A Lifeline for California’s Small Farms Just Expired. What Comes Next?

She went on to study managerial economics at UC Davis, learning how big food worked from the inside.

Then, she decided to stop moving.

“I realized I needed to kind of settle down,” Estrada-Bugarin said.

But as she settled, she noticed a problem that kept surfacing: small farmers in the Central Valley — many of them immigrants, many growing without synthetic chemicals — could grow beautiful food but had nowhere reliable to sell it.

Today, Estrada-Bugarin is the founder and president of Sweet Valley Produce, a food hub in Merced County that aggregates fruits and vegetables from small regenerative and organic farms and finds them markets. The beauty of her line of work, she said, lies in connecting growers and eaters “without having to go through a lot of steps in the food chain.”

For one year, the program that made that vision work best was a federal one, called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, or LFPA. It expired for Sweet Valley Produce in June.

The federal LFPA helped hundreds of California farms sell millions of pounds of locally grown food to food banks while paying growers full market prices. Now that the Trump administration has ended the program, California farmers fear losing one of their most reliable markets as state leaders weigh whether to keep it alive.

For now, lawmakers have proposed extending state funding for LFPA, and the measure sits on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. Newsom, who has publicly opposed the program’s cancellation, has until Tuesday to decide whether California will fund the program on its own.

A box of vegetables, a family fed

LFPA was born out of the pandemic, when federal money flowed to strengthen local food supply chains. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sent funds to states, which used them to buy food from local farmers and route it to hunger-relief programs.

In California, the program was called Farms Together, which was run by three nonprofits — the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, or CAFF, Fresh Approach and the California Association of Food Banks.

For Estrada-Bugarin and many other small farms, it worked like this: food banks paid Sweet Valley Produce, which assembled boxes of seven to 12 seasonal items — fruits, vegetables, herbs, plus a monthly value-added product like honey or microgreens — sourced from four or five local farms each.

The boxes went to the Modesto Salvation Army, which told her that many of the recipients were elderly people who couldn’t easily get to a store by themselves.

Without the program, she said, those families mostly received dry goods. “They don’t get the nutrient value of the vegetables and the fruits, especially those that are seasonally and locally available.”

The scale was substantial. By Estrada-Bugarin and CAFF’s accounts, LFPA worked with roughly 870 farms across over 50 California counties and 50 food banks, moving some 23 million pounds of food and more than $60 million in local purchases.

Sweet Valley Produce alone held a contract worth more than $800,000 — money to buy from farms across Stanislaus, Merced, Fresno and Madera counties, and most importantly, money remaining rooted in the region. “When the farmer gets paid that money, they go and spend it within our own economy,” she said.

Nearly two hundred miles northwest, in Sonoma County, Dylan Stein watched the same program reshape a different operation.

Stein is the wholesale manager and a worker-owner at FEED Cooperative, a Petaluma food hub jointly owned by the farmers who sell through it and the workers who run it. FEED moves produce for a network of about 70 small North Bay farms, many of them 10 acres or less — tiny by California standards.

“In 2024, it comprised like 25% of our sales,” Stein said of LFPA. “That being there just gave an extra outlet for the farms we work with.”

“It was kind of a thriving year for a lot of farms in the North Bay,” he added.

Food banks noticed the difference. Pallets that might normally have held russet potatoes instead arrived full of leafy greens and herbs picked the day before.

“You’re opening these boxes, and it’s almost like gold light is coming out,” Stein said. “It’s the best quality produce that you can find.”

Many of FEED’s other customers are high-end restaurants, he noted, meaning that the food banks were getting the same thing.

More than charity

The deeper value of LFPA, the growers said, wasn’t just generosity. It was stability — and the price.

“If you pay $3 for a bunch of kale at Sprouts, usually the farmer gets like $1 of that,” Estrada-Bugarin said. “But in this case the money went directly to the farmer, so the farmer got paid $3 a bunch.”

That cushion also made it possible for some growers to farm without synthetic chemicals. Regenerative practices, or rebuilding soil through crop rotation, hedgerows and minimal inputs, often result in lower yields. But the better price absorbed the difference.

“I actually had at least two farmers who were transitioning to organic farming from conventional farming because they were able to be supported through this program,” Estrada-Bugarin said.

Others, who previously grew a single crop, used it to start diversifying their fields.

At FEED, Stein saw similar progress. A grower with a surprise surplus — 80 cases of tomatoes in a year that usually yields 50 — suddenly had somewhere to send the extra load.

Over three strong years, farmers accomplished what farm statistics rarely reflect: They expanded. They planted new fields, signed new leases and, in a few cases, bought land.

“Usually when you’re hearing about farm stats, it’s like farms closing and acreage downgrading,” Stein said. “So these expansions we saw were a huge deal.”

Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said that combination of economic and human value helped the program win bipartisan support.

“Farmers loved it because it improved their viability,” he said. “But they also loved just being able to feed their community on a human level.”

Then, in 2025, the second Trump administration terminated the program.

Lavender said that the cancellation arrived at the worst possible moment in the agricultural calendar, “just as farmers were purchasing seeds and getting ready for the spring season.”

Stein recalled the whiplash.

“Even contracts that you’re in the middle of are canceled. They stop delivering.”

After pushback, growers were allowed to finish existing agreements, but the roughly three additional years of funding they had planned around simply evaporated.

Land, labor and belonging

A report from CAFF found that 5% of landowners control half of California’s cropland, and that the market increasingly favors private equity firms and investors buying large parcels. For a small grower hoping to buy 10 or 20 acres, there’s often nothing within that size range to buy.

“Otherwise, you’re stuck renting,” Estrada-Bugarin said, “and then you’re just in this pattern of renting and never really owning the land that you farm.”

CAFF also estimates that about 70% of California farmers participating in LFPA identified as socially disadvantaged, a USDA designation for groups that have historically faced barriers to land, credit and federal programs.

For Estrada-Bugarin, the work is deeply personal. As a Mexican American, she grew up hearing that farming was a dead end.

“We were always told, ‘Don’t work in the fields, agriculture is bad, it’s hard work, not well paid.’”

One story stands out.

During last year’s immigration protests that shut down parts of downtown Los Angeles, a farmer she worked with couldn’t get to his local farmers market for an entire week. He had harvested 80 boxes of plums — and had nowhere to sell them.

He called her.

Because LFPA existed, the plums went into food-bank boxes instead of the compost.

“That’s a very strong example of the power that LFPA had to support us as farmers through these political climates,” she said.

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns added another obstacle for farmers, Estrada-Bugarin said. Crops went unharvested. Yields and income were lost. She said immigration authorities drove past Sweet Valley Produce at least once. Her employees, although prepared, were rattled.

Immigration reform and the farm bill move on separate tracks in Washington, through different congressional committees, Lavender said, so labor policy can’t simply be written into the bill — even though the two are “deeply linked” in the real world.

But Estrada-Bugarin sees the gap from the ground. The industry’s long-running answer to labor uncertainty has been automation, she said.

“But what happens with that? You’re pushing out the small farmers, because we don’t have the money to have automation either,” said Estrada-Bugarin, who would rather see programs such as the H-2A agricultural visa become easier for farmers to use. “How to make it more accessible, or how to make it work better for all of us.”

Now she’s trying to convince the next generation that there are viable careers in agriculture. The community that Estrada-Bugarin has built reflects that ambition. The growers she works with are Hindu, Laotian, Indian, Mennonite and more.

“This whole business is centered around relationship building,” she said.

As a first-generation American, she had to build those relationships from scratch, without the established networks that others inherit, the same way her parents farmed on passion without the language or the technology to keep up.

Farm bill uncertainty looms

For now, the future of California’s small farms may depend as much on Sacramento as it does Washington. With Farms Together’s federal funding gone, the coalition has asked the state for $45 million to keep the program alive. Lawmakers included $15 million in their budget proposal that Newsom is reviewing — enough, CAFF estimates, to keep it operating for about another year.

In an email, CAFF’s policy and organizing manager Keely Cervantes said that “farmers, food hubs, and food banks across California are urging Governor Newsom to support this vital safety net for both farmers and food insecure families.”

At the federal level, the picture is murkier. A new farm bill is being marked up ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline. It includes the Local Farmers Feeding Communities Act, which would create a permanent program similar to LFPA. But the proposal includes no guaranteed funding. Lavender called it “the bones of the house, but there’s no furniture. The lights won’t go on.”

Estrada-Bugarin said she has heard officials talk about supporting local farmers and putting America first. She would like to see it reach the people who grow the food.

“We need to continue supporting, because California is where most of our fresh fruits and vegetables are coming from,” she said.

If the funding returns, Estrada-Bugarin said, she will keep building. First refrigeration for her warehouse, food processing after that and then more partnerships with farmers. If it doesn’t, she fears some growers will simply quit. She has already watched several walk away.

“I see the need,” Estrada-Bugarin said. “I just work toward whatever I can do to make it happen.”

At a recent industry expo, Estrada-Bugarin realized that she was the only small grower in the room. Half the buyers and suppliers, she said, were from other countries.

She felt imposter syndrome creeping in. Then she pushed past it.

“We need to start taking space and being in these places,” she said.

Reporting for this story was supported by the Los Angeles Press Club’s Charles M. Rappleye Investigative Journalism Award.