On Monday, April 14th, my stomach sank as I read an e-mail from the principal investigators of a large-scale, multi-institutional project funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that supported half of my livelihood as a postdoctoral research associate. Following that day’s press release from the USDA—“USDA Cancels Biden Era Climate Slush Fund, Reprioritizes Existing Funding to Farmers”—the email transformed the cloud of uncertainty that loomed over all federally funded scientific inquiry into concrete dejection. Since Inauguration Day, the signing of dozens of executive orders that upended established research priorities, the freezing and unfreezing of federal funds, and the termination of funded grants created a whiplash effect and engendered the ever-present dread of what would be “the next shoe to drop”[1] across research communities around the country. The e-mail confirmed the arrival of the next shoe: the termination of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, including the more than $50 million research and farmer-incentive initiative to support producers of major commodities across the state.[2] In the course of days, hasty action was taken to effectively dismantle the project, including the termination of doctoral and postdoctoral research positions, the firing of project managers, and the lockdown of the cloud-based drive where meeting notes and project details were shared among collaborators. The blow was softened only slightly when an updated termination notice was received a week later, which gave the host institution 120 days to close out the project. There was also an allusion to an opportunity to submit an updated proposal that aligned more closely with the administration’s new “Farmer First”[3] priorities for funding consideration.
The project in question, which I will refer to as Project A, was (or perhaps still is) a transdisciplinary[4] public, private, tribal partnership aimed at incentivizing farmers to incorporate climate-smart agricultural practices into the production of major commodities and to support market opportunities for those commodities and related value-added products.[5] The project involved/s on-farm research, and producer participation was/is integral. While the project was indeed terminated and there has been tangible fallout, including the loss of research positions, incentives to producers, and funding to all project partners, I am still hopeful enough to contemplate the present-tense “is” rather than the past-tense “was” in describing the project. In June, we submitted a modified scope and budget to align with new requirements and policy priorities while striving to maintain the overall objective: to support producers to expand sustainable agricultural practices and access to related markets. We are still waiting for the USDA’s decision on what I call Project A version 2.0. In this post, I examine the dynamics of transdisciplinary agricultural research in the context of recent, stark changes in political priorities. I consider the mobilization and erasure of the term “underserved producers” to shape research objectives and activities through processes of translation from government policy priorities to grant proposals and participant-recruitment efforts.
Politics and Processes of Translation in Landscapes of Shifting Federal Priorities
Recent work in science and technology studies and actor-network theory has explored “translation” as the process through which “knowledge travels, is transformed, and gets established in socio-material effects or practical actions” (Weger, 2019: 186; Foster, 2023). Weger (2019) develops this definition of translation in his ethnographic study of how the Mekong Delta Plan has helped shape climate adaptation in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, tracing the movement of knowledge from the initial creation of a specific need and response by Dutch actors based on climate studies and foreign policy, to the establishment of a concrete plan to address climate change for the Mekong Delta. Foster (2023) further expands the concept of the politics of policy translation in her study on Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) and Indigenous rights law, observing that the diverse translations of FPIC across national and international spaces have differential impacts on Indigenous self-determination and state sovereignty over Indigenous peoples. In what follows, I explore how USDA policy priorities are translated into project-level objectives and activities through the writing of the grant proposal of Project A and the subsequent realization of the proposed work by a transdisciplinary research team.
My analysis is based on my participation as collaborator, including during regular and ad-hoc project meetings; semi-structured interviews with Project A team leaders focused on dimensions of transdisciplinary agricultural research; and analysis of archives, including Project A’s project narrative (the part of the grant proposal that details the needed information to fulfill the proposed project’s goals). As a postdoctoral researcher, I was not involved in the writing of the grant proposal but rather joined the team after the grant had been recommended for funding and the research team mostly formed. Being removed from the initial elaboration of the project provides space to look at the project from the outside-in, even as I have actively helped shape research activities. The only two anthropologists on the project, my postdoc advisor and I share this privileged vantage point of both participant and participant-observer of this transdisciplinary team.
