The Colorado Corn Growers Association is calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to implement a Farm Bill provision crafted by Congress to grant relief to Colorado farm families who have faced multiple years of severe drought.

We are extremely disappointed that USDA has put drought relief on the back burner. This relief should have been made available to Colorado farm families already this spring, but USDA is now talking about a two-year delay.

This is unacceptable.

The provision requires USDA to allow producers to exclude a yield in a year when the yield for the county is 50 percent or less than the 10-year average as the result of an extreme natural disaster.

The effect of the provision is to allow a producer to buy enough insurance coverage to adequately cover future crops. Producers who exclude a yield under the provision must pay additional premium in order to cover any increased liability.

The provision became law on Feb. 7, 2014, but USDA has stepped in to delay the availability of relief until 2016. When natural disasters strike the coasts, Washington responds pretty quickly. Why then, when farm families in places like Colorado are dealing with several years of disastrous drought, does the USDA not seem to have that same sense of urgency?

We hope that our Colorado senators and congressmen will work to get USDA to finally take notice of our situation out here.

We took a lot of cuts in the Farm Bill with the understanding that we would have some other tools to work with. So far, we kept our end of the bargain. We just need to the USDA to keep their end of it as well.

Source - http://www.agjournalonline.com/