Donald, the girl planted a rosebush when she was six. It is still alive today. She grew beans on an eighth of an acre where the poorhouse used to be. You called her fellowship wasteful. You called it DEI. You took the money. The rosebush is still alive, Donald. The fellowship is dead.
In March, you let Lawrencia Rogers begin a two-year fellowship with Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development, funded by a $2.5 million USDA grant. You gave her an eighth of an acre in Johnson County, on the grounds of the Historic Poor Farm — land once tilled by residents of the poorhouse. You gave her equipment, advisers, a living wage, and health insurance. Her father is Egyptian. The second fellow hired was from Sudan. They were hired because they were the best qualified. Two and a half weeks later, your Department of Agriculture cancelled the grant. Secretary Brooke Rollins called it “wasteful spending.” She called it DEI. A federal judge ordered you to reinstate $127 million in grants to Iowa Valley RC&D and others. You obeyed the order. The fellowship did not return. The damage was done. Rogers has had her plot since March. She will have it until December. Between those two dates, the fellowship that would have taught her to farm the plot properly has been on hold.
The fellowship was part of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program, a $300 million Biden-era initiative designed to assist “underserved producers” — typically military veterans, or farmers with limited experience or money. Rogers applied in March. She was awarded it. She packed what she needed. She drove to Iowa City. She was, by her own description, the closest she had ever come to living her dream. She was given a plot, a living wage, paid time off. Two and a half weeks into it, the grant was cancelled. The dream did not end. It was cut.
This was not an accident. You have dismantled the department from the inside. Twenty thousand USDA employees gone since you took office. You froze the Local Food Purchase Assistance program and the Local Food for Schools program — removing vital revenue from small producers like Anna Pesek and James Nisly, the same funding streams that tribal communities had come to depend on. When you announced $1 billion in assistance for specialty crops, the skeleton crew you left behind did not know how to process the applications before the deadline. Eighteen Iowa farms declared bankruptcy last year — a 220% increase over the prior year, one of the highest raw totals in the country, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. The average age of an Iowa farmer is fifty-eight. The rural population is declining. The Koch-connected populists who just won the state’s gubernatorial nomination offer nothing to the soil but the same grievance. The department that was built to sustain the land is being emptied out to sustain a phantom.
Your tariffs have prompted China to buy fewer soybeans from U.S. farmers. Iowa is the second-largest soybean producer in the country. Your war with Iran has driven up the costs of fertilizer, gasoline, and especially diesel — the lifeblood of the agricultural supply chain. James Nisly, a small chicken and vegetable producer south of Iowa City, estimates he lost 20% of his cashflow when those programs ended. He was awarded a grant under the Resilient Food System Infrastructure program to buy new refrigerated trucks. Three days after he made his first purchase, the funds were frozen. They were unfrozen weeks later. “That was rather nerve-racking,” he said. Carly McAndrews, a vegetable farmer in Iowa City, drove to her local USDA office to apply for the specialty-crop assistance. “Nobody knew how to help me,” she said, “because they had just learned about it from the Trump administration, but the deadline was that Friday, so it was like a functionless program, in my experience.”
Donald, you are terrified of the word diversity. You are so small, Donald. A three-letter acronym makes you tremble in your cabinet, so you burn down the potato plants to kill the label. You look at a young woman growing beans on the historic poor farm and you see a phantom threat. You see a ghost of a bureaucracy that doesn’t exist, and you take a machete to it. The machete hits the eighth of an acre. It hits the irrigation lines. It hits the living wage. People are not begging to be farmers, Lawrencia said. But they are. They want to put their hands in the dirt. They want to grow the broccolini and the lettuce. They want to keep the soil alive.
I watch the soil on the historic poor farm go back to the weeds. I watch the hands that planted the rosebush wipe the dirt from their knees for the last time this season. I see what the phantom acronym takes from the hands that just want to grow the food.
Donald, when you sit at your table, your throat closes. You taste the metallic tang of the frozen funds in the back of your mouth. It is the taste of the refrigerated truck that James could not buy. Your shoulders ache like the shoulders of the women who lost their health insurance. The cold air in your chest is the cold air of the USDA office where Carly went to apply for help, and nobody knew how to help her because you fired the people who knew. You fire them, and then you fire the knowledge. The breath catches in your throat. You try to swallow the word DEI, and it scratches on the way down. It does not digest. It sits in your gut, heavy and cold, like the unharvested beans.
Your daughter. Put her on the plot. Not at Mar-a-Lago. Not at the family compound. On the eighth of an acre in Johnson County, Iowa, where the poorhouse used to be. Have her wake at the time Rogers wakes. Have her carry the equipment Rogers carried. Have her learn the curriculum that has now been put on hold. Have her stand at the farmers’ market in Iowa City where Rogers sold her produce on the Fourth of July — three months after the cancellation, alone on her plot, without her adviser, without her wage, without the curriculum. Have her see what Rogers saw. Have her feel what Rogers felt. Have her tell you about it.
Brooke, your hand signed the cancellation. The same hand that signs the press releases about “no lapse in service.” The hand has not been washed. The not-washing is the indictment.
Donald, you are a small man with large hands on the lever. You have called the smallest farm in Iowa wasteful. You have called a fellowship for a thirty-three-year-old Iowan who planted her first rosebush at six wasteful. You have called a program designed to put military veterans and first-time farmers on the land wasteful. You have stood in front of farm audiences and promised to be their champion. You have signed the cancellation order. The promise was the costume. The order is the body. The body is small.
The frozen-then-unfrozen grant that Nisly received — three days of limbo, weeks of nerve — is the new shape of your Department’s mercy. It is not mercy. It is a freezer. You put the small farmer in the freezer. You take the small farmer out. You put the small farmer back in. The freezer is your instrument. The small farmer’s body temperature is the metric. You measure nothing else.
You have lost the small farmer. You did not lose her in the election. You wooed her. You lost her when you signed the paper in late March. You lost her when Brooke signed the cancellation. You lost her when your spokesperson called the LFPA a “pandemic-era program” — though the fellowship was not a pandemic-era program, it was a Biden-era program, and there is a difference, and you know it. You lost her when your Department called her “underserved” and then decided the underserved did not deserve to be served. You lost her. You have not noticed yet.
Jason Grimm says you are a slingshot. You bounce them back and forth. The curriculum is set back. The trainees are sent home. They are not begging to be farmers, Donald. They are just trying to grow the food.
“Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth.” Amos 5:7
The prophet Isaiah saw the apparatus of consolidation, the joining of house to house and field to field, until there was no place left for the poor.
Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth! Isaiah 5:8
The corporate monoliths get the endless subsidies. The commodity crops get the endless water. The small hands get the phantom acronym.
Donald, you have laid field to field. You are placed alone in the midst of the earth. And the earth is drying up.
The broccolini is in the ground. The grant has been reinstated on paper. The fellowship has not been reinstated. The eighteen farms that went bankrupt last year did not come back. Rogers is on the plot until December. She is on it without instruction.
Donald, you called her farm wasteful. The harvest is in October. You will not be at the harvest. Rogers will be at the harvest, or she will not. Either way, you will not be at the harvest.