WASHINGTON, DC—Farmers who experienced losses in 2022 due to almost any natural disaster have until the close of business today to apply for the Emergency Relief Program (ERP) through USDA.
The deadline (August 14, 2024) comes ten months after local Farm Service Agency offices began accepting the applications amid a lawsuit filed by farmers through the Southeastern Legal Foundation and Mountain States Legal Foundation.
The farmers argue that USDA and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have created a system disregarding Congressional intent of disaster relief. USDA established a progressive factoring approach assigning a different payment formula for underserved and non-underserved farmers and ranchers, thus excluding farmers with the most profound losses from receiving representative relief.
Vilsack explains that Congress allocated $3.2 billion in funding to cover an estimated $10 billion in uncovered losses.
Legislators “gave us 30 percent of what we needed (and) we had a choice of basically doing it the way we did before when we had all the money and the resources to be able to cover all the producers or provide an opportunity for 80 percent of the producers to receive slightly more.”
ERP 2022 covers losses to crops, trees, bushes, and vines due to qualifying calendar year 2022 natural disaster events, including wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derechos, excessive heat, tornadoes, winter storms, freeze (including a polar vortex), smoke exposure, excessive moisture, qualifying drought, and related conditions.
