USDA Cuts, Labor Shortages Rankle Struggling Farm Economy

“Sometimes, people think of [agriculture] as cows and plows,” Fies says. “They don’t really broaden it out and think about the foundation. The farmer plowing the field, but all the other supporting industries that are involved.”

Berks County sits at the intersection of three congressional districts–Pennsylvania’s 4th, 6th and 9th districts, represented by Madeleine Dean (D), Chrissy Houlahan (D) and Dan Meuser (R) respectively–giving its voters a role in races that stretch beyond the county’s borders. However, farmers in different parts of the county face many of the same pressures: rising costs, labor shortages, changing markets and challenges to their growth.

Although Berks County has historically leaned Republican in federal elections, recent statewide races have indicated a shifting electorate. In 2026, that makes agriculture not only an economic issue for the county’s farmers, but an issue intersecting with several closely watched campaigns.

A farm economy struggles with federal policy

Weber’s family farm has survived three generations, but growing up, she was uncertain whether her passions could be incorporated into the farm. That was until 2016 when her father worked with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to transform more acreage into pastureland.

A year later, Weber left her job as a part-time librarian and began rebuilding Willow Run Farmstead. With the help of an NRCS conservation grant, the farm went from a conventional crop rotation system to a spanning 75 acres of pasture, fences, waterlines, riparian buffers and silvopasture.

“The farm as it is, would not be here without that funding,” Weber says.

For Weber, the connection between federal policy and the farm is not theoretical. Decisions made at the federal level have had direct consequences for her operation and farmers around her, she says.

In the last 30 years, Berks County alone has received more than $173 million in federal farm payments according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. While $111 million, or 64%, of that went toward commodity crop subsidies, $15 million, or 9%, went toward conservation programming.

However, the federal support is facing a new test under the Trump administration.

In June, the House of Representatives approved $22.5 billion in funding for the USDA in its fiscal year 2027 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies appropriations bill. This represents a 3% cut in USDA funding. The decrease was not as severe as the White House’s proposed budget, which called to eliminate $4.9 billion, or a 19% decrease (the Senate has not approved its version of the bill). Funding for conservation technical assistance faced a steep decline, notable because those funds allow NRCS to support both its own staff as well as third-party technical assistance providers that can supply local expertise.

Yet the federal picture is more complicated than a simple reduction in conservation support.

The cuts come on top of historically low levels of staffing at the USDA due to layoffs and deferred resignations prompted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The NRCS has offices in all 50 states and works within the more than 2,300 USDA local offices nationwide, making staff a vital front-line resource for farmers accessing funds and specialized assistance with potential commercial conflicts of interest.

According to data from the Office of Personnel Management, staff reductions in 2025 left NRCS offices facing widespread staffing shortages, with 144 counties losing 100% of their NRCS staff. Berks County lost one of its 10 county staff members, a 10% decrease.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Commission found that every USDA agency has lost staffing since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Between January 2025 to January 2026, the NRCS saw a 23% loss in staff, from 11,861 to 9,078. Reductions in USDA staffing have affected states nationwide during that time and have resulted in a 19% reduction in Pennsylvania’s USDA workforce.

“Prior to the funding cuts that have been happening, we already did not have enough government agents in the NRCS Department and USDA in general,” Weber says, “so gutting these programs makes it even harder for farmers to access these resources.

Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.-06)  says the loss of funding and staff has also made federal agricultural programs less predictable for farmers.

“What we all crave is predictability and consistency,” Houlahan says. “If you take away programs that existed at one point and are no longer available, and we take away not only the funding for them but the people who supported them, the fact that it’s not reliable and it’s not dependable is particularly harmful.”

Houlahan points to an unseasonably severe late Spring freeze and the damage it caused in Berks and Chester counties as an example of farmers encountering difficulty obtaining federal assistance. She says her office has been working with the USDA since April to secure emergency funding for affected Berks County farmers. While the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is offering $10 million in relief to fruit growers, the state is still fighting for block-grant funding five months later.

“The USDA still hasn’t allowed for emergency funding for the Berks County farmers,” Houlahan says. “And we’ve been working literally since that frost happened to try to unlock that.”

While $10 million in state grants are available to farmers who lost more than 30% of their harvest, officials say that losses from the freeze are estimated at $150 million. Without federal funding, impacted farmers that receive a state grant may only be able to recoup a few hundred dollars an acre.

Weber says that continued farm bill funding and flexibility are important as agricultural conditions change.

“In my opinion, we should be updating the farm bill on a regular basis and supporting the needs of farmers in both large-scale commodities and small-scale operations,” she says. “This is a bipartisan initiative because people of all parties need to eat each day.

Weber says agriculture policy is one factor in how she decides who to vote for, along with a range of other issues.

“When I can see directly how federal policies affect my farm and community, it greatly impacts how I think about the upcoming election,” Weber says.

Those federal decisions are part of the policy question facing Berks County voters in three congressional districts in November.

