Trump Administration and Floriculture: More University Perspective, and a Grower Comment
March 20, 2025 Each week, the editorial team at Greenhouse Grower and Meister Media Worldwide will bring you the latest updates from the Trump administration’s policies and their impact on floriculture, from labor to the farm bill to funding for anything from federal loans to research and Extension. We also want to hear from you. What questions do you have about immigration enforcement, tariffs, or other topics? Let us know, and we’ll do our best to get you answers.
Here’s our update for March 20.
To start, we received the following comment from someone who works at a greenhouse in the Midwest: “I just wanted to share with you my appreciation for your weekly updates on the current administration’s effects on the floriculture and agriculture industry, specifically the March 13 article. Please keep them coming, especially real-life stories about how people are being affected now, and the long-term effects of funding cuts.”
Universities Being Proactive in Facing Funding Challenges
This week, we had another conversation with an individual who chooses to remain anonymous but works at a land grant university and is involved in horticulture.
“At the federal level, we have faculty that conduct research and do Extension work that’s funded through the Specialty Crop Block Grant program. We had a freeze on all of our faculty that had projects funded through that program, and there were active projects that were put on pause for about six weeks. This includes ongoing projects, as well as those that were just supposed to start or were recently selected for funding. So our faculty has been trying to work through this challenge, because in some cases they were bringing in graduate students to do the work.
“In our greenhouses, we do work that’s important to growers. So if funding is paused, how are we going to manage that? From the faculty side, I think we have a plan in place. The good news is we just got notice from our state Department of Agriculture that the funds are available again, and we can move forward with those projects.
“There are some grants that our faculty have that come directly from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and those funds are still on hold. It’s unknown at this time what’s going to happen with them. Unfortunately, we’re just going have to delay the work. We’re not planning on hiring anybody or bringing anybody in until we have some sort of certainty that funding will be available, because we’re afraid they could completely cancel the programs or cancel the funding. It’s just unknown right now, and it’s hard to work in that environment.
“We do have a unique situation for us in that our department of horticulture shares a facility with USDA-ARS. We have four greenhouses that we utilize, and because it’s managed as a USDA facility, we have to abide by their policies, procedures, rules, etc. So we were worried about what would have happened if there had been a government shut down. Would they shut down the facility, or would they let us in. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
“One thing we have done is we’ve started a plan to move out of those four greenhouses, for at least the near term and maybe even the longer term, because we can’t rely on that space. If we have active research in there and then for some reason there’s a shutdown, or they decide not to use the facility anymore, that really puts us in a bind for that type of work. So we’ve started the process of moving into on-campus facilities. The caveat there is with any of our on-campus facilities, while I love using them, there’s a rental fee for using those, and we have to factor that into the grant.
“One other thing we’ve contemplated is the possibility having a tighter research collaboration with our industry. Maybe industry partners would look at using our facilities, or we could partner with them on in-the-greenhouse research collaborations. There has to be buy-in from both sides on that kind of public/private partnership to do things like that.”
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