Farm Bridge Assistance

Updated information on two USDA assistance programs for growers. Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation Richard Fordyce starts first with the Farm Bridge Assistance Program. Speaker 2: Tens of thousands of applications were coming in every day. Kind of slowed down a little bit at the end. We did close out. Sign up for Farmer Bridge assistance on April 17th. Speaker 1: And around the time of FDA site up closing. Speaker 2: We have approved over 540,000 applications for Farmer Bridge assistance. We have obligated over $10 billion. As a reminder, the program was funded at $11 billion. Speaker 1: The Under Secretary adds this figure does not include last day application approvals, which means. Speaker 2: We anticipate that $10 billion number to grow. Speaker 1: He adds the contribution of the login.gov sign up option to the application process was significant. Speaker 2: Of the total applications, we had over 10% of the applications that did use that login.gov platform. Speaker 1: Login.gov will also be utilized for the upcoming assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers program, which recently completed acreage reporting. Fordyce says that offering will be administered in a similar fashion as the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program. Speaker 2: The payments will be based on a per acre payment rate, and those payment rates will vary depending on the crop. And as you can imagine, a lot more specialty crops than we had in the crops that were eligible for Farmer Bridge assistance will get those acres. We'll understand the universe of what those acres are, and then we'll work very closely with the chief economist and others within his office to set the rates by crop.