By Stephen Smoot
Through 2023 and 2024, significant drought conditions hit eastern West Virginia and many parts of the nation. The United States Congress passed the American Relief Act of 2025 to address damage done to farms by the arid conditions.
The statute set up a two-stage application process.
Stage One was geared toward “producers with indemnified losses.” According to the United States Department of Agriculture, this application, if approved “leverages existing Federal Crop Insurance or Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) data as the basis for calculating payments.”
The enrollment period for Stage One remains open and closes April 30, 2026.
For Stage One “Drought losses must have occurred in a county rated by the U.S. Drought Monitor as having a D2 (severe drought) for eight consecutive weeks, D3 (extreme drought) or greater intensity level during the applicable calendar year.”
Farmers who experienced “crop, tree, and vine losses must be due to wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derechos, excessive heat, tornadoes, winter storms, freeze (including a polar vortex), smoke exposure, excessive moisture, qualifying drought, and related conditions occurring in calendar years 2023 and/or 2024,” may also apply for Stage One assistance.
So far, the USDA has approved 239 Stage One applications from West Virginia and paid out $3,305,572.
The West Virginia Department of Agriculture last week announced that the Farm Service Agency would start accepting applications for Stage Two assistance on Nov. 25. The application period for both stages terminates on April 30, 2026.
While Stage One addresses losses that have been indemnified, Stage Two is for non-indemnified losses, including shallow losses, as well as uncovered or uninsured losses, and crop quality losses. The USDA will determine quality losses in the following ways.
“Quality reductions for all crops, except forage, will be calculated using a decrease in value based on discounts provided at the point of sale due to the physical condition of the crop indicated by an applicable grading factor.”
“Quality reduction for forage crops will be based on nutritional value (similar to NAP). This approach provides a range of specified values and calculates a percentage. FSA will use the range of Relative Feed Value (RFV) already established under NAP, Total Digestible Nutrients (TDN), or some other measure of forage feed quality can be used to document the quality factors.”
According to the West Virgina Department of Agriculture, “this builds on earlier relief efforts, including $9.3 billion through the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program and $705 million through the Emergency Livestock Relief Program.
Kent Leonhardt, West Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture said, “We appreciate USDA’s commitment to getting these resources to our farmers when they need them most.”
