FSA Annual County Eligibility Data from the Livestock Forage Disaster Program, 2008–2025

This repository is an archive of the annual county-level eligibility data for the Livestock Forage Disaster Program (LFP).

The data in this repository were acquired via FOIA requests 2025-FSA-04690-F, 2025-FSA-08422-F, and 2026-FSA-02433-F by R. Kyle Bocinsky (Montana Climate Office). This replaces previously filed and fulfilled FOIA response covering 2012–2022 (2023-FSA-00937-F). All FOIA responses, including the original Excel workbooks, are archived in the foia directory.

🗂️ Contents

• foia/2026-FSA-02433-F Bocinsky.zip — 2025 eligibility data
• foia/2025-FSA-08422-F Bocinsky.zip — 2012 through July 2025 eligibility data
• foia/2025-FSA-04690-F Bocinsky.zip — 2008 through 2024 eligibility data (incomplete)
• foia/2023-FSA-00937-F Bocinsky.zip — previous FOIA data and correspondence (archived)
• fsa-lfp-eligibility.csv — cleaned and consolidated data, one record per FSA county, program year, pasture type, and disaster type
• fsa-lfp-eligibility.parquet — the same records as Parquet
• fsa-lfp-eligibility-events.csv — the same determinations reshaped long, one record per qualifying drought event
• fsa-lfp-eligibility-events.parquet — the same event records as Parquet
• qa-report.txt — QA summary and flagged records for the published data
• fsa-lfp-eligibility.R — processing script
• fsa-lfp-eligibility.qmd — Quarto dashboard source
• fsa-lfp-eligibility.html — interactive summary dashboard
• _manifest.txt — flat index of every file in the S3-hosted mirror

☁️ Archive Hosting & Automated Publishing

The consolidated data (fsa-lfp-eligibility.csv and fsa-lfp-eligibility.parquet), the event-grain projection of it (fsa-lfp-eligibility-events.csv and fsa-lfp-eligibility-events.parquet), the QA report (qa-report.txt), the assets/ directory the dashboard reads from, and the foia/ correspondence are all mirrored to S3, served via CloudFront at https://data.sustainable-fsa.com/fsa-lfp-eligibility/ (browse the archive listing or _manifest.txt for a flat index). The interactive dashboard itself is served separately, via GitHub Pages at https://sustainable-fsa.com/fsa-lfp-eligibility/.

Publishing is handled by fsa-lfp-eligibility.R via the shared R/s3-archive.R helpers, and runs automatically in GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/fsa-lfp-eligibility.yaml) whenever the script, dashboard, or workflow changes, or on manual dispatch. The workflow authenticates to AWS via GitHub OIDC (no long-lived credentials stored in the repo), re-renders the README and dashboard, and commits them back to git only if the rendered output changed.

📥 Input Data: FOIA Excel Workbooks

Three FOIA responses, each delivering one Microsoft Excel workbook per program year. 2025-FSA-08422-F and 2026-FSA-02433-F cover 2012 through 2025 with the full set of variables. 2025-FSA-04690-F covers 2008 through 2024 but omits most of them, and supplies the only records for 2008 through 2011.

Column names and layouts vary by year. fsa-lfp-eligibility.R harmonizes them and de-duplicates across the overlapping responses, keeping the most recently dated file’s version of each determination.

📤 Output Data

The archive is published as fsa-lfp-eligibility.csv and fsa-lfp-eligibility.parquet. The archive is published in both formats with identical records. The Parquet carries column types; the CSV does not, so the zero-padded FSA and FIPS codes must be read as character or they lose their leading zeros.

readr::read_csv(URL, col_types = readr::cols(FIPS = "c", `FSA County` = "c"))

Each record is one eligibility determination, keyed on FSA county, program year, pasture type and disaster type. D3A END and D4A END are empty in every record, so a CSV reader takes them for logical rather than date columns.

Variables in Output

🌵 Drought tiers and payment ladders

LFP pays for grazing losses when the US Drought Monitor rates a county at a qualifying intensity during the normal grazing period for that pasture type. The tiers, and the monthly payments they earn, have changed twice.

2008 Farm Bill — program years 2008–2011

2014 Farm Bill — program years 2012–2025

P.L. 119-21 — program years 2026 onward

Section 10401(b) of P.L. 119-21 (July 4, 2025) split the D2 tier, amending 7 U.S.C. 9081(c)(3)(D)(ii)(I). The 4-week and 4-consecutive-week distinctions are as written: the D2 tiers require consecutive weeks, the D3 and D4 4-week tiers do not.

The event codes used across these archives are D2, D3a, D3b, D4a and D4b, and from 2026 D2a_2026 and D2b_2026 in place of D2. The a tiers trigger at any time; the b tiers require a duration.

Which date qualifies a tier

D2, D2A, D2B, D3B and D4B require a duration, and are satisfied on the last day of the qualifying window — their END. D3A and D4A trigger at any time, carry no END value, and are satisfied on their START.

