Editor’s note: This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization; BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina; WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station; WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region; and Interlochen Public Radio.

The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.

The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say, in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays.

By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year.

But now, that funding is in limbo. Under the current freeze, some farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on projects and are waiting for the promised reimbursement. Others have had to delay work they were counting on to support their businesses, unsure when their funding will come through — or if it will.

REAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Secretary Brooke Rollins said the agency is “coming to the tail end of the review process” of evaluating grants awarded under the Biden administration.

“If our farmers and ranchers especially have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole,” Rollins told reporters in Atlanta last week.

But it’s not clear when the funds might be released, or whether all the farmers and business owners awaiting their money will receive it.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan draws over 1.5 million visitors every year. Jim Lively hopes some of those people will camp RVs at a nearby site he’s planning to open next to his family’s local food market. He wants to use solar panels to help power the campsite and offset electric bills for the market, where local farmers bring produce directly to the store.

Lively helped promote REAP during his time at the environmental nonprofit Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, where he’d worked for over two decades. So the program was on his mind when it came time to replace the market’s big, south-facing roof.

“We put on a metal roof, and worked with a contractor who was also familiar with the REAP program, and we said, ‘Let’s make sure we’re setting this up for solar,’” he said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for us.”

They were told they had been approved for a REAP grant of $39,696 last summer — half of the project’s total cost — but didn’t feel the need to rush the solar installation. Then, at the end of January, Lively was notified that the funding had been paused.

The property runs on electricity, rather than natural gas, and Lively wants to keep it that way. But those electric bills have been expensive — about $2,000 a month last summer, he said. When they get the RV site up and running, he expects those bills to approach $3,000.

Selling local food means operating within tight margins. Lively said saving on energy would help, but they won’t be able to move ahead with the rooftop solar unless the REAP funding is guaranteed.

Continuing to power the property with electricity rather than fossil fuels is a kind of personal commitment for Lively. “Boy, solar is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to do that without that funding.”

For Joshua Snedden, a REAP grant was the key to making his 10-acre farm in Monee, Illinois, more affordable and environmentally sustainable. But months after installing a pricey solar array, he’s still waiting on a reimbursement from the federal government — and the delay is threatening his bottom line.

“I’m holding out hope,” said Snedden, a first-generation farmer in northeast Illinois. “I’m trying to do everything within my power to make sure the funding is released.”

In December, his five-year old operation, Fox at the Fork, began sourcing its power from a new 18.48 kilowatt solar array which cost Snedden $86,364. The system currently offsets all the farm’s electricity use and then some.

REAP offers grants for up to half of a project like this, and loan guarantees for up to 75 percent of the cost. For Snedden, a $19,784 REAP reimbursement grant made this solar array possible. But the reimbursement, critical to Snedden’s cash flow, was frozen by Trump as part of a broader review of the USDA’s Biden-era commitments.

Snedden grows the produce he takes to market — everything from tomatoes to garlic to potatoes — on about an acre of his farm. He also plans to transform the rest of his land into a perennial crop system, which would include fruit trees like pears, plums, and apples planted alongside native flowers and grasses to support wildlife.

A solar array was always part of his plans, “but seemed like a pie in the sky” kind of project, he said, adding he thought it might take him a decade to afford such an investment.

The REAP program has been a lifeline for Illinois communities struggling with aging infrastructure and growing energy costs, according to Amanda Pankau with the Prairie Rivers Network, an organization advocating for environmental protection and climate change mitigation across Illinois.

“By lowering their electricity costs, rural small businesses and agricultural producers can put that money back into their business,” said Pankau.

That’s exactly what Snedden envisioned from his investment in the solar power system. The new solar array wouldn’t just make his farm more resilient to climate change, but also more financially viable, “because we could shift expenses from paying for energy to paying for more impactful inputs for the farm,” he said.

He anticipates that by switching to solar, Fox at the Fork will save close to $3,200 dollars a year on electric bills.

