Loans Available to North Country Farmers Affected by Excessive Snow

Apr 14, 2025

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is offering low-interest physical loss loans for producers affected by excessive snow this winter.

Farms in certain counties, including several in the North Country, are eligible to apply if their property was damaged or destroyed by snow between Jan. 2 and March 1.

The loans, offered through the USDA's Farm Service Agency, "can help producers repair or replace damaged or destroyed physical property essential to the success of the agricultural operation, including livestock losses," a press release said. That also includes essential farm buildings, fixtures to real estate, equipment, livestock, perennial crops, fruit and nut bearing trees, and harvested or stored crops and hay.

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Video: Selling Hay for 40 Years: Fritz Trauttmansdorff, Dunlea Farms

Fritz Trauttmansdorff came to Canada from Austria in 1980, bought a 45-cow dairy farm at Jerseyville, and within two years had more hay than he knew what to do with. He sold the quota in 1986, went debt-free, and built a hay business that has kept some of the same customers for forty years. Today Dunlea Farms runs about 2,500 acres — roughly 600 of it hay, the rest IP soybeans and grain corn — and Fritz makes the case that hay isn't the crop you grow when grain doesn't work. It's the crop that makes the grain work.

"If you grow corn, soybeans and wheat, you're on a three-wheeler. If you put hay in the rotation, you're on a four-wheeler."

WHAT WE COVER • Why the hay market moves independently of the Chicago Board — and what that does for farm-level risk
• The real cost of a mistake: five bushels in grain, versus the whole crop in hay
• Getting a second job out of the same iron — planting tractors that mow all summer, tillage tractors that bale
• How a grain farmer can get hay into the rotation without buying a single piece of hay equipment
• Drilling Timothy in the fall and double-cropping soybeans into it the next June
• What it actually takes to go all-in: roughly 500 acres, good sheds, and a baler you didn't buy used
• Local, regional and international hay markets — and choosing which one you're building for
• Why 40-year customer relationships are the asset, not the equipment