The Pennsylvania Farm Bill, a state-funded set of programs, operates alongside federal programs such as crop insurance, specialty crops and conservation. Now in its eight years of funding, the state’s 2026-2027 budget included $13.8 million for PA Farm Bill programs. The state’s 2026-2027 Sustainable Agricultural Program is also contingent on the availability of federal funding.

Farm policy plays out in upcoming midterms

For farmers like Weber, those programs make decisions in Washington and Harrisburg tangible. In November, Berks County voters will weigh competing approaches to agricultural policy across the three congressional districts that divide the county.

Congress has a direct role in many of the programs farmers rely on, from determining funding for the USDA and conservation programs to shaping federal farm legislation. That means the outcome of the midterm elections could affect not only how much agricultural assistance is available, but which parts of the farm economy lawmakers prioritize.

In Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean, who is seeking re-election against Republican Aurora Stuski, has said she supports federal farm bill reauthorization, expanded crop insurance and investment in infrastructure and broadband. Stuski’s campaign has emphasized lower costs, domestic food production and food safety.

For farmers in the district, that places the broader debate over federal agricultural policy alongside the immediate question Weber raises: how much support will be available to farmers trying to keep their operations viable?

Those debates take a different form elsewhere in Berks County, where the pressures facing agriculture are tied to one of southeastern Pennsylvania’s most distinctive crops: mushrooms.

Mushroom industry under pressure

More than 60% of U.S. mushrooms are grown in southeastern Pennsylvania, with Chester and Berks counties at the center of the industry. Berks mushroom farms reported nearly $142 million in sales in 2022, roughly one-fifth of the county’s agricultural sales.

Yet the industry is changing. National mushroom production has fallen since 2018. Berks County mushroom production increased, yet sales declined about 8% between 2017 and 2022.

The industry has become one point of disagreement between the candidates in Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan is seeking re-election against Republican Marty Young.

Houlahan has supported legislation aimed specifically at mushroom growers. She introduced the bipartisan Protecting Mushroom Farmers Act with fellow Berks County Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.-09) which would direct the USDA to study whether federally backed crop insurance could be tailored to the risks facing mushroom farmers.

Young points to the mushroom industry as an example of what he sees as a broader problem with federal agricultural policy.

“I would describe it as really bad monetary policy. We ended up putting a tremendous amount of debt and leverage into the system from the farm all the way to the table,” Young says. “There’s a tax on the entirety of the system, so you’re paying interest [on the debt] on the seed you’re buying from, and then you’re paying interest on what you’re growing, and then you’re paying interest on what you’re harvesting.”

The candidates also differ over broader agricultural legislation. Houlahan opposed the House version of the farm bill, which passed in April, citing cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or federal food assistance, and a $1 billion reduction in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program that would disproportionately affect beginning and specialty crop growers. Her office has said those provisions outweighed other portions of the legislation she supported, while championing the bipartisan decision to remove legal immunity for pesticide manufacturers.

Houlahan argues that SNAP should also be viewed as agricultural policy because food-assistance spending supports the market for agricultural products.

“When you drop SNAP out, it’s not just a safety net for communities,” Houlahan says. “It’s also a source of revenue for our farmers. When you cut things like SNAP, it costs farmers billions of dollars.”

Young says SNAP is important, but argues that Houlahan’s vote against the farm bill left Pennsylvania growers behind. He says that Congress should focus more directly on trade and other policies affecting agricultural producers.

President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law in July 2025, included $186 billion in cuts to SNAP through 2035. As a result, Pennsylvania’s SNAP enrollment has fallen by roughly 200,000, or 11%, over the past year. Children who have lost access to food benefits represent 9% of that enrollment loss.

“I don’t want to be callous about this, but that’s 2% of our population in Pennsylvania,” Young says, citing the 200,000 enrollment decline. “I understand the structural issue, but growing up in the mushroom capital of the world, we can’t lose that. The way you keep it is Congress gets actively involved in things like trade and tariff policies. They’re not.”

For comparison, SNAP benefits for 200,000 people have an estimated $816 million annual economic impact, according to Harvard Kennedy School. The mushroom industry in Pennsylvania employs 8,600 to 9,400 people and provides an estimated $1.1 billion in annual economic impact, according to the American Mushroom Institute.

The cost of business

Kevin Schlegel of R-Lost Creek Farm in Oley Township says his dairy farm has already tried to improve efficiency, from breeding cattle that produce more milk to growing better crops. But those changes have not eliminated what he sees as the central problem: production costs continue to rise while returns remain stagnant.

“Cost of production versus return, it’s that simple,” Schlegel says. “Veterinary bills are higher, feed bills are higher, the cost of hauling in milk is higher, you can go down the line. And yet we’re still making the same amount for 100 pounds of milk as they were in the 80s. How are you supposed to keep going?”

Houlahan says those pressures extend beyond the expenses of running a farm to the everyday costs farmers face.

“When we think about farmers, they are, of course, fundamentally people, and things like health insurance and access to hospitals and prescription drug prices, food prices, livestock prices—all of those kinds of things go into the everyday costs that a farmer or ag person is feeling,” Houlahan says.

