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 $12 billion since 2008: roughly a billion dollars in a typical year, and several billion in years of widespread drought. 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 has been essentially frozen since 2008. 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 Analysis 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 eleven 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 Analysis page; the Team page names the researchers and their faculty committee chairs.
• Anticipated future shifts. Using NASA’s downscaled CMIP6 projections (NEX-GDDP-CMIP6), the team has characterized how grazing periods are likely to shift under future climate conditions; a peer-reviewed manuscript reporting these findings is in preparation.

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 has remained essentially unchanged since 2012, even as the US Census has recorded hundreds of county boundary corrections and changes over the same period. The finding was presented to USDA OCE-OEEP; a fuller report is in preparation.

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.

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.