Drought Relief Meet

                The 2022 growing season was a challenge for most of Western Kentucky due to extreme dry weather. In many counties of Western Kentucky, it has become a very serious drought. Normally when people think of a drought, we immediately think about grain production, not livestock production. The way the weather patterns hit Western Kentucky you could have drought on one side of the county and enough rain to keep descent production up on the other side of the county. This made it difficult for many people to realize how severe the drought was in many parts of Western Kentucky.

                In Livingston County the drought hit our livestock producers the worst. Many of our farmers grazed their pastures to the ground and without rain they began to feed their winter hay supplies a month to in some places two months early. This has increased the cost of hay in our immediate area and feed costs for cattle have risen very significantly. Many of our cattle producers have really reduced their herd due to the lack of forage availability in our area. Livingston finally qualified for the USDA Livestock Forage Disaster Program at the end of the growing season. LFP provides compensation if you suffer grazing losses for covered livestock due to drought on privately owned or cash leased land or fire on federally managed land.

                Agents from the FSA office reached out to Livingston County ANR for help getting the word out on this program. Livingston County ANR offered a meeting space and help put together an informational meeting about this FSA program. Livingston County also offered to advertise through our local newsletters and social media posts. Livingston ANR also helped with printing out work sheets for the producers that attended the meeting. On December the 8^th 2022 the informational meeting was held and was well attended.  FSA agents said due to the joint effort of FSA and Extension over 70 farmers have applied for the program. They said that those numbers were due to Extensions help in getting out the information about the program in a fast manor. The average Livingston producer received around $47.00 per cow or $31.00 per grazing unit. So if the average herd size in Kentucky is around 30head and they received $47.00 per head it would be $1410.00 per producer.