USDA Funds More Covid Relief Aid for Farmers

The Farm Service Agency at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) will begin accept­ing new and mod­i­fied appli­ca­tions for the sec­ond install­ment of the coro­n­avirus food assis­tance pro­gram (CFAP2) on April 5.

CFAP2 orig­i­nally ran from September 21 through December 11, 2020, but the USDA has decided to reopen it and added $6.5 bil­lion of fund­ing to develop new pro­grams and mod­ify exist­ing ones.

Olive grow­ers and olive oil pro­duc­ers are eli­gi­ble for the fund­ing and appli­ca­tions can be com­pleted through the farm­ers’ local USDA county office. No cut-off date for the appli­ca­tions has yet been announced, but the USDA said the pro­gram will remain open for at least 60 days.

Payments to olive farm­ers and olive oil pro­duc­ers will be based on self-cer­ti­fied sales for 2019 in a declin­ing block for­mat, with the max­i­mum pay­ment to any farm­ers or com­pany remain­ing at $250,000.

The pay­ment gra­da­tion for table olives and olive oil are as fol­lows:

As a prac­ti­cal exam­ple, if an olive oil pro­ducer earned $75,000 in sales dur­ing the 2019 cal­en­dar year, their pay­ment would be $7,775. The pro­ducer would receive $5,300 for sales up to $49,999 and $2,475 for the rest of the sales from $50,000 to $75,000.

Along with direct pay­ments to farm­ers, the USDA will also pro­vide fund­ing for per­sonal pro­tec­tive equip­ment for farm­work­ers, cover some costs for organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, develop infra­struc­ture to pro­mote the dona­tion of per­ish­able foods and help reduce food waste, among var­i­ous other ini­tia­tives.

“The pan­demic affected all of agri­cul­ture, but many farm­ers did not ben­e­fit from pre­vi­ous rounds of pan­demic-related assis­tance,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said.

“Our new USDA Pandemic Assistance for Producers ini­tia­tive will help get finan­cial assis­tance to a broader set of pro­duc­ers, includ­ing to socially dis­ad­van­taged com­mu­ni­ties, small and medium-sized pro­duc­ers, and farm­ers and pro­duc­ers of less tra­di­tional crops,” he added.

• USDA
• USDA