What's Up at the USDA Office?
Upcoming Deadlines/Dates
May 15 - August 1: Primary Nesting Season
July 15: Spring Crop Reporting
July 14: ERP Phase 2
July 14: PARP
CRP Reminders
The primary nesting season runs from May 15 – August 1. Please contact the FSA office if you need to perform spot maintenance activities on your CRP acres during this time. Cosmetic mowing of your CRP acres is always prohibited, but you can spot treat areas that are threatened by undesirable vegetation throughout the year. A written request must be made before the County Committee grants approval to conduct maintenance during the nesting season. As a reminder, volunteer trees and woody vegetation must be controlled and removed from CRP acres. Failure to control undesirable vegetation on CRP can result in financial penalties.
County Committee (COC) Election
It’s that time of year when FSA begins the process of the county committee election. This year the election will be for LAA-2, which includes Ludlow, Jefferson, Post, Franklin, Linton, and Fairview townships. Essentially the southern portion of the county. The nomination period begins later in June and runs through August 1. You can nominate yourself or someone else by completing the appropriate form at our office or download it online. Once nominations are finalized, producers who reside in LAA-2 will cast ballots which will be mailed to you in November. These ballots are due back to the FSA office by early December. The elected member will take office on January 1. We’ll be getting more information out, posting flyers around town, and folks in these townships will be getting a postcard in June.
Understanding the U.S. Drought Monitor
Are drought conditions affecting your agricultural operation? The U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) is a resource producers can use to help determine how to best respond and react to a drought as it develops or lingers. The USDM is an online, weekly map showing the location, extent, and severity of drought across the United States. It categorizes the entire country as being in one of six levels of drought. The map is released on Thursdays and depicts conditions for the week.
The U.S. Drought Monitor provides producers with the latest information about drought conditions where they live, enabling producers to best respond and react to a drought as it develops or lingers. In some cases, the USDM may help a producer make specific decisions about their operation, such as reducing the stocking rate because forage is not growing. For others, it may provide a convenient big-picture snapshot of broader environmental conditions. The U.S. Drought Monitor incorporates varying data – rain, snow, temperature, streamflow, reservoir levels, soil moisture, and more – as well as first-hand information submitted from on-the-ground sources such as photos, descriptions, and experiences. The levels of drought are connected to the frequency of occurrence across several different drought indicators. What makes the U.S. Drought Monitor unique is that it is not a strictly numeric product. The mapmakers rely on their judgment and a nationwide network of 450-plus experts to interpret conditions for each region. They synthesize their discussion and analysis into a single depiction of drought for the entire country.
USDA uses the Drought Monitor to determine a producer’s eligibility for certain drought assistance programs, like the Livestock Forage Disaster Program and Emergency Haying or Grazing on Conservation Reserve Program acres. Additionally, the Farm Service Agency uses the Drought Monitor to trigger and “fast track” Secretarial Disaster Designations which then provides producers impacted by drought access to emergency loans that can assist with credit needs.