FSA reports each B-tier START as a copy of its A-tier counterpart, so a START-keyed reshape of the wide table double-counts D3 and D4.

Program years 2008–2011

Those years came from a different FOIA response and carry no tier columns, no grazing dates and no Maximum Eligible Payment Months. The tier survives in Note, which does not distinguish the A and B sub-tiers, but Payment Factor does: the 2008 ladder pays 2 for D3 at any time and 3 for D3 over at least four weeks.

There is no D4b tier in that era. The split assumes Payment Factor is uncapped for those years; the cap’s inputs are absent so it cannot be recomputed to check, and no record shows it binding.

Date of Qualifying Drought, the only date reported for the era, records when the drought began rather than when a tier was satisfied. For D3a and D4a those coincide and the date is used. For D2 and D3b they do not, and no satisfaction date is recoverable, so Qualifying Date is NA. fsa-lfp-eligibility-web reports these tier dates directly; prefer it before 2012.

🔄 Output Data: Event Grain

fsa-lfp-eligibility-events.csv and fsa-lfp-eligibility-events.parquet reshape the wide table long.

One record per Census county, FSA county, program year, pasture type, and qualifying drought event. A county whose drought deepened through the season carries several records, one for each tier as it was reached.

Drought Factor is derived from the ladder in force, not copied from the record-level column of the same name, which reports only the tier that set the award. Maximum Eligible Payment Months and Payment Factor are FSA’s own, repeated on each event of a determination.

Drought Factor, Payment Factor and the cap

Drought Factor is the monthly payments a tier earns under the ladder in force. Maximum Eligible Payment Months is FSA’s cap, a function of the length of the grazing period. Payment Factor is the payable figure, min(Drought Factor, Maximum Eligible Payment Months).

From program year 2026 FSA reports Drought Factor as 1 for both D2 sub-tiers, carrying the two-payment outcome in Payment Factor alone. These archives score D2b_2026 as 2, so compare Payment Factor rather than Drought Factor when checking 2026 against FSA.

The events file does not round-trip to the wide file: determinations with no qualifying tier yield no event, and some 2008–2011 events have no date. qa-report.txt reconciles the two by program year.

🗺️ Two county keys

An LFP determination needs two counties. The normal grazing period is set per FSA county — the administrative unit, established through NAP and the National Crop Table (1-LFP Amend. 7, par. 27). Eligibility then triggers on drought “in any area of the county” as a Census county, the unit the US Drought Monitor is aggregated to (par. 23).

The two do not nest, in either direction. One FSA county may cover several Census counties, most widely in Puerto Rico and Alaska, and in the Virginia county-plus-independent-city pairs. Several FSA counties may fall inside one Census county, where FSA splits a county administratively and each office sets its own grazing period: Aroostook ME, Custer ID, Pottawattamie IA, Otter Tail MN, Polk MN, St. Louis MN, Nye NV, Lucas OH and Galax VA.

Records are therefore keyed on both counties and never combined. Reducing to a single county grain is the consumer’s choice; qa-report.txt lists the records it affects. The FSA-to-Census crosswalk is published in fsa-counties-dd17 and fsa-counties-dd22.

Comparing against the derived archive

official <-
  arrow::read_parquet(
    "https://data.sustainable-fsa.com/fsa-lfp-eligibility/fsa-lfp-eligibility-events.parquet"
  ) |>
  dplyr::mutate(source = "fsa-published")

derived <-
  arrow::read_parquet(
    "https://data.sustainable-fsa.com/fsa-lfp-eligibility-derived/fsa-lfp-eligibility-derived.parquet"
  ) |>
  dplyr::mutate(dplyr::across(c(source, `Pasture Type`,
                                `Qualifying Drought Event`), as.character))

dplyr::bind_rows(official, derived)

The derived archive stores source, Pasture Type and Qualifying Drought Event as factors; this archive uses character throughout. bind_rows() reconciles that on its own, and the as.character() above only keeps the levels from surprising you downstream.

Two schema differences to expect. The derived archive carries source, naming which of four county aggregations produced the record, where FSA has one determination. And it carries neither Maximum Eligible Payment Months nor Payment Factor, so those come back NA for the derived rows.

📊 Demonstration Dashboard

The Quarto dashboard fsa-lfp-eligibility.qmd provides:

• An interactive viewer to explore LFP Eligibility by county, year, disaster, and pasture type
• A tool for researchers and policymakers to assess temporal trends

Access a full-screen version of the dashboard at:
https://sustainable-fsa.com/fsa-lfp-eligibility/fsa-lfp-eligibility.html

📍 Quick Start: Visualize a FSA LFP Eligibility Map in R

This snippet shows how to load the FSA LFP Eligibility file from the archive and create a simple map using sf and ggplot2.

