Earlier this week, USDA announced the availability of over $275 million in grant funding in fiscal year 2026 for the specialty crop industry through the Specialty Crop Research Initiative, the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program and the Specialty Crop Multi-State Program.
Crediting the Working Families Tax Cuts Act, USDA will provide $175 million per year for SCRI, more than double the previous amount of $80 million per year. It also increased the total funding available for SCBGP and SCMP from $85 million per year to $100 million per year starting in fiscal year 2026.
And while specialty crops welcome the grant funding, the industry is still awaiting payments from the $1 billion to support the specialty crop industry through the Assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers program announced earlier this year.
“If you go back to July of last year and the reconciliation bill — what they branded as the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ — it carried all of those tax extensions and also carried additional farm bill funding,” says Kam Quarles, CEO of the National Potato Council and a co-chair of the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance. “So, it’s very good for this year that USDA is rolling out that farm bill funding for the Specialty Crop Research Initiative, for block grants, for all those things.
“That money was basically farm bill money that is coming from an alternate source, but it’s money intended to show up every year to fund those very valuable programs and that’s separate and distinct from the economic crisis that specialty crops — and really all of agriculture — are facing right now, and that’s where the urgency lies,” he says.
In December of last year, USDA announced $12 billion in one-time bridge payments to American farmers, with only $1 billion earmarked for specialty crops, sugar and other unspecified commodities not covered by the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, leaving the specialty crop industry in need of billions in federal aid.
But specialty crops have yet to see a dime.
“It’s our understanding that money has been distributed,” says Quarles of the $11 billion going to program crop farmers. “The remaining [$1 billion] was to be shared between the sugar industry, specialty crops and other commodities. I don’t want to speak for the sugar industry, but I think some of that money has gone out. For specialty crops, no money has gone out. They’re still in the data-gathering stage, so not a dime has gone out under that program.”
Part of the holdup with specialty crop funding may stem from specialty crop farmers’ lack of familiarity with the process of qualifying for aid and Farm Service Agencies not equipped to receive them.
The USDA’s FSA has extended the 2025 acreage reporting deadline to April 24 for specialty crop producers seeking to qualify for the Assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers program.
“I think there were some capacity issues with FSA,” says Quarles. “Some FSA offices were very well staffed. Other were simply overwhelmed with the volume of growers who were coming in to talk to them. And that makes sense, because the specialty crop industry just hasn’t traditionally been set up to interact with FSA on a very intense basis that our program crop friends are because they’re constantly going in and updating their relationship with FSA, because that’s the conduit to a lot of these safety net programs.”
That was the first challenge that you had to get past as a specialty crop grower.
“These are horrible economic circumstances — not just for the program crops; we’re all in the same economic environment, and we really need to have a comprehensive solution that takes care of all of the vulnerable family farms out there so that they can live to experience the better environment that will be offered by tax reform policy and trade reforms,” says Quarles.
A Simple Call for More Aid
Agriculture has been waiting on an updated farm bill for a decade.
“We want to update those programs. That’s why we’re so supportive of what [House Agriculture Committee] Chairman [Glenn “GT”] Thompson is doing in starting that process and getting it out of the House Ag Committee … and we’re very hopeful it’s going to get to the president’s desk this year,” says Quarles.
Thompson is now advocating for $10 billion for row crop producers and $10 billion for specialty crop growers in farm aid.
But the process of getting funding to specialty crop farmers needs to be simplified, says Quarles.
“Specialty crops are so complicated,” he says. “They’re grown in so many different areas, in so many different circumstances.”
Quarles points to the USDA’s Coronavirus Food Assistance Program and the Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops (MASC) as examples of programs that got the money out.
“We have been arguing: Don’t reinvent the wheel,” says Quarles. “Simplicity is your friend. Avoid the things that didn’t work.
“And we’re hopeful that that’s going to be how the administration solves this,” he continues. “We think that’s just kind of common sense. And we’re very hopeful that relief is going to get delivered.”
Quarles says specialty crops are in the same economic crisis as the rest of agriculture, and relief can’t come soon enough.
“If we get to the end of the year and there is no economic relief for specialty crops, a number of family farms will be going out of business,” he says.
