New Hampshire farmers believed USDA grants were secure bets. Then, federal funding halted.

Maple season was just reaching its peak. Working the final minutes of a 12-hour day, Jeff Moore ambled through the woods of his eighth-generation farm in Loudon and inhaled the serenity of the wilderness.

The son of Larry Moore, owner of Windswept Maples Farm, he stewards 11,000 maple trees on his family’s land, tapping and collecting their sap and encouraging the natural course of their regeneration season after season.

This year, Moore knew his efforts would pay off: Winter had blown through with fits of extreme cold and bleak weather and spring promised the arrival of warm days – a necessity for good syrup. He also knew he wasn’t alone in expending tremendous energy to meet the season’s demands.

The farm itself, all 400 sprawling acres, uses lots of electricity. Moore uses vacuum pumps to speed up the flow of sap while other pumps funnel the saccharine elixir into transport tanks. Fans make light work of combustion and evaporators expedite the boiling process.

In 2012, a workhorse invention brought the farm a more energy-efficient method for removing water from sap. The reverse osmosis machine, financed in part by a cost-share grant through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program, is still used on the farm. Even with its advances, Moore still sees a need to lower energy usage.

That’s why last winter — which Moore remembers as being warm and wet, an El Niño year — his family applied for another rural energy grant they hoped would help subsidize solar panels for the farm.

They dreamed up a new roof structure over their cow yard that would, at once, support the solar panels and prevent rain and snow from mixing in with manure. The cow yard has southern exposures ideal for solar, and estimates from the Moore family’s solar contractor suggested the installation could generate 36,160-kilowatt hours of electricity, saving the farm several thousand dollars a year.

In November 2024, the USDA approved Moore’s application, awarding the solar array project $41,906, approximately half of the total cost of designing, permitting, developing and installing the panels. In six to nine months, once the process was complete, the money would be reimbursed.

Just before moving ahead with the solar project, Moore heard about the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze.

“These are big budget decisions. It’s a contract that they signed with us and we signed with them. To have done all that work and then hear back that it could all be for nothing was really discouraging,” Moore said. “It’s like you get something checked off, and now you’re back at square one. The big-picture question we were left asking is, ‘Are we actually going to get this money’?”

The freeze has halted funding to numerous USDA programs. Enshrined in the 2008 Farm Bill and expanded in 2022 under the Inflation Reduction Act, the rural energy program was designed to support farmers making efficiency improvements on their farms or transitioning to renewable energy systems. Other programs facing stalled funding, like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, provide technical and financial assistance to farmers who prioritize soil health, wildlife habitat and water and air quality in their agricultural practices.

New Hampshire farmers have long benefited from and considered the USDA’s more than 400 grant and loan programs to be secure bets. Larry Moore, for instance, remembers participating in federally funded cost-share programs in the 1980s, well before the reverse osmosis machine arrived at Windswept Maples.

Some funding for other programs has been released, but the vast majority of USDA funding remains frozen with sparse communication and few definite answers leaving projects across the state languishing in an uncertain purgatory. Something less tangible also hangs in the balance: the formerly ironclad trust between farmers and the federal government.

Relationships at risk

On Stuart Farm in Stratham, third-generation dairy farmer Nathan Merrill just about breaks even more often than not.

“By the time we buy the grain to feed the cows, we make the hay and the corn to feed the cows, we pay the labor, we pay the taxes, we maintain the buildings, we pay the insurance and fuel, heat and electricity and interest on debt — when you take out all the expenses, we’re left with close to nothing,” Merrill said.

Most years, the difference between profit and loss comes down to the modest federal incentives Stuart Farm receives through federal environmental incentives, payments that total a fraction of the farm’s income, approximately 2 to 3% each year.

They compensate Merrill for conservation-minded agronomic practices, like planting cover crops to prevent exposed soil during the winter, rotating fields and installing water control structures that minimize nutrient and sediment runoff.

He received his last payment in December, and in May, once he’s seeded a new hay field and spring planting is complete, Merrill should receive another payment as part of a multi-year contract. Under less uncertain circumstances, he would be applying for a new round of federal funds this time of year.

“But the word that I’ve gotten is that funding is dried up for any new contracts, that we’re not going to get any new contracts this year,” Merrill said. “So, that hurts.”

At Windswept Maples Farm, budget constraints beyond the solar installation require Moore’s attention: Most barns and facilities on the farm are 250 years old and take quite a bit of maintenance each year. In Merrill’s case, his latest capital investment was a 12-year-old used tractor purchased in 2023 for $55,000. Farming is already a business with razor-thin margins, and both farmers said they wouldn’t risk their farms’ operations to pursue projects without clarity about the fate of USDA programs or the assurance of funding.

