As this year winds down, producers are likely to have noticed a dramatic downturn in direct government payments.
With Covid-19 under control, a lot of USDA and non-government pandemic payments, like ARC and PLC, have begun trailing off.
According to USDA, $31 billion was dished out in the last two years in an effort to help farmers offset diminished sales, lower prices, and other losses. USDA Chief Economist Seth Meyer explains what is seeing now.
“Obviously with the prices that we’re seeing now, those don’t trigger a whole lot, so there’s not a lot of expenses there. There are some increases year over year in government payments for some disaster assistance programs, but you’re talking about coming down well off of the direct government payments that you observed in 2020 during the height of the pandemic.”
Meyer says direct government payments are starting to follow closer to the 10-year average.
