USDA Paid To Study Queer Farmers, Latinx Masculinity, More On Taxpayer Dime

U.S. taxpayers have shelled out tens of thousands of dollars in recent years to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for research on LGBT issues, the kind of funding now under scrutiny by the Trump administration.

The research relies on conducting interviews – in one case for $373 per Zoom call – to explore a researcher’s hypothesis of widespread discrimination.

For instance, one taxpayer-funded research grant studied “queer farmers quality of life in Pennsylvania,” federal records show, one of several grants of its kind.

The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Projects – a federally funded research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture – paid $14,997 for the 2018 grant.

While this grant is relatively small, there are others, and critics argue the spending is a distraction from helping farmers and lowering food prices, which soared during the Biden administration alongside this kind of research funding.

The aforementioned 2018 queer farmers grant went to Pennsylvania State University for a project titled: “Sexuality and Sustainable Agriculture: Examining Queer Farmers’ Quality of Life in Pennsylvania.”

The grant proposal says the topic is “woefully understudied.”

“The deeply entrenched assumption of heteronormativity in farming has excluded queer farmers from full inclusion and benefits from agriculture, even within sustainable agriculture,” the grant’s proposal abstract said.

The graduate student who assisted with the project, Michaela Hoffelmeyer, presented the findings to the Rural Sociological Society Annual Meeting in Richmond, Virginia.

Her research highlighted some of the challenges faced by queer farmers, reporting that “findings suggest that transgender, non-binary, and women farmers faced additional hurdles” but create support networks to overcome those challenges.

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