Karen Bottary sells basil as fast as she can grow it.
Right now, her plants are confined to a 60-by-120-foot barn near her home outside Kansas City. She felt she needed to expand her business to make it sustainable long-term.
So Bottary, a disabled veteran, applied for a grant through the Regional Food Business Centers, a U.S. Department of Agriculture program designed to support smaller food-related businesses through training, grants and technical assistance.
She was approved for $41,301 earlier this year. She hired an employee thinking that the grant would quickly follow. But she still hasn’t received the money.
“I still had to produce. I needed somebody to produce. I hired under the idea that I would get maybe a back pay for the wages that I paid. That’s not gonna happen,” Bottary said. “I’m out of pocket until I get the grant.”
Until then, her business is hanging on by a thin thread. Bottary sold her tractor this month to pay her bills. Growing basil indoors requires a lot of power, and she often pays more than $2,000 per month for electricity. She’s still unsure when she’ll get the grant money.
“What I hope will happen is that the grant will fund. If it doesn’t fund, everything I got here that I’m currently using in my business is for sale,” she said.
In July, the USDA abruptly canceled the program that granted Bottary the money. She’s one of several small business owners who are still waiting for their grant.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the Regional Food Business Centers weren’t financially viable long-term.
“The Biden Administration created multiple, massive programs without any long-term way to finance them,” Rollins said. “This is not sustainable for farmers who rely on these programs, and it flies in the face of Congressional intent.”
Rollins has said that her department will honor the program’s grant commitments. But it’s unclear when that will happen.
The USDA launched the program in 2022 using $400 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, the economic stimulus bill passed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was to expand markets for small producers, and improve resiliency of the food supply chain in rural areas.
The program divided the country up into 12 regions, each of which offered training specific to the needs of local producers. The grants, which ranged from $15,000 to $100,000, could fund additions like cold storage, marketing, vehicles and other infrastructure to help deliver food to customers.
Lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill in June 2024 to ensure long-term funding for the business centers, but it went nowhere.
Cheryal Hills is the lead coordinator for the North Central Regional Food Business Center, which includes Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. She said the program targeted businesses that were not generally on USDA’s radar.
“We were asked to try to serve those growers who had never interfaced with USDA,” Hills said. “So this is an intentional effort to reach the hardest to reach agricultural producers, aggregators, distributors, processors.”
Hills and her colleagues had selected applicants to receive grants in 2025. But she was informed by the USDA in January that all money for the program was frozen until further notice. That notice came in July, when USDA officials told her that they were shutting down the program.
“We had a Zoom call on the 15th of July, where a statement was read to us and then we were promptly told that no questions would be taken and they wanted to just end the call in five minutes,” Hills said.
Donald Green has worked with farmers in the southeast since 1971 with the Mississippi Council of Farm Workers Opportunities. He also led the Delta Regional Food Business Center, which covered parts of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Green said the business center program was the best government program he’d worked with, because of its unique focus on rural food infrastructure.
“Sometimes the rural communities, they have the capacity to grow the products, but they don’t have the capacity to get it out of the field, get it to a major market in time before it spoils,” Green said. “So they have to have freezer trucks, they have to have freezer storage, they have to have cool down facilities.”
A group of 38 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Rollins on Aug. 5 to oppose the business centers’ closure. The group also included nine questions for Rollins about how and why the program was shut down, asking her to respond by Aug. 31.
“We urge you to restore the RFBC program and continue working with small- and mid-sized farms to strengthen our nation’s food system and local economies,” the letter said.
Kerissa Payne is also waiting to receive a grant. She and her husband, who are first-generation farmers, own Covey Rise Farms in western Kansas. They sell beef, pork and chicken directly to consumers.
The Paynes plan to use the money to install freezers at their farm store and to buy a trailer. She said the ability to store and sell fresh produce would benefit their whole community of farmers and consumers.
“There’s no cold storage around here,” Payne said. “I’m hoping that we’ll have it sooner rather than later just because our goal was to add some seafood [to the farm store] for Lent season, but obviously Lent’s passed.”
Payne praised how easy it was to apply for the grant, relative to other opportunities. She recommended the Regional Food Business Center resources to others.
“I was excited to share it with other people in our area, how they could apply for the grant because they were needing assistance,” Payne said. “I was a little bummed because I feel like it was something that definitely could have helped a lot of producers.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
