Ag Policy Blog

USDA on Wednesday released a list of grants and funding initiatives, including aid for farmers facing hurricane losses, as well as an international food-aid pilot program, and more funding for domestic fertilizer plants and small meatpacking operations.

At the World Food Prize event in Des Moines, USDA Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Alexis Taylor highlighted the launch of the Food for Opportunity Program, a $50 million effort to find alternative commodities to provide for international food aid.

"The goal of Food for Opportunity is to assess the suitability of commodities for use in USDA international food assistance programs and to evaluate potential future use in the McGovern-Dole program," Taylor said.

Taylor said USDA had put out a notice to survey industries on what kind of non-traditional commodities could be provided for food assistance. USDA received comments from 26 groups came back with a list of 44 different products that included items such as dried or canned fish, some bean productions, shelf-stable dairy products as well as tree nuts and canned or dried fruits.

DISASTER FUNDS

The department is issuing crop insurance indemnities to farmers, including $143 million in crop insurance indemnities to Florida farmers impacted by Hurricane Milton. The payments come under the Hurricane Insurance Protection-Wind Index (HIP-WI) endorsement and the Tropical Storm (TS) option Another $92 million will go out to livestock producers nationally under the Emergency Livestock Relief Program (ELRP) "as a result of forage losses due to 2022 qualifying drought and wildfire."

FERTILIZER

USDA is awarding over $120 million to fund six fertilizer production projects in Arkansas, California, Illinois, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin through the Fertilizer Production Expansion Program (FPEP), which is funded by the Commodity Credit Corporation and provides funding to independent business owners to help them modernize equipment, adopt new technologies, build production plants and more. To date, USDA has invested over $368 million in 67 projects through FPEP, creating new jobs and increasing domestic fertilizer production across the country.

The biggest recipient was LSB Industries LLC in Arkansas, which is receiving a $77 million grant to expand production capacity of its urea and ammonium nitrate facility to 580,000 tons per year. The expanded capacity will allow product to be available to roughly 450,000 producers within a four-state region. This project is expected to create 20 full-time positions.

LOCAL MEAT PROJECTS

USDA also announced $20.2 million in awards to 26 projects through the Local Meat Capacity (Local MCap) grant program to expand processing capacity within the meat and poultry industry, which adds new jobs to their local communities and provides producers more options to ensure their products get to market. With the announcement, USDA has funded a total of 97 projects for $55.8 million through Local MCap.

Chris Clayton can be reached at Chris.Clayton@dtn.com

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