SDRP deadline is September 30. Quality losses from 2023 and 2024 now qualify with your own records.

If you lost a crop, hay, trees, or vines to weather in 2023 or 2024 and have not filed under the Supplemental Disaster Relief Program, you have until September 30 to do it. FSA extended the deadline on August 10 and added a flexibility for quality losses that a lot of producers were shut out of the first time around.

What SDRP is

Congress put more than $16 billion toward losses from qualifying disaster events in calendar 2023 and 2024: drought, flood, wildfire, freeze, hurricane, derecho, and the rest. It runs in two stages:

• Stage 1 covers losses that were already indemnified through crop insurance or NAP. FSA pre-filled applications from insurance records, and the payment is a top-up on what insurance paid.
• Stage 2 covers uncovered losses: crops without insurance, shallow losses insurance did not reach, and quality losses.

Payments were initially factored at 35 percent to make sure the money did not run out. In April, USDA raised the factor to 70 percent, and producers already approved received the additional 35 percent automatically.

The August change

Quality losses were the hard part. The original rules required specific documentation that many producers, especially in hay and forage, simply never generated. FSA now allows "verifiable and reliable" records of your own to establish a quality loss: buyer settlement sheets showing dockage, forage tests, elevator grade discounts, and similar. If you got docked at the elevator for low test weight in 2023, or your hay tested at half the protein it normally makes because of drought, that is a quality loss.

What to bring to the county office

1. Your FSA-578 acreage reports for 2023 and 2024 (they have these).
2. Any crop insurance or NAP claim records (they have these too, for Stage 1).
3. For Stage 2: production records, sales receipts, forage or grain quality tests, settlement sheets, and anything showing what a normal year looked like.
4. AD-2047, the direct deposit form, if you have never been paid by FSA.

Livestock losses are not in SDRP; those run through LIP, ELAP, and LFP as always.

Do not wait for the last week. County offices are handling this on top of ARC/PLC enrollment and the fall reporting cycle, and an incomplete application on September 30 is a missed application.