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Hand County USDA Service Center Update -  April 30, 2025

In This Issue:

• CED Comments
• Dates, Deadlines and Interest Rates
• Getting Acreage Reporting Right
• Annual Review of Payment Eligibility for New Crop Year 
• Five Facts About the United States Drought Monitor

CED Comments

Please contact the office regarding any program questions you may have and for assistance that we can provide.  Below is some program information that may be of assistance to your farming operation.

Acreage Reporting - Reporting and certifying your acres (prevented, planted, forage and/or grass) to FSA on an annual basis can be crucial if you are participating in most any of our programs. We have 2025 acreage reporting maps available. If you have not done so already, please stop in to pick up your maps at your earliest convenience, or email our office at sdmiller-fsa@usda.gov and request your maps be emailed to you. The deadline to file your 2025 acreage report is July 15^th.

Primary Nesting Season & Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) - The primary nesting season begins May 1st and runs through August 1st. During this time, activities conducted in established CRP fields are extremely limited. Please contact the office to receive permission before doing any spot spraying or spot clipping of weeds on CRP during this timeframe.

Keep Connected with FSA - With all of the existing programs and new programs becoming available to assist you, we don’t want you to miss out on any of these deadlines. We encourage you to sign up for our text message alerts. FSA provides text message alerts (no more than 2 per month) for important reminders and deadlines. Don’t miss out on receiving these reminders. Let’s get you signed up right now in 3 easy steps! 

1. Take out your phone.
2. Send a message to 372-669 with SDHand in the body of the text.
3. Hit send.

If you did these 3 easy steps, you are signed up to receive text alerts. Thanks for doing this and you will receive quick reminders of important deadlines.

Thank you for your time.

Diane Beidler
County Executive Director 
Hand County Farm Service Agency

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Dates, Deadlines and Interest Rates

Important Dates and Deadlines

May 1 - Primary Nesting Season begins
May 26 - USDA Service Center closed in observance of Memorial Day
May 31 - Deadline to request a commodity loan for prior year harvested row crops
July 15 - Deadline to report and certify row crops, small grains, forages & CRP
August 15 - Deadline to apply for ECAP

May 2025 Interest Rates

Farm Loan Program
5.127% - Farm Operating Loans, Direct
5.625% - Farm Ownership Loans, Direct
3.625% - Farm Ownership, Joint Financing
1.625% - Farm Ownership Loans, Beginning Farmer Down Payment

April 2025
Farm Storage Facility Loan Program
4.000% - Farm Storage Facility Loans, 3-Year
4.125% - Farm Storage Facility Loans, 5-Year
4.125% - Farm Storage Facility Loans, 7-Year
4.250% - Farm Storage Facility Loans, 10-Year
4.375% - Farm Storage Facility Loans, 12-Year

Commodity Loan Rate on 2024 crop
5.125% - Commodity Loans

Getting Acreage Reporting Right

You have a lot at stake in making sure your crop insurance acreage reporting is accurate and on time. If you fail to report on time, you may not be protected. If you report too much acreage, you may pay too much premium. If you report too little acreage, you may recover less when you file a claim.

Crop insurance agents often say that mistakes in acreage reporting are the easiest way for producers to have an unsatisfactory experience with crop insurance. Don’t depend on your agent to do this important job for you. Your signature on the bottom of the acreage reporting form makes it, legally, your responsibility. Double-check it for yourself.

Remember - acreage reporting is your responsibility. Doing it right will save you money. Always get a copy of your report immediately after signing and filing it with your agent and keep it with your records. Remember, it is your responsibility to report crop damage to your agent within 72 hours of discovery. Never put damaged acreage to another use without prior written consent of the insurance adjuster. You don’t want to destroy any evidence of a possible claim. Learn more by visiting RMA’s website.

Annual Review of Payment Eligibility for New Crop Year 

FSA and NRCS program applicants for benefits are required to submit a completed CCC-902 Farming Operation Plan and CCC-941 Average Gross Income (AGI) Certification and Consent to Disclosure of Tax Information for FSA to determine the applicant’s payment eligibility and establish the maximum payment limitation applicable to the program applicant.

Participants are not required to annually submit new CCC-902s for payment eligibility and payment limitation purposes unless a change in the farming operation occurs that may affect the previous determination of record. A valid CCC-902 filed by the participant is considered to be a continuous certification used for all payment eligibility and payment limitation determinations applicable for the program benefits requested. 

Participants are responsible for ensuring that all CCC-902 and CCC-941 and related forms on file in the county office are updated, current, and correct. Participants are required to timely notify the county office of any changes in the farming operation that may affect the previous determination of record by filing a new or updated CCC-902 as applicable.                           

