Reports, briefings & theses
Briefings, fact sheets, reports, and infographics from the Sustainable FSA project, alongside the graduate theses it has supported — written for the USDA staff, program leadership, and producers who work with livestock disaster assistance, and grounded in the project's public data archives.
FACT SHEET
Fact sheet · July 2026
A two-page introduction to the project — the archives, analyses, and partnerships behind an effort to ground FSA disaster assistance in reproducible data science, with the headline numbers on LFP payments since 2008.
BRIEFING
Briefing · July 2026
A leadership-facing summary of the project's core finding — the Livestock Forage Disaster Program largely works as designed, but the conditions it was designed for have shifted — laying out where the program's data inputs have drifted from measured conditions and what it would take to bring them current.
BRIEFING
Briefing · July 2026
A case for adopting authoritative Census county boundaries in LFP eligibility determinations, as both a Geospatial Data Act compliance measure and a fiscal-integrity fix — eligibility is adjudicated where the US Drought Monitor meets county boundaries, but the boundary dataset in use is non-authoritative and essentially frozen, despite federal law naming the Census Bureau steward of authoritative boundaries.
BRIEFING
Briefing · July 2026
A guide to the twelve public archives behind the project — the weekly Drought Monitor, county boundaries, normal grazing periods, and the eligibility and payment records that follow from them — all with documented provenance, so any county determination since 2008 can be independently reproduced and audited.
REPORT
Report · July 2026
A reproducible reanalysis of FSA's NAP-190 methodology, re-deriving full-, cool-, and warm-season normal grazing periods for every CONUS county from NOAA's nClimGrid-daily data and the 1991–2020 normals — a pipeline that can be re-run on each new decadal normal so program criteria stay current.
INFOGRAPHIC
Infographic · July 2026
A one-page walk through the LFP pipeline, from the weekly US Drought Monitor map to a payment in a rancher's account — the county cut, the normal grazing period, and the payment calculation, with the drift in each step flagged along the way.
M.S. THESIS
Shae Leigh Olsen, M.S. · University of Montana, 2025
A study based on interviews with 23 FSA staff in nine states, examining how the LFP operates on the ground and how staff and producers experience it as a recurring, rather than exceptional, source of operating capital in drought-affected ranching regions.
M.S. THESIS
Kyla Ivana Fugate, M.S. · University of Montana, 2025
A study of how new operators in western Montana navigate the intersecting pressures of land access, climate variability, and federal program eligibility.
M.S. THESIS
Amishi Singh, M.S. · University of Montana, 2025
A study extending the project's lens to drought planning and response across the Northern Great Plains, with attention to equity and social vulnerability in how disaster relief reaches communities.
M.S. THESIS
August W. Guenthner, M.S. · University of Montana, 2025
A regional case study of water-scarcity dynamics in western Montana that complements the LFP work with on-the-ground evidence from a single valley.