Nearly 130 years of record-keeping, and never before had New Hampshire seen a year as catastrophically wet as 2023.
Excess moisture rinsed nutrients from beyond the vital root zone, and weeds strangled crop yields, multiplying as farmers struggled to work fields saturated with water.
Under typical weather conditions, cultivating a diversity of vegetables creates layered fail-safes that can protect farmers from financial freefall: Even if disease blights every cabbage, other leafy greens, such as lettuce and kale, have a chance of withstanding the scourge. But 2023 was anything but typical.
Only a fraction of farmers surveyed about the year’s production season by the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension were covered by crop insurance. And in the end, the state’s vegetable growers lost $3,109,070 in revenue in 2023, according to UNH Extension.
Bad weather didn’t spare fruit growers, either. Two cold snaps walloped the state, leading to the greatest fruit crop loss in over 50 years. A February freeze decimated peaches, cherries and plums. In May, the cold came for apples at the fragile peak of their blooming.
“None of us had ever experienced a loss like that, that complete,” farmer Chuck Souther recalled. “We were scrambling and saying, ‘How are we going to deal with this? Suddenly, now in May, we’ve got no income coming for a year and a half.”
Souther and his wife, Diane, own Apple Hill Farm in Concord. As vividly as he remembers the devastation of three years ago, he also remembers the person who lent farmers like him an outstretched hand of support and advocated for their relief: U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.
“The senator came out. She visited numerous farms with us,” Souther said. The following year, then-Gov. Chris Sununu and Agriculture Commissioner Shawn Jasper announced the state was establishing a crop loss program by repurposing $8 million of American Rescue Plan funds. “She wanted all the information and made sure that there was money coming at the federal level into that program.”
Honoring Shaheen at a gathering of the New Hampshire Fruit Growers Association this month, Souther proposed a scenario he thought most of his peers would recognize.
“You’re talking to an elected official or a regulatory official about a problem that you’re having, and the response is a sort of monotone. ‘Oh, I understand. Yes, I understand.’ And you leave the conversation feeling like, ‘Well, that didn’t really help me,'” he said. “And with the senator and her staff, the conversation always was, if you presented your problem, they were always asking us questions. ‘How can we fix this? What can be done?’ And that’s just really refreshing.”
Shaheen announced in March that, after nearly 20 years representing New Hampshire in Congress, she would not seek reelection. She previously served three terms as governor, the first woman elected to the position in state history.
In a landscape where many small New England farmers do not feel that federal programs represent or cater to them, to the modes of cultivation that dominate the region, or to the changing climate’s disruptions of once-predictable weather patterns, Shaheen said she hopes her successor will carry her mantle and give farmers visibility and consideration.
“Hopefully, whoever takes the seat — I hope it’s Chris Pappas, because I think he understands New Hampshire and the challenges that farmers face — but whoever takes this seat is going to be someone who understands that a critical part of what makes New Hampshire so special is that we have these family farms,” she said in an interview.
“But unfortunately, the changes that are being made right now to the Department of Agriculture undermine a number of the resources that are critical for our farmers […] because we’re more affected in lots of ways by climate than farmers in some other parts of the country. And the county extension programs — to be cutting those back or moving them away from the people who are benefiting is going to create challenges in the future for our farmers,” she said.
The most current federal workforce data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management shows that the USDA’s staffing levels have plummeted since 2024, truncated by approximately one-fifth. Two years ago, the department employed 98,473 people; as of June 2026, it employed 78,075, with many farmer-facing county offices bearing the brunt of those losses.
Advocacy hasn’t always returned results. Throughout her years in Congress, Shaheen said she and her peers made several attempts to change crop insurance to accommodate small, family farms, without success.
“What we’ve learned is that a lot of the money goes to big growers,” she said. “We haven’t had any luck because the the farmers who have commodity crops — so cotton, soybeans, corn, wheat — they have more clout currently in Congress than New England farmers do.”
But a new raft of disaster relief funding — $5 million from the USDA for New Hampshire farmers who incurred infrastructure, economic or other losses during extreme weather events in 2023 and 2024, approved by the Executive Council in August — demonstrates the benefit of a senator’s backing.
“Small business, agriculture — she just always seemed to get it that small businesses are key to New Hampshire. It’s what we’re all about, and agriculture provides all the good things that people want here in New Hampshire want,” Souther said. “She always just got that.”
At Stone Mountain Farm in Belmont, where Souther and the New Hampshire Fruit Growers Association paid tribute to Shaheen’s congressional run, Shaheen slid on white Hoka sneakers and stepped into a utility cart to tour owner Joe Rolfe’s tall-spindle, high-density orchard.
Where open umbrella trees dominate traditional apple orchards, Rolfe prunes his canopy on a vertical axis to maximize access to sunlight. Ten thousand trees lined up like dominoes. Rows laden with arcane apple varieties — Kindercrisp, Zestar, Gingergold — whizzed past, nearly ready for the beginning of the season on Sept. 1.
Shaheen was not yet serving in Congress when the 2008 Farm Bill passed, reauthorizing and expanding the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, but her support for the bill during her campaign has stuck with Rolfe in the years since.
Rolfe and his wife, Cindy, had just taken over the farm from his parents in 2009 when an EQIP grant allowed them to install deer fencing and orchard irrigation to begin converting what had long been a vegetable and hay farm into an apple orchard.
“She was very supportive at that time of that Farm Bill,” Rolfe said. “And we were direct receipients of that.”
Under a sweeping tent, Souther presented Shaheen with a basket of New Hampshire-sourced farm goods.
He reflected afterward: “It never hurts to say ‘thank you.'”
