Natural Disaster Recovery II Program application support and info session

Need help applying for the new disaster relief funding available to farms through the Natural Disaster Recovery II Program? CISA has been working hard to clarify the details of this new program and is hosting this application and info support session to help ensure local farms can access this funding before the September 30th deadline. The session will start with a brief presentation about the program’s eligibility criteria and application process and a question and answer session, after which dinner will be provided and farmers will have the opportunity to get one-on-one application support from CISA staff.

Please register here to let us know you will attend — this event is free, but registration is required.

Information about the Natural Disaster Recovery II Program:

This program is administered by MDAR and funded through a federal block grant. The $42 million available through this program is earmarked to help compensate local farmers for crop and infrastructure losses resulting from extreme weather events in 2023 and 2024. This is a significantly larger amount of funding than was available to farms through earlier disaster relief programs, so this funding can provide additional relief for farms that were only partially compensated earlier for their losses. It can also cover a wider range of extreme weather events — covering not just flooding and frost damage but also weather events like drought, heat, and storms — as well as a wider range of related losses like infrastructure losses and excess labor expenses.

There is no minimum farm size to be eligible for funding through this program, but farmers must have lost experienced an eligible loss of at least $2,500, and there are specific eligibility criteria associated with each loss — for example, the value of crop losses must represent at least a 15% loss of value of the damaged crops and the value of infrastructure losses must represent at least a 15% loss to the value of the infrastructure that was damaged. The kinds of losses that this program can cover include the following:

• Losses from crops that were damaged, destroyed, or unmarketable (including human food crops, ornamentals, and many value-added products)
• Losses from perennials in need of replanting (to compensate for production losses during years before maturity of new planting)
• Damaged infrastructure (including crop-related structures, livestock housing, plasticulture, maple equipment, irrigation, and farm roads)
• Expenses for practices to mitigate land loss (including mowing/harrowing lost crops, cover cropping, grading land, restoring ditches, and providing emergency water for crops or livestock in drought)
• Timber losses (for those with over 10 acres of continuous forest in an active forest management plan)

A video presentation about the program, including a walk-through of the application form, is available here, and other program details are available here. Contact Kristen with any questions about this session.