More than a year and a half after Congress created a federal grant for smaller farming states, Connecticut finalized its $53 million allotment — and eligible farmers will soon get to apply for a portion of that disaster relief.
The state and federal agriculture agencies worked through the final steps in early July of approving the program design and executing a contract that unlocks Connecticut’s funding. The Connecticut Department of Agriculture is now working to get the application portal up and running by early fall.
Federal lawmakers, led by U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, enacted the $220 million Farm Recovery and Support Block Grant program included in a government funding deal in December 2024. But its implementation hit a number of snags and delays: a clash over the terms of the program and a record-long government shutdown that interrupted negotiations.
Now, the years-long effort to get recovery funds into the hands of farmers who experienced damages caused by disasters and extreme weather events in 2023 and 2024 is nearing the finish line. Connecticut Commissioner of Agriculture Bryan Hurlburt said his agency is working with contractors to go “full speed ahead” on developing the application portal and providing webinars and demos for farmers to learn how the program will work.
Once the portal is ready, he expects the initial application period to open for four weeks with the state agency processing those on a rolling basis. Hurlburt said it’s a “pretty low threshold to qualify.” Farmers are eligible if they earn $1,000 in farm revenue for given years, experienced a minimum loss of $500 in disaster-related losses in 2023, 2024 or both. Hurlburt expects people to start receiving payments about six to eight weeks after they apply.
The first application period is expected to open in September, with another one for later in the fall.
Farmers and lawmakers attended a press conference at Cecarelli’s Harrison Hill Farm in Northford on Friday about the news of the grant and the next steps. Along with a number of local farmers, the event was attended by DeLauro, Hurlburt, Gov. Ned Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, U.S. Rep. John Larson, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
It was organized by William Dellacamera, who helped lead the charge to get federal funding to help smaller farmers. A hail storm in August 2024 destroyed his crops in 13 minutes.
A month after the storm, Dellacamera traveled to Washington, D.C., on his tractor to push for help from the federal government. As months went by with little developments and ongoing negotiations, he came back to the nation’s capital to ask about the status of the farm block grant. He met with U.S. Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins last spring and made his plea for the quick rollout of the money for small and midsize farmers.
Dellacamera made repeated trips to D.C. to advocate for the implementation of the $220 million block grant to be divided between all states in New England and Hawaii and Alaska. Connecticut was awarded $53 million of that last August, but it has not been able to start the process of doling out that money until the state and federal agriculture agencies worked out an agreement and executed a contract.
“It was certainly not the path that we expected, not the path that we were told to expect in the beginning,” Hurlburt said in an interview, noting that the program they recently submitted for approval “is not significantly different that we submitted for review last July” to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Connecticut famers have been awaiting access to such relief after experiencing damages caused by disasters and extreme weather events in 2023 and 2024. In 2023, farmers were badly hit after flooding along the Connecticut River. A year later, Connecticut saw flash floods in the western part of the state and a hail storm in the central part — the same one that took out Dellacamera’s crops.
Another farmer at Friday’s event, Kaitlyn Kimball of Sunset Farm, got hit by the flooding in August 2024. Her 3-acre field in Naugatuck was under a foot of water for almost a week, killing all of the tomatoes. Kimball told The Connecticut Mirror last year that she lost years of compost and materials to improve the soil.
The federal program was geared toward smaller farming states that grow more specialty crops and don’t typically benefit from federal aid in the same ways as larger commodity producers.
“We all need it, that’s for sure,” Dellacamera said in an interview ahead of Friday’s event. “Now, hopefully, within a few months, we all get some real money we need.”
As a constituent of DeLauro’s, Dellacamera worked with the congresswoman on the creation of this fund and throughout the process of getting it up and running. DeLauro, who serves as the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, called the block grant program a “success story” and credited Dellacamera’s persistence on the issue when the timeline of the funding looked murky.
“From the outset, I think there was a sense that, finally, we were looking at standing up a program that was specific to specialty crop farmers. And that’s incredible, because … nothing trickles down for them, and so this was really one of the first efforts to be able to do that,” DeLauro said in an interview from the Capitol ahead of the event.
“[Farmers] have been patient with the ups and the downs,” DeLauro said. “I wish it didn’t have to take a year and a half or over, but you’d never give up in that effort.”
The Farm Recovery and Support Block Grant program hit a number of speed bumps since Congress enacted it in late 2024.
Following Dellacamera’s visit to D.C. in the spring of 2025 and DeLauro’s push at the hearings, disagreements emerged over the rollout of the disaster aid block grant.
USDA gave states two options: they could run their own crop loss program by using the block grant tailored for them, but they wouldn’t get access to larger supplemental disaster aid, or they could go with the latter, run by the federal agency, but face limits on what gets covered by the block grant. Connecticut ultimately decided to go with the former, developing a state-run program using the federal block grant. That meant the state wouldn’t get access to the $21 billion Supplemental Disaster Relief Program.
That led to a clash among DeLauro and other congressional Democrats who argued that wasn’t what they intended when they wrote the language for the block grant. But now, the New Haven congresswoman believes it’s the “best outcome” for Connecticut.
Hurlburt echoed that assessment. Based on the structure of the Supplemental Disaster Relief Program, he said, Connecticut farmers will be able to get more relief from the state’s crop loss program and won’t be on the hook — like they would for the federal program — to purchase one of the crop insurance tools for at least two years to qualify.
Discussions between the Connecticut Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture also stalled during the government shutdown last year. Once it reopened in mid-November, talks picked up to hammer out the final details.
At the end of 2025, Connecticut officials gave a loose timeline of wrapping up negotiations and finalizing the state’s contract before the 2026 planting season. And at a mid-April hearing before Congress, Rollins told DeLauro that the long-awaited federal block grant was “at the finish line for Connecticut.”
Payments will be determined by identifying a farmer’s best revenue year between 2020 and 2025. They will take that number and subtract the disaster losses from 2023, 2024 or both years. A farmer can expect to get 95% of that difference up to $1 million as the maximum award. Any past crop insurance payments will be deducted.
“A bunch of us who need this money, we don’t even know how we’re surviving now,” Dellacamera said. “It’s coming in the bank account and going right back out. It’s going to pay bills.”
Dellacamera said there are larger problems and barriers for smaller farmers, such as the structure of crop insurance that can help farmers weather disaster events. Hurlburt agreed that crop insurance needs to be reformed.
If the application portal is not ready by the anticipated timeline, Dellacamera said, “There will be a lot of angry people.”
He recalled a few farmers telling him that advocating for the funding won’t be a solo mission: “This time you’re not going to have to worry about doing it alone.”
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
