Connecticut farmers struggle to stay afloat amidst hostile insurance policies and climate catastrophe.
On Cecarelli’s Harrison Hill Farm in Northford, CT, an abandoned asylum, a church, and a graveyard sit alongside empty tomato fields. As we drive through the farm in his truck, William Dellacamera, the owner, points out the shed—decorated as a haunted dollhouse—where his eight-year-old daughter, Callie, spooked local farm-goers this past fall.
“I wish I didn’t have to do this,” Dellacamera gestures towards carefully painted haunted houses, an extra source of income for the farm. Eventually, we reach the farm’s perimeter, where damaged wooden posts hold together a dented metal gate.
In August 2024, a hail storm wiped out an entire season’s worth of produce on Dellacamera’s farm in just thirteen minutes. Now, he owes 510,000 dollars in insurance bills and weather damage repairs.
Climate change has increasingly disrupted the lives of Connecticut farmers, resulting in an influx of droughts, flooding, and untimely warm temperatures. In 2023, Connecticut farmers faced over twenty one million dollars in losses due to frosts and flooding.
The absence of government aid for farmers like Dellacamera in response to such climate disasters, on the other hand, is not unprecedented.
At 19 years old, back in 1999, Dellacamera experienced a drought while working on the Cecarelli farm in Northford. There, he watched Senators Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman use the farm as a stage to proclaim their mission to support small farms, specifically through low-interest loans—a solution small farmers oppose as they struggle to pay them off.
Twenty-six years later, Dellacamera stands in a similar place; this time he has the opportunity to directly voice the needs of small farms like his to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, who visited Cecarelli farm after the storm.
Not all farmers could keep fighting, though. Unlike the United States’ largest farming states, in which large single-crop farms dominate, Connecticut farms skew small. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 460 out of 5,058 Connecticut farms closed between 2017 and 2022. These small farmers are trapped within a system that does not adjust to their size. Many face mountains of debt, have trouble navigating the insurance system, and remain overlooked on the policy floor. This, amidst the natural disasters exacerbated by climate change—such as the hail storm at Cecarelli’s—buries farmers deeper in economic strife. As Connecticut’s smaller farms close, a key source of healthy food on consumer’s plates begins to disappear.
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Before the Green Revolution in the 1960s, when scientific advancements aimed to increased crop production, farms thrived off variety, supporting themselves and people’s diets with a regional variety of crops. “Pretty much everyone was a diversified farmer,” describes Ella Kennen of the New Connecticut Farmer Alliance. “And then these policies came into place that subsidized a handful of crops, and that has really drastically changed our diet.”
Post-Green Revolution, desires for high crop yield led to an expansion of monoculture and the usage of chemical fertilizers and GMOs. Such practices have resulted in a lack of biodiversity, agrochemical pollution of soil, air, and water, and increased carbon emissions from industrial technology use.
The most profitable farms are those that participate in monoculture. This is also thanks to the current crop insurance system, which allows farmers to insure their crops if they are diseased or destroyed due to a climate emergency. Large farms in the Midwest grow “cash crops:” corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. If one of these few crops fails, those farms have the resources to insure them; government subsidies for crop insurance are virtually unlimited. For larger farms, high-cost premiums allow insurance companies to gain government subsidies for their services, thus incentivizing them to service monoculture farms. According to the Government Accountability Office, this practice can result in more generous subsidies for high-income farms.
For those who farm a diverse range of crops outside the cash crop realm, however, crop insurance is too expensive and lacks accessible options. Aaron Taylor is one of the four owners at Four Root Farm, in East Haddam, CT, dedicated to growing diversified, unique crops like shishito peppers and fairy tale eggplants. To save money, none of his crops are insured. Instead, he hopes that if one species dies, he can continue growing and selling the others. Similarly, Dellacamera only insured 65 percent of each type of crop he grows—leaving him without the cash to revive his barren farm post-hail storm.
Even the name “cash crop” sets a precedent for smaller farmers hoping to grow a range of produce, labeled “specialty crops.” “They call us specialty crops, but we don’t have specialty rules. We still got to fall under the rules of the green guy,” Dellacamera tells me. By the “green guy,” Dellacamera refers to larger farms that can afford insurance.
Specialty crops, however, aren’t merely a necessary evil for smaller farmers—they are imperative to environmental strength and consumer health. Specialty crops provide biodiversity, better soil health, and a crop rotation that can resist climate emergencies and diseases. On the consumer side, a more diverse diet ensures food security through better nutrition. Still, smaller farms are placed in an arena too large, forced to combat a system that prioritizes monoculture.
To further assist farmers, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency moves to ensure an “equitable delivery” of Farm Loan Programs. However, trouble paying off loans and accumulating interest only land farmers in more debt.
“No farmer needs another loan,” says Chris Bassette, co-head farmer at Killam & Bassette Farmstead in South Glastonbury, CT. “That was the one thing we kept hearing from town officials, state officials, federal officials.”
The incomes of Connecticut farmers have nearly doubled from 14,941 dollars to 28,428 dollars between 2017 and 2022, according to the Department of Agriculture. But in the face of decreasing food profits and high supply-chain costs, farms—especially dairy farms—struggle to support themselves.
Greenbacker’s Brookfield Farm, in Durham, CT, auctioned most of their cattle in 2018, ending a legacy of dairy farming dating back to 1732. In a 2009 testimony before Connecticut’s Environment Committee, farmer Joe Greenbacker expressed that due to suppressed milk prices, the farm was down one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in milk income.