Now, Snedden is waiting for the USDA to hold up their end of the deal.

“The financial strain hurts,” said Snedden. “But I’m still planning to move forward growing crops and fighting for these funds.”

At the start of the year, Jon and Brittany Klimstra were nearly ready to install a solar array on their Polk County, North Carolina farm after being awarded a REAP grant in 2024.

As two former scientists who had moved back to western North Carolina 10 years ago to grow apples and be close to their families, it felt like a chance to both save money and live their values.

“We’ve certainly been interested in wanting to do something like this, whether it be for our personal home or for our farm buildings for a while,” said Jon. “It just was cost prohibitive up to this point without some type of funding.”

That funding came when they were awarded $12,590 from REAP for the installation. But, after the Trump administration’s funding freeze, the money never came.

“We were several site visits in, several engineering conversations. We’ve had electricians, the solar company,” said Brittany . “It’s been a very involved process.”

Since the grant is reimbursement-based, the Klimstras have already paid out-of-pocket for some costs related to the project. Plus, the farm had been banking on saving $1,300 in utilities expenses per year. In a given month, their electricity bill is $300-$400.

Across Appalachia, historically high energy costs have made the difference between survival and failure for many local businesses, said Heather Ransom, who works with Solar Holler, a solar company that serves parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

“We have seen incredible rate increases across the region in electricity over the past 10, even 20 years,” she said.

Through Solar Holler, REAP grants also passed into the hands of rural library systems and schools; the company installed 10,000 solar panels throughout the Wayne County, West Virginia school system. About $6 million worth of projects supported by Solar Holler are currently on hold.

In other parts of the region, community development financial institutions like the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky combatted food deserts through helping local grocery stores apply for REAP.

Solar Holler also works in coal-producing parts of the region, where climate change discussions have been fraught with the realities of declining jobs and revenue from the coal industry. The program helped make the case for communities to veer away from coal and gas-fired energy.

“What REAP has helped us do is show people that it’s not just a decision that’s driven by environmental motives or whatever, it actually makes good business sense to go solar,” Ransom said. In her experience, saving money appeals to people of all political persuasions. “At the end of the day, we’ve installed just as much solar on red roofs as we do blue roofs, as we do rainbow roofs or whatever.”

The grants aren’t only for solar arrays and other renewable energy systems. Many are for energy efficiency improvements to help farmers save on utility bills, and in some cases cut emissions. In Georgia, for instance, one farm was awarded just under $233,000 for a more efficient grain dryer, an upgrade projected to save the farm more than $16,000 per year. Several farms were awarded funding to convert diesel-powered irrigation pumps to electric.

The USDA did not directly answer Grist’s emailed questions about the specific timeline for REAP funds, the amount of money under review, or the future of the program. Instead, an emailed statement criticized the Biden administration’s “misuse of hundreds of billions” of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL) funds “all at the expense of the American taxpayer.”

“USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, Secretary Rollins is carefully reviewing this funding and will provide updates as soon as they are made available,” the email said.

Two federal judges have already ordered the Trump administration to release the impounded IRA and BIL funds. Earthjustice, a national environmental law organization, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the freeze of USDA funds on behalf of farmers and nonprofits.

“The administration is causing harm that can’t be fixed, and fairness requires that the funds continue to flow,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

Rollins released the first tranche of funding February 20 and announced the release of additional program funds earlier this month. That did not include the REAP funding.

The USDA announced Wednesday it would expedite funding for farmers under a different program in honor of National Agriculture Day, but as of March 20 had not made an announcement about REAP.

Rahul Bali of WABE contributed reporting to this story. ​​

Some dairy farmworkers say they’re struggling to get basic resources like PPE, testing, and flu shots needed to protect themselves from possible bird flu infections, even after connecting with their local and state health department.

That’s according to the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC), which issued a press release Thursday describing recent situations in which they say workers tried to get testing, vaccines, and personal protective equipment, but ran into barriers and delays.

