WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture designated 15 counties in New Jersey as primary natural disaster areas because of losses caused by severe storms, with high winds, heavy rainfall, hail and associated plant diseases that occurred during the period of April 15, 2009, and continuing.
Those counties are:
• Atlantic
• Cape May
• Hunterdon
• Monmouth
• Somerset
• Burlington
• Cumberland
• Mercer
• Ocean
• Sussex
• Camden
• Gloucester
• Middlesex
• Salem
• Warren
“President Obama and I understand these conditions caused severe damage to the area and serious harm to farms in New Jersey,” said Secretary Tom Vilsack. “These designations will provide help to farmers who suffered significant production losses to fruit crops such as apples and peaches, truck crops including cucumbers, melons, pumpkins and squash and wheat.”
Farm operators in Morris, Passaic and Union counties in New Jersey also qualify for natural disaster assistance because their counties are contiguous.
Farm operators in the counties listed below in the adjacent states of Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania also qualify for natural disaster assistance because their counties are contiguous.
Delaware: New Castle
New York: Orange and Richmond
Pennsylvania: Bucks, Delaware, Monroe, Northampton, Philadelphia and Pike
All counties listed above were designated natural disaster areas Sept. 25, 2009, making all qualified farm operators in the designated areas eligible for low interest emergency (EM) loans from USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), provided eligibility requirements are met. Farmers in eligible counties have eight months from the date of the declaration to apply for loans to help cover part of their actual losses. FSA will consider each loan application on its own merits, taking into account the extent of losses, security available and repayment ability. FSA has a variety of programs, in addition to the EM loan program, to help eligible farmers recover from adversity.
USDA has also made other programs available to assist farmers and ranchers, including the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Program (SURE), which was approved as part of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008; the Emergency Conservation Program; Federal Crop Insurance; and the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program. Interested farmers may contact their local USDA Service Centers for further information on eligibility requirements and application procedures for these and other programs. Additional information is also available online at: http://disaster.fsa.usda.gov.
FSA news releases are available on FSA’s Web site at: http://www.fsa.usda.gov via the “News and Events” link.
Sea Isle City – Why are we paying two construction officials hundreds of thousands of salaries and they can’t even have buildings that are destroyed by a fire demolished in a timely manner. It’s been 7 months. We…