Schlegel farms in Oley Township, within Pennsylvania’s 9th Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Dan Meuser is seeking reelection against Democrat Rachel Wallace. Agriculture is one part of a broader economic debate in the district, but the candidates have offered different approaches to the pressures facing farmers.

Meuser has pointed to federal agricultural programs, including conservation and dairy support, while supporting legislation he says would reduce regulatory burdens and costs for businesses. He also voted for the fiscal year 2027 Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and related agencies appropriations bill.

Wallace’s campaign has emphasized protecting small and mid-sized farms and addressing consolidation affecting farmers, alongside broader proposals focused on lowering costs and supporting local businesses.

Self-inflicted labor shortages

Mushroom farms and other year-round agricultural operations face another challenge: finding enough workers.

A 2024 study of Pennsylvania’s mushroom industry found that farms were short an average of 16% of the workers they needed, with all 20 employers surveyed reporting shortages of mushroom harvesters. The report’s authors—two rural sociologists who completed their research prior to Trump’s immigration crackdown—determined that higher wages and more respectful workplaces would result in fewer labor shortages among their largely immigrant workforce that had settled in rural communities. They noted that employers “felt forced” to solve the problem by contracting out the management of their employees.

In a 2025 follow-up, the authors warned the mushroom industry, and the agriculture sector at large, “must prepare for the ripple effects” of Trump’s harsh immigration policies. This includes Trump’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, which was granted an extension in 2023. These newer arrivals played a critical role in the workforce, the authors wrote, because of a generational shift in the industry. The long-standing Mexican mushroom workforce is now aging out, and their U.S.-born children are unlikely to stay in agriculture long-term.

For Houlahan, agricultural labor has been a longstanding issue, particularly because the types of farms operating in Berks and Chester counties can have different workforce needs than seasonal operations.

“Our farms here in Chester and Berks County are largely not large farms,” says Houlahan. “They are more small- to medium-sized farms, and many of them are more small- to medium-sized farms, and many of them are either specialty, mushroom or dairy farms, and therefore have different labor issues than some of the more seasonal crops do.”

Houlahan says Congress isn’t doing enough with immigration policy, especially issues with H-2A visas, which allow U.S. agricultural employers to bring foreign nationals into the United States to fill temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs.

“We haven’t addressed those issues aggressively. There was a Farm Workforce Modernization Act that passed a couple times out of Congress while I’ve been there on the House side, but hasn’t passed on the Senate side,” says Houlahan. “We’ve been advocating to try to include it in the Farm Bill itself, unsuccessfully, so that’s something that needs to happen.”

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would reform the H-2A visa system to allow longer periods for immigrant workers in some year-round agricultural jobs and establish a path to legal status for some farmworkers already working in the United States. According to the UFW Foundation, nearly 70% of the farm workers in America are immigrants and more than 45% are undocumented immigrants, meaning a shortage of labor from immigrant workers could have a significant impact on the United States’ farm economy.

Young also points to immigration policy as an issue for year-round agriculture.

“At year-round operations, things like chicken farming, mushroom farming that are constantly producing rather than going through the seasons,” Young says, “we should probably revisit some of our immigration laws, as well as our different visas that we have, to support those industries.”

What comes next

For farmers, these issues are interconnected, but none of the policies up for debate among these candidates eliminates the economic challenges of making a farm pay.

But none of those policies eliminates the basic economic challenge of making a farm pay.

“When they sit up on Capitol Hill and come up with these bills that they think are going to help, the backside really ends up hurting the small-time farms,” says Brian Kehl, owner of Heritage Homestead in Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District.

Houlahan is similarly pointed in her assessment of the administration’s broader agricultural policy changes.

“A lot of the policy changes and cuts we have seen from this administration have really pulled the rug out from under farmers,” says Houlahan. “The thing the government is supposed to do is do no harm, and I think that this administration has been harming the very people that you could argue have put them in the White House and [given them] the trifecta.”

Weber says she thinks about that uncertainty when she considers the future of her own farm.

“There feels like there’s a lot more unknowns,” she says. “I felt like I could rely on what the federal government said in the past about what they could provide or what funding was available.”

High costs, low returns, corporate consolidation and uncertainty are what’s at stake in the 2026 midterm election, as farmers look to Washington and Harrisburg for policies that could shape the future of their farms and the communities around them. In Berks County, the future of farming is tied not only to the farmer.

Weber puts it this way:

We’re small, but mighty. I have a 75-acre farm, and yet, on that farm I’ve been able to develop a business that feeds my local customers, provides humane treatment to my animals and creates an ecosystem and system that provides homes for wildlife as well. It’s a bigger picture which impacts beyond my 75 acres. It impacts the people downstream.

It impacts my community. That’s important.

Dylan SokolovichMore by this author →

Dylan Sokolovich is a writer from Reading, Pennsylvania, and a recent graduate from Albright College.