While the CDC says the risk of bird flu to the general public is still low, cases have been picking up speed in the past year, with 70 reported human cases in the U.S. so far, including one death. Dairy herds have been the source of infection in 41 of those cases, including two dairy farmworkers in Michigan in May.

In mid-January 2025, a group of 20 dairy farmworkers in the Upper Peninsula “reported being sick with flu-like symptoms,” according to the MIRC release. “The illness spread quickly among the workers.”

On January 22, the local health department (MIRC staff attorneys declined to say which health department, to protect the identity of the workers) said “they did not have H5N1 PPE, tests, treatments, or vaccines readily available, nor do they have the staff and language resources needed to communicate effectively with this vulnerable workforce,” the release said.

“They didn’t have free flu vaccines, and these workers couldn’t afford to pay for flu vaccines,” said Anna Hill Galendez, managing attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.

Seasonal flu vaccines don’t protect against avian influenza, but they’re highly recommended for people with exposure to potentially infected animals, because a co-infection of human seasonal flu and avian flu could theoretically result in a mutation of avian flu that’s better adapted to spreading between humans. (In July, the CDC said it would spend $10 million on preventing bird flu infection in farmworkers, including $5 million for providing seasonal flu shots, Reuters reported.)

The local health department did eventually provide paper masks and COVID testing, and it took about two weeks “before they were able to get access to seven avian flu tests, which wasn’t going to be enough for all of those workers,” Hill Galendez said.

The health department also arranged a testing site for workers, but there was a miscommunication, she said, and the farmworkers weren’t sure whether their employer would allow them to attend.

“Dairy farmworkers often work 12-hour shifts, six or seven days a week,” she said. “There’s a lot of concern for many workers about missing work, for fear of being fired. And so they’re often looking to their employer to facilitate access to these resources, or to feel like they’re being given permission to access these kind of resources. And so it can be really hard to figure out how to get these resources to dairy workers in a way that they can actually take advantage of them. So in this situation, that communication didn’t work out in a way that allowed them to actually get access to that testing.”

An MDHHS spokesperson said it “quickly responded to reports of farmworkers in the Upper Peninsula with symptoms consistent with respiratory illnesses like influenza. To protect their health and safety, MDHHS worked with the farmworkers’ local health department (LHD) to make resources available including translation services, influenza testing, influenza vaccination and personal protective equipment (PPE).”

But MIRC said it took a month for the farmworkers to eventually get PPE. It also provided a written statement from an unnamed U.P. farm worker:

“The reason for sharing what I’m going to say is that we’re workers on a farm and we’ve been affected by a flu/virus, a cough that none of us has been able to avoid,” the statement said in part. “We spent one or two days in bed suffering from a fever and sore throat…We hope that through this communication, there can be protective equipment for the other ranches, since we’ve already gotten PPE at the ranch where we are working…If the protective equipment had arrived faster, we might not all have gotten sick.”

Milk testing and flu shots 

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) “did go out to test either the farm’s cows or milk within about two weeks of the first reported illness,” Hill Galendez, the MIRC attorney, said. “We weren’t aware of that testing at the time, but later learned that that took place and those tests came back negative.”

A spokesperson for MDARD said the agency “has tested bulk milk on all dairy farms in the U.P. and all have been negative for HPAI.”

CDC guidance recommends testing symptomatic people who’ve been exposed to infected animals, the MDHHS spokesperson said via email Thursday.

“Recent bulk milk testing at Upper Peninsula dairy farms by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) was negative for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), which meant exposure to animals sick with HPAI was not suspected among these farmworkers. MDHHS and the LHD made the decision to offer seasonal influenza testing to these workers, as their illnesses occurred at a time when there was extremely high respiratory virus activity, including seasonal influenza.”

But to date, those U.P. farmworkers still haven’t received their seasonal flu shots, Hill Galendez said. “The emphasis is over and over again on animal health, over human health. And so we see that focus again on the health of animals and consumer safety, over workers and protecting workers.”

