The day Emily Wright expected to hear whether her vegetable and flower farm in mid-Missouri would receive grant funding to expand their operations, she was anxious.
“I was out in the field and I was just doing like a million different things to try to keep myself busy…” Wright said about the day in July. “All I could think about is just waiting for this press release or this email.”
Wright and her partner Paul Weber own Three Creeks Farm + Forest in Ashland. They sell their produce wholesale to places like restaurants and floral designers in the area.
The grant would allow them to build a new barn on their property to add coolers and a space for washing and packaging. Their goal is to get more locally-grown vegetables and value-added goods, like pickles and hot sauce, to their customers– both from their farm and potentially others in the area.
Wright eventually got some good news. Their project was among 30 selected to receive a grant.
But funding limitations in the Missouri state budget means they have to wait on the money. While 16 projects will get partial funding this fiscal year, Wright’s is one of more than a dozen that cannot be funded for the time being.
“Fourteen projects like ours are in what I'm calling bureaucratic purgatory, right?” Wright said. “We just, we can't start. There's no contract.”
The Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program aims to help small farmers across the U.S. get their products to market with grants for projects like constructing farm buildings or buying packaging equipment. The program is distributed through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service and funded through the American Rescue Plan Act.
Missouri received nearly $7 million for these grants. But Missouri lawmakers only approved about $2 million of those federal funds for the 2025 fiscal year. That means the Missouri Department of Agriculture, which is running the state’s program, can’t spend more than that amount.
Every state received funding for this grant program. In many states, the process is ongoing, and only four – including Nebraska and Kansas – have awarded the funds, according to the USDA status page.
But Missouri is likely the only state that limited the funding amount for this year, according to a USDA spokesperson.
“We have not been informed by any other state that they are in a similar situation,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “USDA anticipates that the remaining RFSI awards will be made in 2025.”
Allocating the dollars
There is no big reason behind the limited funding, according to Missouri Rep. Greg Sharpe. The Republican lawmaker chairs the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for Agriculture, Conservation, Natural Resources, and Economic Development and is part of the House Budget Committee.
Instead, he said it’s likely a result of lawmakers rushing to get the budget done.
“At the budget process at the end of the session, and between the House and the Senate, we have a tendency to jam everything through at the last,” Sharpe said. “And I think there’s some language that wasn’t in there to spend the money.“
Sharpe expects the funding will be addressed in the supplemental budget early next year. He said there are other departments with funding available that are unable to spend it due to the budget language.
“A lot of times the supplemental budget is kind of a nothing event. It will be a pretty big event this coming year in February,” Sharpe said. “There was quite a bit of things that are going to need to be addressed.”
Sharpe said there had been a “school of thought” that wanted the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program funding to be dispersed over four years. But he’s not expecting that to come to pass.
Wright and several other Missouri producers who applied for the funding signed a letter to Gov. Mike Parson in July, requesting a special session to allocate the full funding amount.
Gov. Parson’s office did not immediately return a request for comment from Harvest Public Media.
Grant impact
Many farmers are facing ongoing challenges, such as low crop prices and extreme weather. Tim Gibbons, the communications director for the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, said even a small amount of money can go a long way for farm families and their income.
“Any dollars going into our economies and our communities and farms right now is a big deal,” Gibbons said.
The Missouri Department of Agriculture received 142 applications for the program, Communications Director Christi Miller wrote in an email. The department expects that all of the projects will “receive their full funding as spending authority is made available by the Missouri legislature in future fiscal years,” according to the statement.
Wright said she’s working with the department to get the necessary approvals on her project in the meantime. So far, her project has made it through the last review process before it goes to the USDA for final approval, she said.
She’s looking at ways to move forward with her plans without the grant funding for now. This includes other grants that could help fund software upgrades or a vehicle. But most don’t fund construction projects, Wright said.
“Ultimately, to be able to build this program, we're gonna need the space that we proposed in the RFSI,” she said.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