# Load required libraries
library(sf)
library(ggplot2) # For plotting
library(tigris)  # For state boundaries
library(rmapshaper) # For innerlines function

## Get the LFP Eligibility data
eligibility <- 
  readr::read_csv("fsa-lfp-eligibility.csv")

counties <- 
  tigris::counties(cb = TRUE, 
                   resolution = "5m",
                   progress_bar = FALSE) |>
  dplyr::filter(
    !(STATE_NAME %in% c("Guam", 
                        "American Samoa", 
                        "United States Virgin Islands", 
                        "Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands"))
  ) |>
  sf::st_cast("POLYGON", warn = FALSE, do_split = TRUE) |>
  tigris::shift_geometry() |>
  dplyr::group_by(STATEFP, COUNTYFP) |>
  dplyr::summarise(.groups = "drop") |>
  sf::st_cast("MULTIPOLYGON")

## Calculate the 2025 LFP Eligibility for Native Pasture, and
## combine with the county data
eligibility_counties <-
  eligibility |>
  dplyr::filter(`Pasture Type` == "Native Pasture",
                `Program Year` == 2025) |>
  dplyr::transmute(
    id = paste0(`FIPS State Code`, `FIPS County Code`),
    `Payment Factor` = factor(`Payment Factor`,
                            levels = 1:5,
                            ordered = TRUE)
  ) |>
  dplyr::left_join(
    counties |>
      dplyr::transmute(id = paste0(STATEFP, COUNTYFP))
    ) |>
  sf::st_as_sf()

# Plot the map
ggplot(counties) +
  geom_sf(data = sf::st_union(counties),
          fill = "grey80",
          color = NA) +
  geom_sf(data = eligibility_counties,
          aes(fill = `Payment Factor`), 
          color = NA,
          show.legend = TRUE) +
  geom_sf(data = rmapshaper::ms_innerlines(counties),
          fill = NA,
          color = "white",
          linewidth = 0.1) +
  geom_sf(data = counties |>
            dplyr::group_by(STATEFP) |>
            dplyr::summarise() |>
            rmapshaper::ms_innerlines(),
          fill = NA,
          color = "white",
          linewidth = 0.2) +
  # Use the same color scale used by the LFP
  # https://www.fsa.usda.gov/documents/native-pasture-2024-lfp-01-23-25
  scale_fill_manual(
    values = c("1" = "#E0E436", 
               "2" = "#DF9114", 
               "3" = "#DD2313", 
               "4" = "#850014", 
               "5" = "#3B003C"),
    drop = FALSE,
    name = "Payment\nMonths") +
  labs(title = "FSA LFP Eligibility",
       subtitle = "Native Pasture — 2025") +
  theme_void()

🧭 Related archives

Three archives cover LFP county eligibility, at the same event grain and with the same event codes, so they can be compared directly:

• fsa-lfp-eligibility — FSA’s determinations as obtained by FOIA, program years 2008–2025
• fsa-lfp-eligibility-web — FSA’s determinations as published weekly on its maps page, 2008–present, including every superseded weekly version
• fsa-lfp-eligibility-derived — eligibility recomputed from the US Drought Monitor under four county aggregations

The FOIA archive is the richer record for closed program years: it includes fire eligibility and payment factors the web tables omit. The web archive covers the current program year and, for 2008–2011, carries per-tier dates the FOIA response omitted. The derived archive is not a record of FSA’s determinations.

📝 Citation

If you use this data in published work, please cite:

USDA Farm Service Agency. Livestock Forage Disaster Program Eligibility, 2008–2025. Obtained under FOIA requests 2025-FSA-04690-F, 2025-FSA-08422-F, and 2026-FSA-02433-F; curated and archived by R. Kyle Bocinsky, Montana Climate Office, University of Montana. Sustainable FSA project. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD. https://sustainable-fsa.com/fsa-lfp-eligibility/

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15491626

Machine-readable metadata are in CITATION.cff; GitHub’s Cite this repository button (top right of the repo page) renders it as APA or BibTeX.

Acknowledgment: This work is part of the Enhancing Sustainable Disaster Relief in FSA Programs project, supported by the USDA Office of the Chief Economist, Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, and the USDA Climate Hubs.

📄 License

• Raw FOIA data (USDA): Public Domain (17 USC § 105)
• Processed data & scripts: © R. Kyle Bocinsky, released under CC0 and MIT License as applicable

⚠️ Disclaimer

This dataset is archived for research and educational use only. It may not reflect current USDA administrative boundaries or official LFP policy. Always consult your local FSA office for the latest program guidance.

To locate your nearest USDA Farm Service Agency office, use the USDA Service Center Locator:

🔗 USDA Service Center Locator

👏 Acknowledgment

This project is part of:

Enhancing Sustainable Disaster Relief in FSA Programs
Supported by USDA OCE/OEEP and USDA Climate Hubs
Prepared by the Montana Climate Office

✉️ Contact

Questions? Contact Kyle Bocinsky: kyle.bocinsky@umontana.edu