The MDHHS spokesperson said seasonal flu shots were offered to the workers, but “I do not believe they took us/the LHD [local health department] up on the offer.”

Getting vaccines to farmworkers 

MIRC also described a dairy worker in Barry County “who noticed her co-workers were sick and wanted to avoid contracting the illness,” and reached out “to the local health clinic [but] was told they didn’t have the avian flu vaccine.” That same worker then contacted her local health department, but staff there didn’t speak Spanish.

An MDHHS outreach worker was able to assist her in communicating with that health department a few days later, but the worker was “disappointed” to learn that avian flu vaccines aren’t currently available in the U.S. (Some countries like Finland have been offering them to farmworkers.)

“It’s important to recognize that there are workers that are looking for these protections and we could be making them available, but we aren’t,” Hill Galendez said. “Dairy workers that understand their risks really [and] are looking for protection for themselves.”

(Last week, Bloomberg News reported the Trump administration has paused a $590 million contract the Biden administration made with Moderna for bird flu shots. It also canceled a key FDA meeting about which strains of flu to target in next year’s flu shot.)

The Barry-Eaton County District Health Department said it was contacted by several farms and farmworkers last year, “and was able to quickly fulfill all PPE requests. However, BEDHD has not been contacted by any farm owners or workers since June 2024.”

And while the department isn’t allocated adult seasonal flu vaccines, they can administer them if a farmworker is unable to get one at a local pharmacy or health care provider. The department also said it can provide flu testing and the flu medication, Tamiflu, for symptomatic farmworkers from farms where highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been detected.

Asked about how many farmworkers have received seasonal flu vaccines at MDHHS outreach events for farmworkers, a department spokesperson didn’t specify, but said it is working with several partners, including “a CDC project specifically to increase seasonal influenza vaccine coverage in dairy and poultry workers in several Michigan counties…As part of this, we have run some local events where we have administered doses of flu vaccine.”

Farmworkers are especially vulnerable right now, Hill Galendez said, and their employers often aren’t offering the recommended PPE. The challenges of reaching dairy farmworkers means it’s more important than ever to offer mobile testing and flu vaccine clinics, and proactively distribute PPE directly to workers, she said.

“That would all go a long way to make sure that dairy workers actually get access to these resources.”

A backyard poultry farm in Monroe County is the latest Michigan flock hit by the highly pathogenic Avian influenza. 

Hundreds of thousands of turkeys at a commercial farm in Ottawa County had to be euthanized at the end of last year because of the bird flu outbreak. 

But the disease isn’t only affecting turkeys and chickens. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources estimates the virus has killed more than 300 wild birds in five counties since Jan. 1, 2025.

Mitch Marcus, a wildlife health supervisor at the DNR, says the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is also affecting waterfowl and birds of prey.

“Think ducks, geese, swans,” he said. “Also scavenging birds and raptors, so think eagles and owls.”

People who found dead birds in the wild alerted the DNR. Marcus says scientists at Michigan State University’s Veterinary Diagnostic Lab test tissue samples for the virus.

“If HPAI is suspect from those results, the samples get sent on to the national vet services laboratory for confirmation,” he said.

The DNR encourages people who find at least six dead birds in one area to report the discovery through its “eyes in the field” tool.

Marcus says it’s best to avoid direct contact with a dead bird in the wild. If someone finds one on their property, he recommends caution.

“If they’re in a situation where they have to get that carcass removed, I would suggest that they utilize some personal protective equipment,” he said.

Read more: Avian flu outbreak forces major layoffs at Michigan’s largest poultry farm

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development also offers advice for pet owners concerned about bird flu.

“A good general precaution is just keep your pets away from any sick or dead wild animals,” Marcus said.

The DNR says HPAI has infected some feral and domestic cats in the U.S., but so far, it has not affected dogs.

The state has detected the virus at large commercial poultry farms in western Michigan as well as backyard flocks in Wayne, Oakland, and Monroe counties.