The initial grant proposal was written and submitted during the Biden administration, during which time the term “underserved producers” permeated the language of requests for applications (RFAs) published by the USDA. The term “underserved producer” emerged from the 1990 farm bill, in which the USDA formally recognized several groups referred to as “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” (Pub. L. No. 101-624, 1990) who faced inequitable access to USDA programs and policies, that is, those who were “undeserved” by the USDA.[6] Who is considered “underserved” may vary based on the USDA program, though the category broadly includes beginning producers, socially disadvantaged producers (including individuals who are Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino, and/or women), veterans, and limited-resource producers (USDA, 2022). To address the imperative to increase underserved producer’ access to USDA programs, Project A’s proposal included a participant quota based on “underserved” status. Project A sought to recruit a certain percentage of underserved producers to participate in the project’s incentive program to promote the addition or expansion of one or more climate-smart practices on a given producer’s fields. “Underserved” was defined broadly, though the authors of the proposal specified the groups their recruitment efforts would focus on: tribal members, women, small producers, veterans, and beginning farmers and ranchers. This focus reflected the demographics of the state (e.g., the increase of women producers from 12 to 31% of producers in the state between 2012 and 2017, which was noted in the proposal) and the composition of the partnership team (e.g., the participation of two federally recognized tribes).
I joined the team in August 2024, as the project leads were carrying out the initial phases of participant recruitment and enrollment. The first round (“Round 0”) had occurred over the summer, targeting producers whom project partners already knew and who would be willing to beta test the enrollment process. In November, Project A completed the first open round of participant recruitment (“Round 1”), and I had the opportunity to discuss this process with different project partners. In one interview, a project partner and I discussed the ambiguity of the definition of “underserved,” given its different usage across USDA projects. They wanted to make sure they were fulfilling the promises of the grant, and as the resident social scientist, I was seen as an expert on this topic. Though I was not, I did more background research to create a document outlining how each category of underserved producer was defined by USDA agencies. In a later interview, another project lead shared their perspective that the definition that should matter most for our project was the one written in our proposal, which had effectively been approved by the USDA when the grant was funded.
Overall, recruitment efforts—including information meetings across the state, press releases, and presentations at field days—did not target producers from specific underserved groups but rather were carried out to cast as wide a net as possible. The publication of materials in Spanish and English in an effort to reach Hispanic producers[7] was, in fact, an exception by targeting a specific group. At the same time, it followed the general approach of greater inclusion by increasing overall accessibility of the project. More focused recruitment occurred organically because of composition of the transdisciplinary project team. For example, the participation of two federally recognized tribes and a beef cooperative in project leadership allowed for community-based approaches to recruitment, which have been shown to help recruitment of minoritized and other underrepresented groups in other areas of research, such as medical research (e.g., Hanza et al., 2016, Matsuda et al., 2016). For one of the tribes, this included enrollment of the tribal-owned and operated farm into the project. Additionally, the beef cooperative played an important role in the recruitment of women ranchers.
Project partners visit with a farmer on one of his fields to discuss his sustainable practices and marketing strategies during a project-wide meeting in November 2024. (Photo: author)
When Project A was terminated in April, it was on track to meet its quota of underserved producers. This goal has since become irrelevant, at least in terms of federal priorities and the updated project scope. Project A v2.0 removed language referring to “underserved” producers to focus on “small” producers to better align with current Farmer First priorities. Yet, the nuanced change may not necessarily change the impacts of the project if it is refunded. According to the original proposal, “underserved growers tend to own and/or operate smaller farms (Horst et al., 2019).” Thus, while Project A v2.0’s new scope and budget speak to the USDA’s Farmer First priorities under the current administration, the USDA’s former imperative to address farming-related inequities remains translated by the revised proposal, albeit veiled. If Project A v2.0 is funded, we will be able to observe how the new project objectives are translated into processes of producer recruitment and enrollment.
Looking Forward
This post will be published without satisfying knowledge on the state of Project A v2.0. In the meantime, I am analyzing interviews I conducted with project partners before we found out the project had been terminated. The continuation of that work—in addition to the sustained commitments of the project partners to support sustainable agriculture and ranching practices while translating current federal policy priorities into the proposal for Project A v2.0—blurs what defines new and old configurations of the project in the ever-changing socioecological landscapes of agricultural research.
