Farmers impacted by Hurricane Debbie will soon be seeing assistance from the USDA.
Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation, Robert Bonnie recently saw the damage first-hand in North Carolina describing it as heavy.
According to Bonnie, “Almost $100 million in crop insurance dollars have already gone to those folks hit by wind. We’re going to get more losses that will be covered through crop insurance, but the need here is deep and we spend a lot of time with farmers trying to underscore that today. Learn what more we can do. We’re also going to need help from Congress, I think.”
He says that the frequency and impact of disasters impacting ag have become almost overwhelming, prompting the USDA to learn to adjust.
“We’re spending more and more time on these types of disasters. So I give you an example, we have a disaster like this, it puts a lot more pressure on our local offices to help farmers. So, we’re literally having to surge staff to different parts of the country to deal with that demand. And if it were one place, that’d be one thing, but it’s Puerto Rico, it’s Florida, it’s New England, it’s the Midwest, it’s the West when we have large wildfires, it’s North Carolina putting more and more stress on our staff volume,” he adds. “And I think as we think about the Farm Bill, as we think about disaster programs, we understand that this is going to be part of the way we do business and we both have to think about how do we do a better job of responding to these incidents and also how do we help farmers be more resilient on the front end.”
Undersecretary Bonnie says that he hopes to see a focus on conservation programs, strong bipartisan support for crop insurance, and farm loan programs in the new Farm Bill.
