Providence Farm Collective must keep receiving federal grant money while its lawsuit works its way through the court system, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
The ruling means that Providence will be able to keep funding the Incubator Farm Program, which helps immigrants and refugees become farmers by providing them with farmland access, shared equipment, training and other resources. The incubator is one of three such programs in the state.
“This decision provides relief for the moment, as it restores essential grant funding while the lawsuit continues to work its way through the courts,” PFC Executive Director Kristin Heltman-Weiss said in a statement.
The preliminary decision comes just months after the U.S. Department of Agriculture terminated the collective’s three-year, $750,000 grant. The USDA determined that the grant, which was awarded in 2023, was being used to support “a DEI initiative and, therefore, discriminatory and unconstitutional.”
Providence and four other organizations that lost grant funding sued the USDA in June to undo that determination. They alleged that the agency engaged in a broader “policy, pattern, and practice of unlawfully terminating hundreds of grants.”
Hamadi Mganga, Providence’s marketing coordinator, said the grant funding was the “backbone” of the incubator program. Without the program, the Grant Ferry neighborhood — parts of which are considered food deserts, according to Buffalo State University — would lose a source of fresh produce, and one less organization would be “cultivating the next generation of farmers,” he said.
“Seeing all that they’ve accomplished, and then seeing this gut-wrenching thing that happened, it's just demotivating,” Mganga said in an interview. “But a lot of them are still hopeful that the best outcome will turn out in this case with the lawsuit, but they are definitely disheartened about the loss of funding.”
Working across 27 farms, Providence’s 232 farmers collectively earned $117,530, according to a 2024 brochure. Most of that farmland is located in Orchard Park, but the collective operates a weekly farmers market on Grant Street in Buffalo.
