More than 18,000 producers could qualify for disaster payments under Emergency Relief Program.
By Jacqui Fatka
USDA has paid out $6.37 billion in Emergency Relief Program payments to a total of 261,017 applicants for losses experienced in 2020 and 2021. In continued efforts by the agency to simplify the application process, USDA announced Aug. 18 that it was sending new or updated pre-filled disaster applications to offset losses to more than 18,000 producers.
Before applying any program payment factors or eligibility criteria, it is estimated that this next installment may generate about $756 million in assistance, the agency estimates.
By breaking-down agency barriers, using existing data across USDA and pre-filled applications, USDA’s Farm Service Agency in cooperation with the Risk Management Agency has been able to expediently provide economic relief and save producers and staff over a million hours of time.
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“We knew when we announced ERP in May that we would have additional applications to send toward the end of the summer as we received new information, and we came to know of producers who were inadvertently left out of the first data set we used,” explains USDA Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation Robert Bonnie. “I am proud of our team's continued effort to capture additional insurance records to enable over 18,000 producers to receive new or updated pre-filled disaster applications to provide much needed financial relief.”
FSA says it will begin mailing pre-filled applications in late August to producers who have potentially eligible losses and:
Producers are expected to receive assistance direct deposited into their bank account within three business days after they sign and return the pre-filled application to the FSA county office and the county office enters the application into the system.
Payments to date
ERP and the previously announced ELRP are authorized by the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2021. The law provided $10 billion to help agricultural producers impacted by wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, winter
storms and other eligible disasters experienced during calendar years 2020 and 2021.
This emergency relief under ERP complements ERP assistance recently provided to more than 167,000 producers who had received crop insurance indemnities and Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) payments for qualifying losses. USDA has processed more than 261,000 applications for ERP, and to date, has made approximately $6.4 billion in payments to commodity and specialty crop producers to help offset eligible losses from qualifying 2020 and 2021 natural disasters. Also, earlier this year, staff processed more than 100,000 payments through the Emergency Livestock Relief Program and paid eligible producers more than $601.3 million for 2021 grazing losses within days of the program announcement.
Corn producers have received $1.9 million in payments, followed by soybean producers receiving $1.1 million and wheat at $921 million. North Dakota producers have benefited the most with a total of over $1 billion in payments, followed by Texas with $786 million.
The second phase of both ERP and ELRP will be aimed at filling gaps and provide assistance to producers who did not participate in or receive payments through the existing risk management programs that are being leveraged for phase one implementation. USDA will keep producers and stakeholders informed as program details are made available.
For more information on ERP and ELRP eligibility, program provisions for historically underserved producers as well as Frequently Asked Questions, producers can visit FSA’s Emergency Relief webpage. A new public-facing dashboard on the ERP webpage has information on ERP payments that can be sorted by crop type – specialty or non-specialty– specific commodities and state. FSA will update the dashboard every Monday.