Changes that may require a new determination include, but are not limited to, a change of:

• Shares of a contract, which may reflect:
• A land lease from cash rent to share rent
• A land lease from share rent to cash rent (subject to the cash rent tenant rule)
• A modification of a variable/fixed bushel-rent arrangement
• The size of the producer’s farming operation by the addition or reduction of cropland that may affect the application of a cropland factor
• The structure of the farming operation, including any change to a member's share
• The contribution of farm inputs of capital, land, equipment, active personal labor, and/or active personal management
• Farming interests not previously disclosed on CCC-902 including the farming interests of a spouse or minor child

Certifications of average AGI are required to be filed annually for participation in an annual USDA program.  For multi-year conservation contracts and NRCS easements, a certification of AGI must be filed prior to approval of the contract or easement and is applicable for the duration of the contract period. 

Participants are encouraged to file or review these forms within the deadlines established for each applicable program for which program benefits are being requested.

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Five Facts About the United States Drought Monitor

This is likely no surprise to you, but drought persists across the western U.S. and is intensifying in some areas. No geographic area is immune to the potential of drought at any given time. The U.S. Drought Monitor provides a weekly drought assessment, and it plays an important role in USDA programs that help farmers and ranchers recover from drought.

Fact #1 - Numerous agencies use the Drought Monitor to inform drought-related decisions.

The map identifies areas of drought and labels them by intensity on a weekly basis. It categorizes the entire country as being in one of six levels of drought. The first two, None and Abnormally Dry (D0), are not considered to be drought. The next four describe increasing levels of drought: Moderate (D1), Severe (D2), Extreme (D3) and Exceptional (D4). 

While many entities consult the Drought Monitor for drought information, drought declarations are made by federal, state and local agencies that may or may not use the Drought Monitor to inform their decisions. Some of the ways USDA uses it to determine a producer’s eligibility for certain drought assistance programs, like the Livestock Forage Disaster Program and Emergency Haying or Grazing on Conservation Reserve Program acres and to “fast-track” Secretarial drought disaster designations. 

Fact #2 - U.S. Drought Monitor is made with more than precipitation data.

When you think about drought, you probably think about water, or the lack of it. Precipitation plays a major role in the creation of the Drought Monitor, but the map’s author considers numerous indicators, including drought impacts and local insight from over 450 expert observers around the country. Authors use several dozen indicators to assess drought, including precipitation, streamflow, reservoir levels, temperature and evaporative demand, soil moisture and vegetation health. Because the drought monitor depicts both short and long‐term drought conditions, the authors must look at data for multiple timeframes. The final map produced each week represents a summary of the story being told by all the pieces of data. To help tell that story, authors don’t just look at data. They converse over the course of the map-making week with experts across the country and draw information about drought impacts from media reports and private citizens

.Fact #3 - A real person, using real data, updates the map.

Each week’s map author, not a computer, processes and analyzes data to update the drought monitor. The map authors are trained climatologists or meteorologists from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (the academic partner and website host of the Drought Monitor), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and USDA. The author’s job is to do what a computer can’t – use their expertise to reconcile the sometimes-conflicting stories told by each stream of data into a single assessment.

Fact #4 - The Drought Monitor provides a current snapshot, not a forecast.

The Drought Monitor is a “snapshot” of conditions observed during the most recent week and builds off the previous week’s map. The map is released on Thursdays and depicts conditions based on data for the week that ended the preceding Tuesday. Rain that falls on the Wednesday just before the USDM’s release won’t be reflected until the next map is published. This provides a consistent, week‐to‐week product and gives the author a window to assess the data and come up with a final map.

Fact #5 – Your input can be part of the drought-monitoring process.

State climatologists and other trained observers in the drought monitoring network relay on-the-ground information from numerous sources to the US Drought monitor author each week. That can include information that you contribute.

The Drought Monitor serves as a trigger for multiple forms of federal disaster relief for agricultural producers, and sometimes producers contact the author to suggest that drought conditions in their area are worse than what the latest drought monitor shows. When the author gets a call like that, it prompts them to look closely at all available data for that area, to see whether measurements of precipitation, temperature, soil moisture and other indicators corroborate producer-submitted reports. This is the process that authors follow whether they receive one report or one hundred reports, although reports from more points may help state officials and others know where to look for impacts.

There are multiple ways to contribute your observations:

1. Talk to your state climatologist - Find the current list at the American Association of State Climatologists website.
2. Email - Emails sent to droughtmonitor@unl.edu inform the USDM authors.
3. Become a CoCoRaHS observer - Submit drought reports along with daily precipitation observations to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network.
4. Submit Condition Monitoring Observer Reports (CMOR) - go.unl.edu/CMOR.

For more information, read our Ask the Expert blog with a NDMC climatologist or visit farmers.gov/protection-recovery.

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