Linda Mielke is the sixth generation of her family to farm dry land in eastern Washington. “Not much grows in a 12-inch rainfall area,” she said. “Over the centuries, people have figured out that soft white wheat grows really well in our area. We have been doing this for a very long time.”

In 2017, their daughter Alicia came home to farm with her parents, after earning a master’s in flute performance from the New England Conservatory in Boston. Together, they farm just under 10,000 acres, “just the four of us: my husband, myself, our daughter Alicia and her husband Matthew,” Mielke said. “My daughter Alicia, of course, is the seventh generation, and their daughter Emily, will be the eighth, if she chooses to farm.”

The Mielkes farm a summer fallow crop rotation, letting half the land lie fallow at any given time to gather enough moisture to grow a crop. “We don’t irrigate, and we have learned how to farm dry,” Mielke said. ““We’ve been in a drought for the last five or six years, and our crop yields are reflecting that.”

In the last year, they’ve also learned to navigate broken promises from the federal government that left them on the hook for thousands of dollars. They paid all costs up front for a solar array to power their farm. “We have a signed contract, but we have yet to see that money that was frozen in January, 2025,” Mielke said. “That’s $40,000 out of our pocket that we’re supposed to have reimbursed.”

The Mielkes were ready to sign an Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) contract when the federal government halted funding for the program as well. “That was a four-year contract, and we were due to receive $900,000ish dollars that we’ll never see,” Mielke said.

Mielke sees how whiplash for farmers hurts the broader rural economy in eastern Washington. “If we don’t have that money, we don’t buy new equipment,” she said. “We don’t buy a new service vehicle.”

She depends on her abilities as a farmer to cut spending in tight times. “I can cut back,” she said. “I have a big garden. I have chickens. All I have to do is buy feed, and I’ve got eggs. So when you’re hurting agriculture, you’re just hurting so many other things down the line. Talk about trickledown economics. Good grief. This is where it actually does trickle down.”

Mielke also worries about funding cuts to federal agencies that farmers depend on for information to make day-to-day decisions, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and USDA. “I don’t think people really realize how much the USDA is doing for them,” Mielke said. “And we look at the NOAA website five times a day to know what’s coming, weather-wise. We plan our entire day on what’s coming weather-wise. We don’t work in an office building and look out the window and go, ‘Oh, I guess I should have brought an umbrella to work today.’”

With the evaporation of nearly a million dollars in expected costshares for farm improvements, Mielke keeps a careful eye on two bottom lines. In the short term, she needs to make sure that the farm can bring in more than is spent on growing a crop each year. In the long term, she needs to carefully steward the land so that the farm can continue to provide for her daughter, granddaughter and future generations.

“The soil is our life,” Mielke said. “The air, the environment, is our life. If I don’t take care of my body, I’m going to die. If I don’t take care of the environment and everything involved with the air, water and soil, I don’t have a business.”