About the project

The problem

USDA Farm Service Agency disaster-assistance programs — the Livestock Forage Disaster Program (LFP), Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees, and Farm-Raised Fish (ELAP), and the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) — are a critical lifeline for American producers. LFP alone has paid out more than $13.6 billion since 2008 — roughly $800 million in a typical year, and over $2.5 billion in years of widespread drought — as computed from the project’s Farm Payment Files archive. Eligibility for those payments hinges on two key inputs:

1. The Normal Grazing Period (NGP) assigned to each type of grazing land in each county — the period of the calendar year when grazing normally occurs, which sets the season during which drought conditions can trigger eligibility.
2. The US Drought Monitor (USDM), the weekly drought-severity classification that triggers LFP eligibility and fast-tracks Secretarial disaster designations.

Neither input is neglected: FSA state committees review Normal Grazing Periods annually, and a new Drought Monitor map is issued every Thursday. The problem lies in the foundations beneath that cadence. County grazing-period dates still largely trace to a one-time national calculation under FSA Notice NAP-190 (2017), rather than being re-derived as each new 30-year climate normal is released. The USDM classifies drought against statistical baselines that peer-reviewed research — including by this team — shows have been outpaced by climate change. And county eligibility is adjudicated using a non-authoritative county boundary dataset that was adopted before the 2008 Farm Bill and revised only three times since. The result is that program criteria can drift away from the growing seasons and county lines they are meant to represent — mismatches that FSA county staff, the people most directly responsible for delivering these programs, see firsthand.

What this project does

This is a three-year research partnership between the Montana Climate Office at the University of Montana and the USDA Office of the Chief Economist, the USDA Climate Hubs, and the Farm Service Agency. The work has produced four complementary outputs, all openly available on this site:

• Re-grounded the science. Using the methodology FSA set out in Notice NAP-190 and the latest NOAA nClimGrid daily climate data, the team rebuilt the county-level Normal Grazing Period calculation as a fully reproducible workflow anchored to the current (1991–2020) climate normals. The same pipeline can be re-run on each new climate normal — so program criteria can stay current with measured conditions rather than going stale. The full report is published on the Publications page.
• Closed data gaps. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the team obtained, cleaned, and publicly archived the official county-level Normal Grazing Periods (2008–2026), LFP eligibility determinations, the LFP county boundaries used in those determinations, and FSA’s current county boundary geodatabase — with the legacy geodatabase FSA formerly distributed archived alongside them. The project also maintains weekly mirrors of the US Drought Monitor (every weekly map since the machine-readable record began on January 4, 2000) and of the Secretarial disaster designations and Presidential major-disaster declarations that unlock emergency assistance. The full set of archives is surfaced on the Data page.
• Listened to FSA staff and producers. Graduate research — including staff interviews conducted with national FSA approval — has produced four completed M.S. theses examining how the LFP and related programs are delivered on the ground: what works, what doesn’t, and where program design and producer experience diverge. Two were directly supported by the project; two more, advised or mentored by the PI, extend that work to drought planning in the Northern Great Plains and water scarcity in western Montana. The four theses are listed alongside the project’s analytical reports on the Publications page; the Team page names the researchers and their faculty committee chairs.

In the course of this work the team identified a notable program-administration finding: LFP eligibility has been determined using a non-authoritative county boundary dataset — one maintained outside USDA that was adopted before the 2008 Farm Bill and has been revised only three times since, even as the US Census has recorded 472 county boundary corrections and changes from 2008 through 2025 alone.

Why it matters

The aim is simple: disaster relief programs should be responsive, timely, and grounded in operational reality. When the data behind eligibility decisions are transparent, current, and publicly auditable, USDA can:

• Avoid misallocations and improve the fiscal integrity of emergency-assistance spending.
• Reduce red tape for FSA county staff by giving them better tools and authoritative reference data.
• Deliver effective, targeted relief to ranchers when and where it is actually needed.
• Base program criteria on transparent, science-based metrics that any researcher, producer, or oversight body can independently reproduce.

Looking ahead

The remaining months of the project translate these results into briefings, factsheets, and a national working meeting with USDA OCE and FSA staff aimed at concrete program-administration improvements. Findings will also be shared with FSA state offices.

Scientific foundation

The project builds on peer-reviewed work demonstrating that drought-assessment methods have not kept pace with the climate record — most directly, Hoylman, Bocinsky, and Jencso (2022), “Drought assessment has been outpaced by climate change: empirical arguments for a paradigm shift,” in Nature Communications. That paper provides the empirical case for re-anchoring drought thresholds to current climate normals; the present project translates that case into reproducible workflows and authoritative data archives for FSA program administration.

About the Montana Climate Office

The Montana Climate Office (MCO) at the University of Montana is Montana’s official state climate office, designated in 2006, and the official steward of the state’s climate data. Its mission is to provide Montanans with high-quality, timely, relevant, and scientifically based climate, drought, and water-resources information and services. The MCO operates the Montana Mesonet — a network of more than 215 active stations monitoring weather, soil moisture, and snowpack across the state — and produces operational drought analyses for the Upper Missouri River Basin and the Pacific Northwest. That combination of on-the-ground monitoring, drought science, and day-to-day service to producers and agencies is the foundation on which this project is built.

Funding

This work is funded through a Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement with the USDA Office of the Chief Economist, Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, passed through to the Research, Education, and Economics mission area.