“There’s a good chance this money could be unfrozen, but you don’t really know that because this administration has chosen not to be clear and follow logical procedures. If they back out of this agreement, I don’t know that we would necessarily go forward with the project,” Moore said.

Moore and Merrill’s experiences aren’t anomalies dotting New Hampshire’s rural landscape. The farmers Jeremy Delisle meets with also viewed federal contracts as trustworthy until now.

Delisle is a fruit and vegetable field specialist with the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. For 11 years, he has worked closely to bridge the divide between local growers and the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NCRS), bringing farmers research-based strategies for pest management and updating the agency on local farmers’ need for financial and technical assistance.

“From the UNH Extension perspective, this is particularly frustrating because we view our partners at NRCS as essential for farmers to accomplish their goals,” he said. “But right now, there’s still a significant outlay of cash needing reimbursement. When we do this, we put our relationship with growers at risk, and then this is the situation we found ourselves in.”

Delisle’s understanding is that current contracts will eventually go through and will be paid, but no one is certain.

On February 20, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that $20 million in contracts for three programs would be released, in the same statement noting that the USDA’s review process aims to “ensure that programs are focused on supporting farmers and ranchers, not DEIA programs or far-left climate programs.” Her pronouncement pierced through an otherwise deafening dearth of information and offered a sliver of hope that halted federal funding will soon be released for other USDA programs.

Even so, a lack of clear communication about active contracts and future rounds of funding has already begun to erode farmers’ confidence, and industry stakeholders fear that any reluctance to enter into federal contracts could reverberate throughout the supply chain.

Shockwaves rippling out

Local farmers looking to build wildlife fencing might visit Wellscroft Fence Systems in Harrisville. Those seeking a high tunnel to protect field crops from heavy rain might choose Rimol Greenhouses in Hooksett. When Moore began planning for his cow yard solar project, he went to regional solar installer ReVision Energy.

For more than 20 years, ReVision has helped farms and rural businesses secure grants for solar installations. According to Dan Weeks, ReVision’s vice president of business development, at least a dozen of its current customers have been affected by the funding freeze.

ReVision’s halted contracts in southern New Hampshire alone total $3 million.

“In some cases, our partners, rural businesses, are trusting that the government is going to follow through and make good on its word, and they’re moving forward. In other cases, they’re asking us to stop doing any work,” Weeks explained. “There’s obviously a significant impact for them and for us as their contractor.”

In 2018, despite never foreseeing such abrupt and widespread a halt in federal funding, ReVision created a low-cost financing option with help from a network of “impact partners” aligned with the company’s mission. Until grant funding is released, Weeks said ReVision will encourage farmers to look at lending opportunities as a temporary alternative.

It’s impossible to predict which “far-left climate programs” won’t be spared by the federal government’s review, but Weeks said he hopes for a path forward for programs like Rural Energy for America. To him, attempts to contort solar into a political lightning rod miss the mark.

“We understand that the administration has a particular distaste for programs that are helping marginalized communities, low-income communities and environmental justice communities. We would humbly suggest that this is not some far-left agenda. This is bread and butter, it’s helping fellow Americans who are often struggling the most on low incomes to afford their energy bills,” Weeks said.

At Rimol Greenhouses, Bob Rimol ships more than 500 greenhouses from his local manufacturing facility each year, about a quarter of which involve contracts with the Natural Resource Conservation Service. Realistically, he said, there’s some security in knowing the bulk of his business does not come from these contracts, but compounded by the sting of tariffs, the funding freeze means manufacturers are facing unstable times.

“Between us selling greenhouses and the guy down the street selling tractors, there’s a lot of uncertainty,” Rimol said. “The government’s got to be careful because, when you start to screw with the food supply, it could have some damaging consequences.”

At listening sessions across New Hampshire, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has heard from some affected farmers and other agricultural stakeholders. Shaheen declined an interview with the Monitor, but said in a statement, “It’s unfair, unreasonable and unnecessary to put them in this position. Congress approved this funding, and farmers should be able to trust that when they sign a contract with the federal government, it will be upheld.”

Delisle, too, has participated in listening sessions with farmers since the USDA’s review of programs receiving IRA funding was announced, and he shared a similar feeling of indignation and foreboding.

“These farmers are people, they’re individuals like the rest of us. We go into contracts and, if we don’t trust them, we’re going to be hesitant. And you can’t blame them for that,” Delisle said. He also had a severe warning: “This certainly isn’t something that farmers will forget soon.”

In a statement to the Monitor, a USDA spokesperson said Rollins continues to evaluate “paused” funding to make sure the programs are directly supporting farmers and ranchers, while eliminating government inefficiencies and strengthening the USDA’s services.

Rebeca Pereira can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com.