Washington Disaster Counties

Wednesday Dec 2nd, 2009 27 Views Line on Agriculture

Washington Disaster Counties. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated a number of counties in multiple states as primary natural disaster areas due to losses caused by drought that occurred from Jan. 1, 2009, and continuing. In the Pacific Northwest that includes six counties in Washington. Chris Bieker is with the Washington FSA in Spokane.

BIEKER: The U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary has designated 6 counties in Washington State as primary natural disaster areas due to drought. The designation triggers a couple of different disaster programs that we have that benefit agricultural producers. Primarily the designation kicks in our emergency loan program.

These emergency loans are low interest loans for ag producers in these affected counties.

BIEKER: And that would be for producers in these primary counties which are Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant, Lincoln & Okanogan. It also covers producers in contiguous counties.

Those additional counties are Adams, Franklin, Kittitas, Snohomish, Stevens, Whitman, Benton, King, Skagit, Spokane, Whatcom, Yakima.

BIEKER: There are other programs that require a Secretarial disaster designation as well and one of those programs is a new program, part of the 2008 Farm Bill and that’s the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payment Program more commonly known as SURE and so producers will be able to sign up for loss under that program/

Producers who have been affected by the drought will need to make an application to FSA.

BIEKER: First they would need to contact their county office and they would need to be able to document their loss and again it varies depending on which program they are signing up for so the best thing to do is for producers to contact their county offices and ask which programs might apply to them and their situation.

Additional information is also available online at: http://disaster.fsa.usda.gov. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.