By BRENT MARTIN

St. Joseph Post

Midwestern farmers and ranchers, attempting to recover from flooding, are turning to the federal government for assistance.

Farm Service Agency Administrator Richard Fordyce says the Emergency Conservation Program is in demand.

“For those of you in the Midwest, it’s going to be highly utilized from the flooding that happened in March,” Fordyce tells farm broadcasters gathered in Washington, D.C. “I think nearly 50 counties in Nebraska have made application and then counties in Iowa and Missouri to this point from those March storms.”

The program provides federal assistance to repair damage from natural disasters, both for cropland and for pasture land. Fordyce, former Missouri Agriculture Director, says he recently returned home to tour some of the flooded areas on both sides of the state.

“I was in Missouri over the weekend and it is wet,” Fordyce says to laughter. “Like, the top of a hill has water standing on it.”
Fordyce didn’t just visit his hometown, he also toured other areas of the state.

“But I see a lot of corn planted when I was driving around,” Fordyce says. “We were in St. Louis and then went to south Missouri and back up to northwest Missouri. A lot of corn is planted, but it is going to be a while, at least in that part of the country, before we’re going to get back into the field.”

Congress is working on a separate disaster relief package, which would incorporate assistance for farms and communities impacted by flooding this year.

Fordyce understands recovery is just now taking place and future flooding is a real possibility.

“There really is no deadline for producers to sign up under ECP with the flooding concerns,” “It’s really hard, obviously as you can imagine, it’s nearly impossible to get an estimate on what that project will cost if there’s water on it.”