We’re approaching the two-week mark of the tornados that tore through central North Carolina on April 16th. Now that producers have had time to assess damage and begin working a plan to rehabilitate farms and other lands. Kevin Wooten, County Executive Director, USDA Farm Service Agency says that there are several government programs to assist in the rehab, the first being the Emergency Conservation Program:
 “We do have several programs that can be available for disasters such as what we had a week ago last Saturday. First one would be our Emergency Conservation Program which can be activated to help producers rehabilitate crop land, which means we would cost/share with producers to remove tree debris as well as debris from buildings, anything like that, anything that’s on the crop land we will cost/share to get that removed so that they can farm the land in a normal agricultural manner.”
Wooten points out that the Emergency Conservation Program is not an automatic program. Each individual county has to request the program after each event from the federal government:
“The reason I say that we have to request the disaster, would be that this program isn’t necessarily an entitlement program it is for disaster events that happened that the loss to the crop land, the damage to the crop land is so severe it takes federal assistance to get it back into shape.”
Another program is the Livestock Indemnity Program:
“What this does is pays assistance when producers loose livestock in excess of normal mortality because of a natural disaster; hurricane, flood, in this case tornado. Mainly what I’d look at is that anybody that had a poultry house that got destroyed and had a flock of some kind of poultry in there that was destroyed, they can come into a county office and apply for this livestock indemnity program. This is not a program that has to be requested, it is always there when we have some type of natural disaster.”
Wooten says that there’s a new program that covers forest lands:
We do have a new program called the Emergency Forest Restoration Program, it just came out late last year. It’s very similar to the Emergency Conservation Program, in the fact that the county committee, the county office does have to request the program, but this provides assistance to woodlands. So, a private stand of timber that got damaged or destroyed, we can cost/share in a similar manner to rehabilitate or replant the timber on the property.”
And finally:
“Our Tree Assistance Program, this is for orchardist and nursery tree growers in the event of a disaster, we can cost/share with these individuals, to rehabilitate the nursery stock or replace the nursery stock through our Tree Assistance Program.”
For further information, or to apply for these programs, contact your county Farm Service Agency office.
County Executive Director, USDA Farm Service Agency Kevin Wooten
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