RENO - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has designated Elko County as a primary natural disaster area due to damages and losses caused by the recent drought.
Farmers and ranchers in Eureka, Humboldt, Lander and White Pine counties also qualify for natural disaster assistance because their counties are contiguous.
All counties listed above were recently designated natural disaster areas, making all qualified farm operators in the designated areas eligible for low interest emergency (EM) loans from USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA), provided eligibility requirements are met. Farmers in eligible counties have eight months from the date of the declaration to apply for loans to help cover part of their actual losses. FSA will consider each loan application on its own merits, taking into account the extent of losses, security available and repayment ability. FSA has a variety of programs, in addition to the EM loan program, to help eligible farmers recover from adversity.
Actions taken by the USDA in 2012 to provide assistance to producers impacted by the drought included:
• Extended emergency grazing on Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres, freeing up a record 2.8 million acres and as much as $200 million in forage and feed for ranchers during a challenging time.
• Reduced the emergency loan rate, from 3.75 percent to 2.375 percent, as well as making emergency loans available earlier in the season.
• Allowing haying or grazing of cover crops without impacting the insurability of planted 2013 spring crops.
• USDA worked with crop insurance companies to provide flexibility to farmers, and one-third of all policyholders took advantage of the extended payment period.
• Authorized $16 million in existing funds from the Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program (WHIP) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to target states experiencing exceptional and extreme drought.
• Transferred $14 million in unobligated program funds into the Emergency Conservation Program (ECP) to help farmers and ranchers rehabilitate farmland damaged by natural disasters and for carrying out emergency water conservation measures in periods of severe drought.
• Authorized haying and grazing of Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) easement areas in drought-affected areas where haying and grazing is consistent with conservation of wildlife habitat and wetlands.
• Lowered the penalty on CRP acres used for emergency haying or grazing, from 25 percent to 10 percent in 2012.
• Simplified the Secretarial disaster designation process and reduced the time it takes to designate counties affected by disasters by 40 percent.
Additional information is also available online at http://disaster.fsa.usda.gov.
Additional programs available to assist farmers and ranchers include the Emergency Conservation Program, Federal Crop Insurance, and the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program. Interested farmers may contact their local USDA Service Centers for further information on eligibility requirements and application procedures for these and other programs. Additional information is also available online at http://disaster.fsa.usda.gov.
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