South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a longtime member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, issued the following statement after multiple Thune-led agriculture provisions were included in the bipartisan COVID-19 relief and government funding package, which was overwhelmingly approved by Congress and is soon expected to become law. Thune’s Paycheck Protection for Producers Act, bipartisan legislation that will improve the way producers calculate their Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan award, and a deadline extension to enroll acres in the Thune-authored Soil Health and Income Protection Program (SHIPP), among other provisions, will benefit the agriculture community in South Dakota and around the nation.
“Ag producers were dealing with a challenging agriculture economy even before the pandemic hit, and the coronavirus has only made things tougher,” said Thune. “I strongly advocated for including additional resources to support farmers and ranchers in this legislation, and I am pleased that the final bill includes this much-needed support.”
In addition to Thune’s Paycheck Protection for Producers Act, the relief package also includes a provision that explicitly makes biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel eligible for United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) assistance, at the discretion of the secretary of agriculture.
The broader package will also build upon Thune’s efforts to support farmers and ranchers affected by the pandemic. Specifically, it provides supplemental Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) payments for row-crop producers, and it provides a supplemental CFAP payment for livestock producers to address payment inequities based on an arbitrary date USDA previously used to calculate payments.
This legislation will also extend the deadline to enroll acres in SHIPP, a voluntary income protection, short-term conserving use program that Thune authored in the 2018 farm bill. SHIPP is authorized and funded as a pilot program at 50,000 acres in the six Prairie Pothole Region states: South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota. The SHIPP enrollment period is extended through September 30, 2021, which will provide producers another opportunity to put this important tool to work.
Thune’s Missouri River Basin Drought and Snowpack Monitoring Act, a provision that will improve flood risk monitoring and the accuracy of soil moisture and snowpack data, was also included. The provision will authorize funding for the Army Corps of Engineers’ continued installation of a network of weather monitoring stations and require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to implement a pilot program to acquire and utilize the data.
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