Rebecca balanced a black crate of shiny red grape tomatoes on her hip, rows of squash spanning out behind her. Tim climbed up onto the seat of an old John Deere 2350 as he called out to the couple’s five daughters.
The girls came running from the house and the swing set—one in sneakers and pink shorts, another barefoot in a sundress. As their father drove the tractor slowly, dragging an attachment that loosened the bed, the girls followed, reaching into the dirt, grabbing carrots, and tossing them into crates.
“I got one!” yelled Gabby, whose participation as the youngest was more play than work. She held up a carrot like a prize fish and grinned, showing off a gap between her two front teeth.
Within minutes, they had harvested enough to take to market.
Gabby Cooper shows off a carrot she helped harvest with her family in Points, West Virginia. (Photo credit: Lisa held)
Since they started Cooper Farms in 2019, Tim and Rebecca have been motivated by joyful family moments like these that shape life on their farm, and by their drive to feed people who may otherwise struggle to eat well.
But keeping it all going has not been easy. And in the last two years, like many people Civil Eats spoke to in West Virginia ahead of the midterm elections, some Trump administration policies have made it harder for them to succeed.
As a result, they’ve traveled winding mountain roads to both Charleston, the state capitol, and Washington, D.C., to advocate for small farms and hunger relief, two priorities they believe have the power to make America healthy again.
Cancelled Contracts
Their biggest challenge started with an incredible opportunity. In 2022, West Virginia’s Mountaineer Food Bank received federal funds through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) Program under former President Joe Biden to allow the state’s food pantries to fill their shelves with produce and meat grown nearby. As a result, Mountaineer employees offered to buy nearly all the vegetables and pork the Coopers were producing.
Tim grew up in poverty, and his memories of his mother struggling to put food on the table remain vivid. So getting paid to feed families like his own was a dream come true.
“We were asked to scale up, and we did,” Tim said. They built new high tunnels to plant more cabbage, arugula, and lettuces year-round, and in March of 2025, those tunnels and the fields alongside them were packed with crops.
He remembered looking out across the early spring landscape, heartbroken, as representatives from Mountaineer told him they would not be able to purchase the food they had contracted for, due to the Trump administration’s cancellation of LFPA funding.
“All that money is spent. Everything’s ordered. Now, where do you go with it? We can’t just go to the local store and try to sell a half-a-million-dollar crop,” he said. “You get that news, and I’m like, ‘These kids cannot see me fail.’”
Rebecca’s first thought was also of their daughters. “Having five kids, it really brings panic,” she said. “Two of our kids were born in this house here on this farm. You’re thinking that you’d hate to have to leave here and go do something else.”
Many others share the Coopers’ experience.
“All that money is spent. Everything’s ordered. Now, where do you go with it? We can’t just go to the local store and try to sell a half-a-million-dollar crop.”
Across West Virginia, Nathan Bergdoll, a planning coordinator for the state Department of Agriculture, said that over the past two years, he’s been having the exact same conversation with many farmers and families in low-income communities.
“The opportunities are just not there for local food, period,” he said. “And I just don’t know what to do for folks half the time, because they’re calling me saying, ‘I’m going to be bankrupt. I’m going out of business. I’m going to have to sell my home. I’m going to have to sell my property.’ Some of those programs were really building out local communities and food systems around them, and now that’s all fallen to pieces for no apparent reason.”
Tim was especially shocked by the news of the canceled funding based on the Trump administration’s alignment with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. “We had seen talks about cuts on the news,” he said, but he thought that given MAHA’s focus on healthy food, “there’s no possible way that they’re going to take this money from local producers.”
He also thought West Virginia’s Republican governor, Patrick Morrissey, would want to do something about it, given that Morrissey was one of the first governors in the country to align himself with MAHA’s healthy food objectives.
But Morrissey and Republican state lawmakers have declined to fund a state-level program that is similar to LFPA. “Our governor, he just does not want to hear it at all, and a lot of our legislators don’t want to hear it,” Tim said.
