The USDA last year made $12bn in aid available to farmers who suffered trade-war losses.
And there's nothing the US government can do about the millions of bushels of damaged crops here under current laws or disaster-aid programs, US Agriculture Under Secretary Bill Northey told a Reuters reporter who joined the flight.
But it has no program to cover the catastrophic and largely uninsured stored-crop losses from the widespread flooding, triggered by the"bomb cyclone" that hit the region in mid-March. Congress would have to pass legislation to address the harvests lost in the storm, according to Northey and a USDA statement to Reuters.Indigo Ag, an agriculture technology company, identified 832 on-farm storage bins within flooded Midwest areas.
"If we have to pass a bill to do it, I hate to tell you how long that takes," said the senator from Iowa, who joined Northey on the helicopter tour. Near Crescent, Iowa, farmer Don Rief said the flood damaged more than 60,000 bushels of his grain, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He tried to move the crops before the flood, but dirt roads were too soft from the storm to support trucks.
In this case, floods inundated fields quickly after multiple levees failed when rain and melting snow filled the Missouri River and other waterways. The frozen ground was unable to soak up the water. Of that, about 309,000 acres will be eligible for the federal program that helps farmers and ranchers remove debris left by natural disasters on farmlands, De Jong said last week. She estimated the program would need about $34 million to clean up the fields.
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