In early 2025, Farm Aid staff fielded an inquiry from the University of Texas’ Extreme Weather Adaptation Lab, offering a tremendous opportunity for us to work together to support farmers. Over the past year, we have partnered with the Lab (part of UT’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs) to help farmers prepare for, and recover from, disasters. We’re working with professors and graduate students to conduct research and analysis that will produce impactful resources to help our work with farmers and partners in disaster response and recovery.
This wasn’t Farm Aid’s first connection with the University of Texas. The Willie Nelson Endowment for Uplifting Rural Communities, established in 2023, is housed at the LBJ School and funds research and student fellowships focused on sustainable agriculture, eliminating hunger, resilient energy, sustainable water, and natural disaster recovery to benefit rural and farm communities.
The LBJ school offers graduate students the chance to work directly with clients on Policy Research Projects. These projects represent a win-win, with students gaining experience and sharing expertise with real-world organizations like Farm Aid. In the Fall of 2025, we embarked on such a project with a class of graduate students led by Professor Dr. Herschel Thomas. The project, Landscape Analysis of State-Level Disaster Resources and Programs for Farmers, was a comprehensive look at the existing options farmers have for accessing these much-needed programs.
Disaster Programs By State
Farm Aid advised the students to focus on three distinct regions: West, South and Midwest. Additionally, the class did their own research of and outreach to disaster programs across the country to build out their analysis of programs in each state, looking for successes, gaps and networks to offer a baseline understanding that can inform Farm Aid’s broader disaster work and funding.
Hover over each state to see disaster programs available in that state (please note that the Northeast region was excluded from this research because Farm Aid has an ongoing project with the Northeast Climate Disaster Relief Network):
The Spring 2026 semester class will build on data collected by the Fall 2025 class to dive deeper into analysis. They’ll look at case studies of Hurricane Helene, Massachusetts flooding and freezing, drought in Western states, and the Texas 2021 freeze and 2024 Panhandle wildfire. Through interviews with farmers, nonprofit organizations, community leaders and public officials, the project seeks to better understand how disaster response and recovery systems operate in practice, including the role of non-state actors and opportunities for cross-sector collaboration.
We are excited to continue to build on the work of this class in a second and third semester in the Spring and Fall of 2026!
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