Last fall, Jim Watt opened his inbox to an email from the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire and learned about an opportunity that seemed serendipitous.

Three days earlier, someone vandalized the solar generator on Sun Fox Farm where Watt, co-owner of Concord Bee Company, keeps one of his apiaries. The generator powered a fence that protected his bees, and it would need immediate repair. Watt had just heard that his insurance company wouldn’t be covering the fix, so he coughed up the money.

Then he encountered that fortuitous email: NOFA-NH was fielding mini-grant applications through its Farmer Resilience Fund. The organization wanted to fund climate-smart projects, to assist with organic cost-share reimbursement and to support farms in need of disaster relief.

Watt leaped at the chance for a reimbursement.

“This is helping recover those losses, which is great,” he said. “These grants are important. The more money we can get in the hands of locally sourced food, the better for our community.”

The fund, which began awarding mini-grants in 2023, distributed a total of $29,000 to 18 New Hampshire farms last winter. Grant recipients were announced last week.

Joyce Ford, a NOFA-NH board member, said the application process revealed the greatest areas of need among the state’s agricultural producers.

One-third of the grant recipients had endured high winds, late frosts or fungal disease on their farms and requested grant funding for disaster relief. In some cases where farmers found themselves pitted against the elements, they asked for crop relief instead. Other farmers, thinking proactively about protecting crops from increasingly frequent extreme weather events, requested help buying high tunnels and greenhouse supplies.

Noah Courser-Kellerman was seeking funding for a more experimental solution when he applied. Courser-Kellerman is from Essex, Massachusetts, and farmed there with his wife Sophie for a decade before starting Alprilla Farm in Warner.

For a long time he’s had wollastonite, a mineral soil amendment, on his mind.

“It’s not widely used, and as a result, it’s pretty expensive,” he explained. “We probably wouldn’t have made the investment to try it out on our own, but having some help lowered the risk of trying something that was kind of not fully proven but has the potential to really help our plants resist pest, disease and weather extremes better.”

Considering how the federal “funding landscape has obviously shifted dramatically recently,” Courser-Kellerman said the local grant shows good farming practices are still worth the investment. “We’re really grateful.”

Ford, herself a retired organic fruit farmer of 40 years, said that while applications were reviewed and grants were awarded in December — before the USDA halted federal funding for farm projects nationwide — since then, NOFA-NH has heard from affected farmers and begun collecting their stories.

The Farmer Resilience Fund, which is currently fundraising to award a new round of grants for 2025, could help bridge the gap between uncertain federal funding and local climate-conscious farms.

“You know, the Red Cross is there for people when there’s a natural disaster, but there really isn’t a Red Cross for farms,” Ford said. “It behooves all of us to be supportive of our neighboring farms and to help them get through, you know, the changes in climate that we’re seeing and how to make their farm more climate resilient.”