Emergency Relief Program

ERP provides financial assistance to producers for losses to crops, trees, bushes, and vines due to wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derechos, excessive heat, winter storms, freeze (including a polar vortex), smoke exposure, excessive moisture, qualifying drought, and related conditions occurring in calendar years 2020 and 2021. Losses due to drought are only eligible for assistance if any area within the county in which the loss occurred was rated by the U.S. Drought Monitor as having a D2 (severe drought) for eight consecutive weeks or a D3 (extreme drought) or higher level of drought intensity for any period of time during the calendar year. This program is authorized by the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act (Pub. L. 117-43). ERP will be administered in two phases. Phase 1 uses a streamlined process with pre-filled application forms when the data needed to calculate a payment is already on file with FSA or USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) as a result of the producer previously receiving a crop insurance indemnity under certain crop insurance policies or a payment through FSA’s Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP). Phase 2 uses a producer’s decrease in allowable gross revenue as an approximation of a producer’s crop losses due to qualifying disaster events, which reflects losses in both production and quality and captures a producer’s loss regardless of whether the loss occurs before harvest or after harvest while the crop is in storage, further streamlining the delivery of assistance.

The assistance will be approved and awarded by FSA to eligible applicants. For ERP Phase 1, payments to eligible applicants will be made as applications are processed. For ERP Phase 2, producers will receive an initial payment equal to the lesser of their calculated payment or $2,000, and a final payment will be issued after the application period ends. If total calculated payments exceed the total funding available for ERP Phase 2, the ERP factor used to calculate payments may be adjusted and the final payment amounts will be prorated to stay within the amount of available funding.