Emma Johnson is surrounded by apples. Specifically, 53 varieties across 80 acres on her family farm in the rural Iowa community of Central City. To be fair, the farm also grows dozens of varieties of vegetables and 40 types of herbs.

But those veggies and herbs are dwarfed by the farm’s canopy of 8,000 apple trees. And this year, Johnson expects a milestone haul. “We’re going to have a record apple crop this season,” she said in the summer of 2025.

Ordinarily, that news would be exciting. This year though, the mood is decidedly dour. The cancellation of the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) cooperative agreement program and the Local Food for Schools (LFS) cooperative agreement program, both administered by the USDA, puts Johnson and her family in a difficult position.

She estimates that because of the cancellation, her family-run Buffalo Ridge Orchard will need to move at least 30,000 pounds of apples that would have otherwise been purchased by local schools, food pantries, shelters, and hospitals with the grant funding from those two programs. 

The relationships established between local farmers and the organizations utilizing that grant funding created more stable and reliable markets for individual farmers, who already have to navigate a great deal of unpredictability. 

“We were told we would need to triple what we did last year,” Johnson said, referring to projections before this year’s growing season. “We were going into this year feeling really comfortable. Now, with some of those connections being severed or going backwards, it’s nerve racking. Your profit goes down and you’re making decisions to just break even.”

In between hand-pruning the thousands of trees in the orchard, and checking them regularly to ensure they are free of damaging fungus and insects, Johnson and her team are working to establish new markets while considering the need and costs associated with additional cold storage. At a time when Johnson said her team deserves a pay raise, working long hours in the heat of the summer, the farm has to consider if or when staffing cuts will need to be made. 

Johnson said when the program was cut in the spring, it felt shockingly sudden. Especially after increasing the farm’s production. Apples are a really popular item for school lunch programs, and those relationships as well as relationships with food pantries and other organizations were on the upswing for the Buffalo Ridge Orchard. 

That’s why Johnson was eagerly anticipating this season, when an additional 1,600 trees would come into full production. 

“It’s frustrating to cancel a program that is working and already had money appropriated,” she said. “We’re growing for Americans here. It’s unnecessary to do this to our community.”

The cancellation also comes at a time when Buffalo Ridge Orchard utilized a grant through the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program, funded by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), to purchase equipment that would have allowed them to scale and meet the needs of the LFPA and LFS programs. To be sure, Johnson said, they can still use the equipment and it will make the labor-intensive work on the orchard easier once it’s up and running. But the programs were designed to work together. 

“We hoped it would make us more efficient and reduce our price point,” she said, considering how the landscape has changed. “Right now, we’re on a bit of a hope and a prayer that it’s all gonna shake out.”

Unpredictability hit Buffalo Ridge Orchard a second time in 2025 in the form of an unusual, late-season hail storm. It reduced the farm’s late-season crop by half, further underscoring for Johnson why programs like these are important for farmers. 

After all, apples don’t adjust to market conditions, abrupt policy changes or weather.

“We can’t decide not to let the apples fruit. Our industry is incredibly labor intensive and it’s bringing workers back into rural communities because it requires labor,” Johnson said. “We’re taking a lot of risk. Next year we won’t be able to take that risk. If things don’t pan out, we’ll have to make big cuts. We know how to hustle and adapt and change so we’re doing our best to not have too much of a shortfall this year, but we’ll see.”