After 13 weekends of rain, Tilton growers drill a $10,000 well and dig 200-foot drains

Thirteen consecutive weekends of rain washed through Mark Wilson and Mari Princiotta's 11-acre vegetable farm in Tilton, New Hampshire, last spring, leaving their sloped property swamped and their high tunnel flooded. The couple responded by drilling a well and digging a 200-foot trench drain, partly funded by a public climate resilience grant.

A Natural Resources Conservation Service soil health professional measured the water table beneath the Tilton land at just 20 inches below the surface, a finding that explained why even modest storms overwhelm the fields, Wilson said.

What does the climate data show for the state?

U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations in Keene, Durham and Hanover have recorded a rise of 1.1 to 2.6°F in southern New Hampshire's average annual maximum temperatures since 1970. A 2014 University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute report projects annual precipitation will climb 17% to 20% by 2100.

The 2026 growing season delivered the predicted volatility. The last week of June poured on central New Hampshire. By July 2, temperatures neared 100°F.

Which farmers are losing crops first?

Berry and tree-fruit growers take the worst of the heat spikes. Canterbury farmer Luke Mahoney, owner of Brookford Farm, watched his 2025 raspberry harvest shrink to almost nothing when humid conditions persisted.

"Hot humid periods like we're having now, if it were to go on for a longer period of time? Last year, we barely had any raspberries that were marketable because it was just so hot," Mahoney said.

Mahoney keeps his 240-head dairy herd under portable Shade Haven structures during heat waves, and switches vegetable ground quickly into perennial cover such as blueberry bushes to anchor the soil.

How are vegetable growers rewiring their fields?

Wilson and Princiotta routed a New Hampshire Conservation Districts climate resilience grant into the Marimark Farms well, then doubled the grant with private funds to reach a total project spend of almost $10,000.

Moisture sensors feed readings to Wilson's phone, and drip tape laid in rows dispenses water directly to root zones via pulse timers. A 200-foot trench drain, buried 2 feet deep, wrapped in plastic and packed in porous gravel, channels overflow into the wooded buffer beside the Buffalo Park Conservation Area.

"As these rain events have increased, we started having all kinds of moisture issues," Wilson said. "The tunnel started flooding and the property got saturated, and it has basically been saturated since 2018."

The couple plans a second 75-foot diagonal drain, new barn gutters and a caterpillar tunnel for field tomatoes.

What can rope and a bucket deliver?

At Off the Wall Orchard in Concord, owner Ron Christie is roughly one-third of the way through equipping each of his 300 cherry, apple and peach trees with capillary-fed wick irrigation. Each tree gets a braided nylon rope, sheathed in rubber hose, leading to a bucket of water.

"If you have a leaf way up over here, what happens? It dries out, and then it says, 'All right, I need more water,' so the roots respond by moving water from an area that has a lot of water, usually soil, up into the plant," Christie said.

"By using a wick, what you're doing is you're providing water that seeps from a wet area to a dry area through capillary action."

The orchard also grows multi-leader trees under netting in narrow alleys to maximise sunlight. A New Hampshire Conservation Districts grant partly funds the conversion, which Christie expects to complete by the end of summer 2026.

What should growers and policymakers watch next?

"There's going to be some years where we can't really overcome all the pressures that exist on the farm in order to bring it to a fruitful end," Mahoney said. At Marimark, the next storm will test whether a second 75-foot drain, gutter upgrades and a caterpillar tunnel keep standing water off the fields. At Off the Wall, the question is whether 300 rope-fed buckets can carry 300 trees through July and August without a power-hungry pump.

Princiotta accepts the engineering will run ahead of the climate. "We came from knowing basically nothing about farming. We just had kind of a vision like, 'How hard could be?' Well, it's the hardest thing I've ever done," she said. "Our problems are big. Weather, weather, weather."