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Counties Designated as Disaster Areas and Qualify for Other Programs

Updated November 18, 2021
Professional headshot of Heather Gessner

Heather Gessner

SDSU Extension Livestock Business Management Field Specialist

U.S. Drough Monitor Map for South Dakota. Conditions range from extreme drough in the Southeast and Southwest to abmornal to moderate in the rest of the state.
Figure 1. U.S. drought monitor for South Dakota, November 3, 2020.

Five South Dakota counties have been given disaster declarations due to dry summer conditions.

In Southeast S.D., Clay, Lincoln, Minnehaha, and Turner counties have been designate as primary disaster areas. This declaration gives producers in these counties and those in contiguous counties access to USDA-FSA emergency loans. Contiguous counties include Hutchinson, Lake, McCook, Moody, Union, and Yankton, S.D.; Lyon and Sioux, Iowa; Pipestone and Rock, Minnesota; and Cedar and Dixon, Nebraska.

In Southwest, S.D. Bennet County has also received this designation. Thus, the contiguous counties of Jackson, Mellette, Oglala Lakota, and Todd Counties in South Dakota, and Cherry and Sheridan, Nebraska qualify for emergency loans as well.

In addition to the disaster declaration, due to the degree of drought designation and the number of weeks of those designations, livestock producers in these counties may qualify for Livestock Forage Disaster Program (LFP) payments.

Full eligibility rules can be found in the LFP Fact Sheet or by talking to their local FSA office staff. Livestock Forage Program payments are triggered by the number of weeks a part of the county has been listed as D2, D3, or D4 by the United States Drought Monitor.

Each county eligible for an LFP payment has been listed at a minimum of D2, for 8 continuous weeks, during the normal grazing period. County designations can be found on the Drought Monitor page. A producer in a county designated as D3, at any time during the normal grazing period, may be eligible for three monthly payments for qualifying livestock inventories.

Producers that may qualify for USDA programs should contact the FSA staff in their local office. There are application deadlines to apply for assistance and ensure that applications contain the appropriate information.