Fluctuating food prices have shrunk farmers’ profits. In July 2024, the national crop production index was 6.7 percent lower than in June of the same year, meaning farmers received less money for their crops. Still, distributor prices and labor costs remained high. Farmers, then, are thrust into a volatile market. “It is really easy to go underwater,” Taylor says.
“It’s tough because labor is so expensive, and then [there’s] all of your insurance, your feed bills, your fuel,” Megan Hastings says. She owns Hastings Farm, one of only eighty-seven surviving dairy farms in Connecticut, a sharp decline from 210 in 2009. In 2009, the Hastings faced a similar struggle to the Greenbackers, almost selling their cows and the farm entirely.
“You worked all day and knew, at the end of the day, [that] you would be in more debt than when you started,” Hastings tells me.
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Chris Bassette and her husband Kevin Bassette, along with their 94-year-old business partner, Kenry Killam, have found innovative ways to secure extra income to support the farm. Similar to Dellacamera, they host haunted events at their farm known as “spooky strolls.” The farm also sells crops in fifteen different markets a week, rents out an Airbnb, and offers catering. “It’s great to have the consumer come and get to meet us and talk to us, but it’s a lot of work, and I would love to not have to do it,” Chris Bassette says.
Killam and the Bassettes aren’t the only farmers juggling new hats. At Four Root Farms, in East Haddam, CT, Taylor cycles between roles: musician, father, and co-owner of CT Greenhouse. “It wasn’t working for me to make [the amount of money] I was making, which is sad, and I wish that hadn’t been the case,” Taylor says.
Managing a business and accruing side hustles have become integral to a farmer’s daily routine, and the demanding schedule can cause mental health battles and burnout. More young farmers are quitting. The national average farming age is around sixty. And among the younger farmers who want to begin farming, many lack land access and struggle with land affordability.
Some, however, have surpassed the hurdles and choose to stay.
“We are not growing the next giant business that can do it differently, but to be one of many small farms who are doing differently,” Taylor says. Four Root is comprised of four best friends, all farmers between the ages of thirty-nine and forty. Taylor and his friends chose to enter the industry because they wanted to be among those changing the face of farming. “I could just be another person with a college degree working for a nonprofit trying to support farmers, or I could learn to be a farmer in my generation and learn to do it well and feed my community,” Taylor says.
Though she tried to distance herself from her family’s dynasty in her youth, Megan Hastings found herself drawn to dairy farming. Now, Megan and her sister, Lauren Hastings, are committed to continuing their family’s legacy amidst the uncertainty of the dairy market. “When we were talking as a family about selling the cows, we were all gonna get real jobs. It didn’t feel right,” she remembers. “I can’t really imagine doing anything else.” The future of younger farmers, then, lies in their resilience and dedication to creating a new legacy of farming.
Some farmers are also organizing. The New Connecticut Farmers Alliance aims to support the future of farming by connecting beginner farmers with one another, especially BIPOC farmers, a demographic often underrepresented in farming.
For Dellacamera, advocacy starts in his tractor. With the support of other local Connecticut farmers, Dellacamera has driven across Connecticut, sporting signs with signatures from local farmers across the state––an effort he calls his “Will Goes to Washington” movement. His last stop was Washington, D.C., inside Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s office, where senators and USDA officials crowded the room.
In December, 2024 shortly after Dellacamera’s trip to the Capitol, DeLauro secured a Disaster Assistance Bill, allotting a 220 million dollar grant for farmers who underwent climate disasters during the 2023 and 2024 seasons in New England states, Hawai’i, and Alaska. The bill provides financial support to small and medium-sized farmers without the requirement for crop insurance—a large step for specialty farmers.
The Disaster Assistance Bill is just the start. In Dellacamera’s words to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal after the bill was passed, “This isn’t over. And there’s a lot that needs to be done.”
One major contender in this fight for the small farmer is the Farm Bill, a multiyear bill tracing back to post-Depression America. The bill allocated 428 billion dollars from 2018 to 2023 in government funding to support farmers, food-insecure citizens, and environmental protection efforts. Despite being renewed every five years, the bill failed to pass in both 2023 and 2024 and has now been extended to 2025. Democrats and Republicans still have not agreed on how to fund the bill, and whether nutrition and climate programs should be limited. The longer the renewal of the bill is postponed, the longer smaller farmers endure crop insurance untailored to them, insurance and loan programs that do not help them, and new climate issues not addressed by the outdated bill.
This season, Dellacamera’s farm is barren. Sitting in his truck, he is quiet as he thinks about the future of Cecarelli’s Farms. He instead describes how local farm-goers marveled at the abundance of peppers displayed on his field just four days before the hail storm.
For many, all it can take is a few minutes for a livelihood of work to disappear. But Dellacamera is prepping for his next harvest—and trip back to the Capitol. And while the dirt road he drives on is a long one, it is not one untaken. In 1979, farmers participated in the Tractorcade, driving hundreds of miles to Washington D.C. in their tractors to protest the foreclosure of American farms. Today, Dellacamera has four tractors ready to be driven by neighboring farmers, all working acre by acre to fill what looks like an uncertain future.
-Sonia Rosa is a first-year in Pierson College.
Photography courtesy of Sonia Rosa.