around, applying for a USDA Rural Development grant that she hoped could help offset their losses and keep the business afloat.
When the government shutdown began more than a month ago, the USDA furloughed the vast majority of its remaining workforce and suddenly halted most services. Ver Mulm still hasn’t heard back about his application – and now the wait itself is becoming the problem.
As the shutdown approaches a historic but grim milestone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates it has already created at least $7 billion in financial losses for the U.S. economy. Those who grow and sell the food we eat face the greatest consequences of these losses – especially farmers and ranchers who also face the cumulative effects of extreme weather and the erosion of the federal safety net.
About 20,000 Agriculture Department employees have lost their jobs this year — a rapid and sweeping transformation of the agency that has led to administrative challenges, overworked employees and significant delays in processing payments and financial aid applications. This summer, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a controversial reorganization plan that experts say would lead to further staff reductions and a skeleton workforce. The USDA announced last week that approximately 2,100 county-level USDA Farm Service Agency offices would be reopened starting Thursday, Oct. 23, with two employees reinstated per office, to help farmers access $3 billion in aid from existing programs, although further details on which programs, payments and services will be resumed and to what extent remain unclear.
Meanwhile, small farmers and ranchers have spent the past ten months facing increasing pressures from major administrative changes in food and agricultural policy that have exacerbated the country’s highly volatile agricultural economy.
The shutdown is poised to make hunger worse in America — just as the Trump administration stopped following it.
The impact on growers, whose operations require advance planning – at a time of year normally filled with finalizing future growing plans, purchasing seeds and other resources, and building winter reserves – will only grow as the shutdown persists.
So will the broader economic and societal impacts that will be felt nationally: President Donald Trump’s administration has said it will not use billions in emergency funds allocated by Congress to continue the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, during the shutdown. Without this emergency funding, the USDA said SNAP benefits, which are used by nearly 42 million Americans who struggle to pay for groceries, will be suspended on Saturday, November 1. (SNAP money is also a crucial source of income for many small farmers.) A cohort of more than two dozen states sued the Agriculture Department on Tuesday, seeking to preserve SNAP funding during the shutdown by tapping into USDA contingency funds set aside to finance operations when regularly appropriated funds are not available. Two federal courts ruled Friday afternoon that the agency must draw on these contingency funds to cover at least part of the food program’s benefits for the month of November. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the decision.
Before the decisions, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins blamed Democrats for the shutdown and possible loss of benefits for millions of Americans, while saying the department lacked legal authority to distribute the agency’s emergency funding. At a press conference Friday, Rollins criticized SNAP, noting that the shutdown exposed a program that, under the Biden administration’s watch, has become “so corrupt.”
The USDA did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, Hill policymakers continued to level accusations from both sides of the aisle in their budget impasse on federal health care. Trump urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the lockdown by eliminating the filibuster, an unprecedented move by the president, although many Republican senators remain supportive of the rule. If Congress is still deadlocked early next week, it will mark the longest shutdown ever seen in U.S. history.
Each day of delay brings more prolonged uncertainty for farmers like Ver Mulm. Even if lawmakers manage to vote to reopen the government in the near future, the second-generation Iowa farmer worries that the backlog USDA staff will face after all the time spent on furlough, adding to an already strained workforce, could result in new bottlenecks.
Over the past year, Ver Mulm has emptied his savings to avoid having to sell the farm and live off his credit cards. Today, its credit rating is downgraded and Orange Creek Farms is on the brink of insolvency. And with each day that passes as the government remains in limbo, the small window to save their farm shrinks. Ver Mulm prepares himself emotionally for what’s to come: it’s increasingly likely that his family will soon have to close the chapter on feeding their community.
“We have exhausted all our options,” she said. “This grant is our last chance to keep the farm going. It’s our last lifeline.”
