Spring is a busy time at Tyonek Grown, a community farm on the west side of Cook Inlet. Local students come to plant seeds, water them and then harvest organic fruits and vegetables.
This summer, the farm managers had even bigger plans. They wanted to set up a community food forest that would include Indigenous plants and fruit trees.
But the forest – and many more of Tyonek Grown’s plans – are now up in the air. That’s due to federal staff and funding cuts, said Laurie Stuart, the executive director for Tyonek Tribal Conservation District, which manages the farm.
“The loss of those funds in the coming years is going to have a big impact on the growth that we were building,” Stuart said. “The future of the garden is having to be rethought.”
In Alaska, nearly all produce is imported, which makes the food supply vulnerable, especially in rural areas. Some support for local producers comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is one of many agencies that are cutting employees and programs in response to Trump’s executive orders.
In recent weeks, the agency reinstated some of its terminated employees but then put them on administrative leave.
That’s the case for Amanda Compton, who lives in Palmer and works in the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The program helps landowners – in Alaska, mainly tribes – to sustainably manage their natural resources. It’s helped villages set up fish passages, reindeer ranches and programs like Tyonek Grown.
That changed with the layoffs and disruptions, Compton said.
“We lost our entire team of people that are working to get Native communities greenhouses, our team that's getting the Native entities fish passages,” Compton said. “We lost our entire team that communicates between the engineers and tribal entities.”
Tyonek, an off-the-road community of about 300 people, is about 40 miles southwest of Anchorage as the crow flies. Produce needs to be flown in, so fruits and vegetables grown at the Tyonek farm give locals a rare chance to enjoy affordable fresh food.
The USDA’s Forest Service, through the Arbor Day Foundation, awarded $900,000 to Tyonek Tribal Conservation District in December. The grant was meant to grow their team and set up a quarter-acre community food forest next to the farm that would promote food sovereignty and traditional ecological knowledge, Stuart said.
“It's kind of a community, cultural harvesting space,” she said.
The Forest Service terminated the award, in an effort to comply with Trump's objectives.
Another terminated USDA grant is the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program. It’s meant to provide money to schools and food banks to buy produce from local farmers and fishermen, said Cayley Eller, Tyonek Grown’s programs manager.
“In Tyonek that meant that we were able to support our local farm operation and compensate the farm for the food that we're growing and feed community members at low costs, as well as supporting local fishermen and supporting other tribal producers,” Eller said.
Overall, Tyonek Grown has funds to operate now, but the near future is uncertain.
"It's a food security farm production space, and that means we're not making a profit on our produce,” Eller said. “Our goal is to feed the community, and that means we're heavily reliant on grant funds."
Reindeer herders in limbo
Meanwhile, about 500 miles northwest, around Nome, reindeer herders are wondering about their future, too. Tribal liaisons used to help herders apply for grants and establish rotational grazing plans, said Nathan Baring, director of the Kawerak's Reindeer Herding Association, which provides technical assistance to herders in Bering Strait communities.
The Trump administration also halted a USDA grant meant to support Indigenous peoples’ animal harvests and help communities expand their meat processing, he said.
“Having all of that kind of just thrown either into the air or outright eliminated just simply means that we start over in terms of shopping those projects around again, which then further delays what I would describe as Alaska's untapped potential in a pre-existing livestock industry,” Baring said.
Bonnie Suaŋa Scheele is an Iñupiaq reindeer herder at the Midnite Sun Reindeer Ranch near Nome. She said that for herders like her, interruptions in federal programs mean that it’s harder to find funds to build temporary housing for workers and corrals for holding animals.
Scheele said she should be at her ranch now, but she can’t be. She was counting on another frozen grant — this one from the Bureau of Indian Affairs — to help pay for upgrading her power source.
Despite the challenges, Scheele said herders will figure out a way to continue the practice, even if it means providing food for just their villages instead of expanding their operations.
“We'll overcome it. We'll figure it out,” she said. “It's going to come back around, and we're still, we're still here, we're still herding reindeer. We're still providing for communities.”
