Troy Hadrick, an ag-über-alles conservative who thinks advocacy for fighting climate change is a front for dictatorship, happily accepted a $35,000 grant from President Biden’s USDA Regional Food Business Center program (on top of $2.2 million in socialism to support his plan for a local butchering operation in 2023).
Hadrick’s RFBC grant is one of five projects in South Dakota that beat the buzzer that farm-hating dictator Trump sounded last month in terminating the RFBC program:
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today announced the termination of the Regional Food Business Centers (RFBC) program. This pandemic-era, Biden program was created using one-time, temporary funding from Congress. The Department is terminating this program that should not have been established in this manner in the first place, but are doing so in a way to honor commitments made to farmers.
“The Biden Administration created multiple, massive programs without any long-term way to finance them. This is not sustainable for farmers who rely on these programs, and it flies in the face of Congressional intent,” said Secretary Rollins. “USDA will honor existing commitments for over 450 grants to farmers and food businesses to ensure planning decisions on the farm can continue as normal, however stakeholders should not plan on this program continuing. Any remaining funds will be repurposed to better support American agriculture.”
Out of the 12 RFBC’s, only 8 have selected or issued Business Builder grants. USDA will honor current and pending commitments to producers and food businesses through the Business Builder subaward program. Due to the broad scope of the program, and a long process of setting up partnerships and conducting work planning, a relatively small number of those Business Builder grants have been awarded to date. RFBC’s that have executed or announced Business Builder subawards will have the option to continue managing those existing commitments through May 2026. Centers that have not yet made Business Builder commitments will be terminated; these include the Great Lakes Midwest RFBC, Southeast RFBC, Delta RFBC, and Islands and Remote Areas RFBC [USDA, press release, 2025.07.15].
Even if Hadrick still gets the government cash, he and farmers nationwide will get less service and useful data as Trump takes a meat-ax to the USDA:
Klobuchar and some of her colleagues on the Senate agriculture committee sent a letter to Vaden on Monday requesting more time to comment on the plan and increased transparency with the results of the agency’s ongoing public comment period. The letter followed at least two others that have been issued in the last month by groups of lawmakers demanding more information. Nearly all have referred to the first Trump administration’s relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which resulted in the resignation of three-quarters of employees, and declining workforce productivity.
…What’s more, the RFBC program wasn’t solely addressing an immediate food system crisis that became clear because of the pandemic, he said, but “it was addressing a problem that had been revealed. The problem was always there.” A USDA report released last October found that the RFBCs led to more than 2,800 individuals receiving technical assistance, 1,500 new partnerships formed by recipients, and 287 businesses reporting increased revenue as a result of the program. Other critics of the Trump administration’s decision to cancel it have argued the program was established to meet a $4 billion congressional mandate in the American Rescue Plan to build more resilient food systems.
Another current USDA employee based in Washington, who also asked to remain anonymous, told Grist that the double blow of the closure of the regional food business centers and the proposed relocations “is going to result in massive harm to rural America, which, again, is a population that they purport to care about. There’s no particular rhyme or reason that we can tell,” the staffer said, while pointing out where the new hubs aren’t. “California is the biggest agriculture state in the country, and there’s not a hub there. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“For farmers and people that rely on the USDA for information, for money, it’s going to be poorer quality service and less of it because there’s just going to be less people working,” said Roberts, the USDA union president. “If we experience an even greater loss of the administrative staff that keeps the USDA running, by telling them that they need to pick up their entire lives and move to somewhere across the country, the USDA is going to grind to a halt” [Ayurella Horn-Muller, “Inside the Program Cuts, Workforce Purges, and Secretive Reorganization of the USDA,” Grist, 2025.08.27].
This withdrawal of USDA support for regional food resiliency comes as the king farmers elected imposes tariffs that are driving more farmers into debt and bankruptcy, cuts off opportunities for farmers to sell their products locally, ends support for diversifying farms into renewable energy, and drives farm consolidation that accelerates the hollowing out of rural communities. You’d think advocates for agriculture like Troy Hadrick would have more to say about Trump’s war on rural America.