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Farmers with 2018 & 2019 crop quality issues might qualify for payments

Farmers with poor quality 2018 and ’19 crops can take advantage of a special USDA Quality Loss Adjustment disaster program.  Economist Paul Mitchell from the University of Wisconsin says some farmers in 2018 saw fifteen inches of rain in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, and 2019 was wet for everybody. “Lots of prevented plant and just wet weather, and then the forage wasn’t that great for corn. I know that for silage, they had troubles, and it was just a wet summer. And then, it snowed early and harvesting was difficult. It was just a mess.”

Mitchell says producers with quality losses in those years have a good chance of being eligible for disaster payments, but there is little time to contact FSA to sign up. “The big rush is it’s got to be done by March 5th. You’ve got to get your application in, and you just need to demonstrate a quality loss, and so if you’ve got grain like corn, you want your grading documents or settlement sheets to show evidence that you had dockage or discounts applied to anything you sold because if your test weight was low or you had lots of foreign matter because you were harvesting in rough harvesting conditions.”

Mitchell says the program can potentially pay out nearly 70% of the losses, but there are many qualifications to meet.  He encourages farmers to gather their grain dockage documentation or forage total digestible nutrition test results and set up an appointment with FSA as soon as possible to find out how much the Quality Loss Adjustment program can help.

The signup deadline is March 5^th, and Mitchell says it does not appear this program will be renewed or extended.  Mitchell says the program hasn’t been available for long and has very limited availability.