Now that Agricultural producers that were eligible for the Farmer Bridge Assistance payments have completed their applications for funds, we sat down with Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation Richard Fordyce to get an update on the status of these payments.
Under Secretary Fordyce said, “ It’s been a big success. You know, we started, we kicked off sign up on the 23rd of February. We were actually urging farmers to get a login.gov account. We had a really overwhelmingly large number of folks that did that initially. So as of last night, 375,000 applications have been received by FSA.”
“And we’ve got around 45,000 of those applications that came in through the login.gov purity front door. And so where that makes sense for folks, where that’s been a desire of some of our producers to interact with the agency and the agencies more from a virtual or digital perspective. But we saw, you know, the biggest chunk of those folks were right at the beginning. And we continue to see a few more kind of come in. But, you know, we’re going to continue to work toward that, not to say that we’re not going to meet farmers where they are. But 375,000 applications received, 335,000, 340,000 have been approved. And we have, as of this morning, $7.9 billion has been obligated to Farmer Bridge Assistance in two weeks and two days,” said Fordyce.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.