Sustainable Farming Practices Could Be Impacted By Federal Funding Cuts

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, June 17, 2025…

• Federal dollars that help small growers experiment with farming more sustainably are drying up. Now, some farmers on the Central Coast are trying to find ways to keep their land nourished despite precarious funding. 
• A federal appeals court will hear arguments Tuesday on President Donald Trump’s decision to send armed troops to Los Angeles in response to immigration protests.
• Governor Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature are proposing to gut California’s main source of homelessness funding.

Researchers Got Millions To Incentivize Sustainable Farming In The Salinas Valley. But That Money May Be Going Away

Celsa Ortega walks up and down the rows of her 4.25-acre farm in Aromas in Monterey and San Benito counties on a cloudy morning in early June. She’s been farming for five years, but has only had her own plot for about a year. She’s currently growing lettuce and three different varieties of onion. “My biggest dream in agriculture is to understand the earth,” Ortega said, in Spanish.

A federally funded grant project aimed to foster that. Researchers at Cal State Monterey Bay got $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities (PCSC) program last year to test the effectiveness of three climate-smart practices on farmland in the Salinas Valley: adding compost, planting cover crops, and reducing the amount of applied nitrogen fertilizer.

The term “climate-smart” refers to strategies farmers use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from crop production and to make their operations more resilient to climate change. The grant was initially supposed to fund five years of research. But in April, researchers got a letter from the USDA stating their grant was getting cancelled—and not just theirs. The whole nationwide program was getting axed.

The USDA has since announced it was changing course. Instead of a full-blown termination, the PCSC program is getting revamped under a new name—Advancing Markets for Producers. Current grant recipients might be able to keep their funding as long as they comply with the new requirements.

Can Trump Keep Troops In LA? Appeals Court To Hear Case Tuesday

Governor Gavin Newsom had a fleeting win against President Trump last week when a federal judge handed down an order that would have halted Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles. Within hours of that decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals suspended the ruling, allowing the troops to remain under Trump’s control. On Tuesday, the appeals court is scheduled to pick up where it left off in Newsom’s challenge to Trump’s order.

The narrow focus of the hearing — and the expected order from the judges sometime this week — has massive implications for California. Namely: Can Newsom reclaim command of the National Guard against Trump’s wishes?

The arguments will play out in front of a three-judge panel, two of whom were appointed by Trump and one by former President Joe Biden, a Democrat. This isn’t the only hearing that’ll determine who gets control of the 4,000 guard members Trump deployed since June 7, after protests in the Los Angeles area erupted in response to federal immigration officers raiding work sites and arresting individuals they say are in the U.S. without authorization. Those protests were in full force over the weekend. On Friday, the lower court judge who initially sided with Newsom’s lawyers is expected to hold a hearing on whether to issue a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s deployment of military personnel, including the Guard, to Los Angeles. For Newsom’s legal team to prevail in that hearing, they’ll have to clear a higher threshold of scrutiny. That’s because anyone seeking a preliminary injunction must demonstrate that the merits of their arguments will likely prevail in the full trial.

Proposed Budget Eliminates Funding For Homelessness

State leaders have been talking a lot lately about cleaning up California’s homeless encampments and moving people indoors. But the tentative budget they’ve drawn up for the upcoming year has many asking: With what money?

Both Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature have proposed gutting the state’s main source of homelessness funding in the 2025-26 budget, sending a wave of panic through the cities, counties and service providers that have been relying on that money for years. Now, those critics warn that thousands of Californians could end up back on the streets, undoing the tenuous progress the state has made in addressing the problem.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, whose city had been receiving about $30 million a year from that pot of homelessness funding — enough to pay for about 1,000 interim housing placements. “Residents of California tell us consistently that ending unsheltered homelessness is one of their very top priorities…So the idea that the state can’t make a substantial, consistent investment in residents’ top priority makes me question whether or not they’re really listening to the people of California.”