Some commodities left out of CFAP because of lack of information

The Coronavirus Food Assistance Program provides financial assistance to agricultural producers, but some commodities were left out.

The Farm Service Agency has approved more than $2.8 billion dollars to be paid to more than 220,000 producers. FSA administrator Richard Fordyce says that groups were left out of the initial phase because of a lack of information, something the agency is working to correct.

“Our approach to that was to issue a NOFA, a notice of funds availability, for the public to submit data that would support inclusion of their commodity, and that’s been a robust process,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of submissions from different commodities, either organizations representing commodities or individual producers that have submitted data.”