By: Jeff Beach
WASHINGTON (North Dakota Monitor) – The federal government has announced help for sugar producers as an application period opens for a previously announced $12 billion farmer assistance program.
Brad Thykeson, North Dakota’s state director for the Farm Service Agency, was likely among the first to use the online application site for the Farmer Bridge Assistance program announced in December.
Thykeson, who farms with two sons in Steele County, said he got a text message from Jared Hagert, the North Dakotan who is the new U.S. Department of Agriculture deputy administrator of farm programs, encouraging him to test out the application site that went live Monday morning.
The payment calculator relies on reports filed last summer about how many acres a farmer planted to various crops.
“I was able to check a couple boxes, consent and electronically sign,” Thykeson said. “So it is really simple and very streamlined.”
Farmers can still apply through their local FSA office, but Thykeson said application forms will not be mailed out to growers.
There is a review process and processing time will vary based on location, but the Farmer Bridge Payment could be in the applicant’s checking account within a few days.
“We do expect that the payments will be out relatively quickly,” Brandi Laframboise of the North Dakota FSA office said Monday.
USDA in December announced per acre payment rates for the crops covered, including $30.88 for soybeans, $39.35 for wheat and $44.36 for corn.
The program has $11 billion for those more conventional crops and $1 billion for special crops ranging from almonds to watermelons.
The USDA announced Friday that specialty crop payments would include $150 million for sugar producers. Sugar beets are a key specialty crop in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota.
The agency also announced $89.1 million in disaster assistance to sugar growers for 2023-24 drought-related losses.
“As growers face low or negative margins, these assistance packages are giving the entire domestic sugar industry a fighting chance against market disruptions, ongoing inflation, rising production costs, and losses to foreign suppliers,” the Red River Sugarbeet Growers Association said in a statement.
An application period for special crops producers will come later, Thykeson said.
Commodity groups representing producers lobbied for government help as farmers face low prices and high costs for inputs such as fertilizer.
Thykeson said farmers who have some livestock production, an area where North Dakota trails neighboring states, are more likely to be profitable in the current farm economy.
“As far as crop production, no matter what crop you’re raising, it seems like it’s just a tough time right now,” Thykeson said. “We either have too low prices or we have too high input costs, and that’s just the fact.”
The USDA said in a new release that the bridge payments are intended in part to aid farmers until farm policy changes included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress last year can kick in later this year. Those changes include higher reference prices, the prices that trigger farmer assistance programs.
These one-time bridge payments are intended to help address market disruptions, elevated input costs, inflation, and market losses because of unfair trade practices from other countries.
Brian Leier of Linton, president of the North Dakota Corn Growers Association, said groups like his lobbied for the payments but also advocated for other policy changes, such as increased use of ethanol fuel made from corn.
“I kind of laugh. I called them the Bridge to Nowhere,” he said of the bridge payments last month at the Northern Corn and Soybean Expo in West Fargo, given the bleak outlook for the farm economy.
At the same event, Justin Sherlock, president of the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association, said the federal assistance doesn’t address the trade issues that are affecting farmers.
“We have to have markets,” Sherlock said. “We cannot just keep giving government payments.”
Thykeson said his family plans to add canola to their usual plantings of corn, soybeans, wheat and some edible beans.
“Hopefully there will be a rally in one of the markets and will have a good crop at a good price,” he said.
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