The United States Department of Agriculture recently announced that more than $175 million in disaster payments has been made to farmers and ranchers through two federal programs. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that farmers and ranchers in the country deserve "efficient and effective" programs to help them get through disasters.
"While the previous ad hoc disaster assistance too often was too little, too late, because we were able to get these new programs up and running quickly, we are already beginning to achieve Congress' goal of helping producers recover losses rapidly and more thoroughly," Vilsack said.
The two programs available to farmers and ranchers are the Livestock Indemnity Program and the Livestock Forage Disaster Program. The former covers losses through the death of livestock, while the latter deals with losses caused by a reduction in grazing land because of natural catastrophes.
These are among the variety of programs through the USDA that have been in the news of late, as farmers and ranchers deal with weather-related losses from 2009. Farmers across the country have been dealing with difficult weather, which has made it hard to harvest their crops.
