Utah agriculture faces an uncertain future. The average farmer here is 57 years old and works multiple jobs. Land is expensive, because Utah is one of the fastest-growing states in the country.
To connect with customers, aspiring farmers need to show that they have a high-quality product. For many, the best way to do that is with a U.S. Department of Agriculture organic certification.
“Organic certification can be super important for farmers," said Michelle Shahczenski, a food systems advocate working with the Transition to Organic Partnership Program in Utah. "It is very much sort of a farmer-to-farmer choice.”
“Beyond the environmental, water, and soil benefits that we see from organic certification," she continued, "maybe you're trying to grow and you want to distinguish yourself, or you want to have a way to communicate to customers that you are using practices that the consumer cares about. The USDA organic stamp is a really easy way to communicate all those things to a customer.”
While organic certification can be advantageous for farmers, getting certified is extremely difficult. For a farm to be organic, it cannot use any synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. The certification process can take years. The Transition to Organic Partnership Program is meant to ease the transition.
Jesse Beckett Parr is the chief program officer for California Certified Organic Farmers. She helps farmers in six states across the West with their organic certification.
“The Transition to Organic Partnership Program was a USDA initiative that started in 2022 with the goal of increasing the number of certified organic farms and certified organic acreage here in the United States," Parr said.
The program provided $100 million to help aspiring farmers through the certification process. Parr said that funding helps aspiring farmers in a few different ways.
“Primarily, it's a farmer-to-farmer mentorship program that puts veteran organic farmers together with the next generation of folks who want to take their farms organic," she explained. "It also provides technical assistance, community building, and outreach resources for folks that are specific to different geographies and different crop types and climates across the US.”
In a profession that requires many different skills for success, the knowledge of an experienced mentor can be invaluable.
Lydia Hartman is a farmer at Fine Tilth Farms in Draper. She said that mentor support is useful for navigating the bureaucratic red tape of the federal certification process.
“Being able to work with a mentor has really helped just fortify what we already do and understand how to better communicate those processes to other people," Hartman said, "as well as navigating really complex record keeping and paperwork systems that is required for organic farms.”
Shirley Steinmacher is a farmer in Mill Creek. She grows one hundred varieties of hot pepper at her farm, the Urban Pepper Project, and says that the transition program provides a way to find support from other beginner farmers.
“Meeting some of these other people who are going through this process too is priceless," she said. "Seeing how they do things is really helpful.”
At the beginning of 2025, the Trump administration announced a freeze to the program's funding. When the program resumed a few months later, it was cut short by a year — so while all the funding is still available for program events and farmer training, none of the funding will be available to support aspiring organic farmers past the fall of 2026.
In Utah, this could hobble a transition that was just starting to pick up steam.
David Larson was born and raised in Newton, and has been farming organically for 10 years now. Over the past two years, he was a mentor for the transition program. Larson said that without the program, the convolutions of the certification process might stop many aspiring organic operators before they even get started.
“When I went organic," Larson said, "it took a lot of courage and strength and and just beating my head against the wall to get the requirements met. After 10 years, they're not that difficult, but when you're outside beginning, it's a lot to try. The first time helping my mentee go through the paperwork, he says, 'You do this every year?' And I just smiled and said, ‘Yeah, it gets easier.’ And that will be lost. Because of it, I think you will lose out on the surge that you're having right now in organics in Utah.”
Prior to the program’s creation in 2022, there were only seven certified organic vegetable farms in the entire state of Utah. But right now, there are 18 such farmers enrolled in the program. If each of the farmers enrolled were to complete the certification, the number of certified vegetable organic farms would more than triple statewide.
“The transition organic partnership program has had an incredible impact," Parr said. "In fiscal year 2024 alone, we had over 327 mentorship pairs. We certified over 3800 new operations across the US and transitioned over 260,000 acres.”
The program has only gained more traction since it’s establishment, ramping up to include more and more farmer-mentor pairs. Parr said that the number of mentor-mentee pairs has increased each year in the program from 2022 to 2024. The data isn't in yet, but she expects that 2025 will break the record for most enrolled farmers yet.
The loss of funding for the transition program is yet another difficulty for small Utah farmers to navigate on their way to viability. Farmers can still be certified organic, but without a mentor and training resources to help light the way, it will be much more difficult.
Nationally, the loss of the program also means that U.S. farmers will miss a considerable market opportunity.
"The US organic market is worth over $80 billion but America is a net importer of organic food," Parr said. "American farmers lose $6 billion a year to foreign imports, and that means that here in the United States, we don't get to reap the benefits of organic. There's environmental benefits, public health benefits and economic benefits for farmers. Farmers get paid more to grow organic, and US farmers are missing out.”
For Parr, it’s an economic no-brainer. The loss of the transition program means that U.S. farmers will be undercut.
“$6 billion a year is a lot of bread," she said, "and the Transition to Organic Partnership Program was the first USDA program and initiative to really empower US farmers to be able to choose organic.”
A recent report from the Kem C. Gardner Institute at the University of Utah details how Utah lost 10% of its agricultural land between 2002 and 2022. That’s 1.2 million acres, more than the current size of Great Salt Lake and roughly equivalent to the state of Delaware.
As Utah farmers continue to struggle with high input costs and encroaching development pressures, the Gardner Institute projects that the number of farmers around the state will steadily decline.
The loss of the Transition to Organic Partnership Program isn’t a death blow to small farmers in Utah. But it is one more piece of support stripped from farmers that already feel abandoned.
Parr grew up on an organic farm in California and saw firsthand how difficult it was to establish a successful organic operation.
“Organic farming is both a successful rural economic strategy, and it also meets the goals of making America healthy again," Parr said. "Transitioning to organic is really hard. It's a risk for farmers to transition their entire business strategy and without support from USDA, this network of farmers and organizations that support these farmer mentor pairs across the US will disband. We'll continue to lose organic farms here in the U.S.”