The Secretary of Agriculture is authorized to designate counties as disaster areas to make emergency loans (EM) available to producers suffering losses in those counties and in counties that are contiguous to a designated county. In addition to EM eligibility, other emergency assistance programs, such as FSA disaster assistance programs, such as the Livestock Forage Disaster (LFD) program, have historically used disaster designations as an eligibility trigger.
Currently Carter county in Montana is eligible for the LFD program and Robin Markuson, the FSA Executive Director of Carter and Fallon county said that 100{75e25ebeb47fb4337942be2c10689dca1c292c2a66240b62c5ca4214f5b25ecc} of their participants in the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) have made claims this year.
NAP provides financial assistance to producers of noninsurable crops when low yields, loss of inventory, or prevented planting occur due to natural disasters.
In 2012, USDA streamlined the Secretarial disaster declaration process to reduce paperwork and documentation requirements at the local FSA level, making the process more efficient and timely for agricultural producers. The program improvements included Fast Track Secretarial disaster designations for severe drought, which provide for a nearly automatic designation when, during the growing season, any portion of a county meets the D2 (Severe Drought) drought intensity value for eight consecutive weeks or a higher. For all other natural disaster occurrences, including drought conditions that do not trigger a Fast Track designation, the county must have a 30 percent production loss of at least one crop or a determination must be made by surveying producers that other lending institutions will not be able to provide emergency financing.
Other Counties affected by this drought:
|
County |
State |
DROUGHT |
Wind, High Winds |
Fire, Wildfire |
Heat, Excessive heat |
Approval date |
|
Carter |
Montana |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/27/2016 |
|
Butte |
South Dakota |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/27/2016 |
|
Custer |
South Dakota |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/27/2016 |
|
Harding |
South Dakota |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/27/2016 |
|
Lawrence |
South Dakota |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/6/2016 |
|
Meade |
South Dakota |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/6/2016 |
|
Pennington |
South Dakota |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/6/2016 |
|
Big Horn |
Wyoming |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
6/2/2016 |
|
Campbell |
Wyoming |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/27/2016 |
|
Crook |
Wyoming |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/6/2016 |
|
Johnson |
Wyoming |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
6/2/2016 |
|
Niobrara |
Wyoming |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
7/27/2016 |
|
Sheridan |
Wyoming |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
6/2/2016 |
|
Washakie |
Wyoming |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
6/2/2016 |
|
Weston |
Wyoming |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
6/29/2016 |