Notes
[1] I began to hear the phrase “the next shoe to drop” so often that I eventually looked up its origin. According to Barker (2024), the phrase may have come about in the United States in late 1890s and early 1900s in reference to hearing when another tenant takes their shoe off and drops it on the floor through the thin walls and floors of tenant buildings in major cities.
[2] Given the sensitivity of some of the topics in this post, I avoid specific references related to the research project discussed.
[3] The “Farmer First” policies on which the original grant was evaluated were: “A minimum of 65% of federal funds must go to producers; Grant recipients must have enrolled at least one producer as of 12/31/2024; and Grant recipients must have made a payment to at least one producer as of 12/31/2024.” Our project failed to meet the first criterion. The same week we received the termination notification, the America First Policy Institute published its “Farmer First Agenda.” In May 2025, the USDA announced its “Farmer First” policy agenda.
[4] In this work, I use transdisciplinary to refer to research and practice aimed at creating engaged, socially responsible science (Bernstein, 2015). According to this definition, transdisciplinary work is defined by the aims of the research process and outcomes and not the number of researchers, disciplines, fields, or practitioners involved (Pohl et al., 2021), and it can be considered a deliberate integration and co-production of science and society (Jasanoff, 2004).
[5] The description itself merits a critical examination of the idea(l)s of climate-smart agriculture and markets in the context of U.S. agriculture, which goes beyond the scope of this blog post.
[6] The term “historically underserved producer” is also used as an umbrella term for these groups of producers, the word “historically” added to recognize the goal to right “historical wrongs” faced by these producers. See, for example, “Historically Underserved Producers” published by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
[7] The term “Hispanic producers” (versus Latinx producers) was used in the Project Narrative and is used in the USDA’s Census of Agriculture to refer to farmers of “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” (USDA NASS, 2022).
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my wonderful project partners and my postdoctoral advisor for sharing in the work to support producers and more sustainable agricultural practices. Also, thank you to Aaron Neiman for the insightful feedback.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In addition, any reference to specific brands or types of products or services does not constitute or imply an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for those products or services. USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender.
References
Barker, Richard. “Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop – Meaning, Origin and Usage – History of English.” History of English (blog), June 28, 2024. https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop.
Bernstein, Jay. “Transdisciplinarity: A Review of Its Origins, Development, and Current Issues.” Journal of Research Practice. 11, 1 (2015). https://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/510.html
Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990. Pub. L. No. 101-624 (1990).
Foster, Laura. “Translating Indigenous Rights: A Multi-Level Analysis of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent in Peru,” PhD diss., (University of Georgia, 2023).
Hanza, Marcelo et al. “Lessons Learned from Community-Led Recruitment of Immigrants and Refugee Participants for a Randomized, Community-Based Participatory Research Study.” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. 18, 5 (2016), doi:10.1007/s10903-016-0394-2
Horst, Megan and Marion, Amy. “Racial, ethnic and gender inequities in farmland ownership and farming in the U.S.” Agriculture and Human Values. 36 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-018-9883-3
Jasanoff, Sheila. “The idiom of co-production.” In States of Knowledge: The co-production of science and social order. Edited by Sheila Jasanoff. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Matsuda, Yui et al. “Guidelines for research recruitment of underserved populations (EERC).” Applied Nursing Research. 32 (2016), doi:10.1016/j.apnr.2016.07.009
Pohl, Christian. “Conceptualising transdisciplinary integration as a multidimensional interactive process.” Environmental Science & Policy. 118 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.12.005
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)a. Get Started: Resources for Historically Underserved Farmers and Ranchers. Farmers.gov, 2022.
USDA NASS. “Hispanic Producers.” 2022 Census of Agriculture: Highlights. (2022).
Weger, Jacob. “The Vietnamization of delta management: The Mekong Delta Plan and politics of translation in Vietnam.” Environmental Science & Policy. 100 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2019.07.011
