SDRP Payments Expand for 2023–2024 Losses, While New Disasters Emerge

Apr 30, 2026

By Daniel Munch

Key Takeaways

USDA has delivered $6.7 billion in SDRP payments for 2023–2024 disaster losses, providing needed relief, though nearly 60% of authorized funding remains to be distributed.
USDA’s decision to increase the SDRP payment factor from 35% to 70%, along with extending the application deadline to Aug. 12, will provide additional support to growers still recovering from disasters.
Disaster assistance timelines vary, with farmers in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Hawaii still awaiting payments as block grant programs are still being finalized.

While this assistance is a welcome step, a new round of losses is already emerging without dedicated support, including an estimated $5.7 billion in uncovered crop losses in 2025 and early 2026 impacts such as a Florida freeze exceeding $3.1 billion, alongside expanding drought conditions.

USDA is increasing disaster assistance for farmers still recovering from the severe weather events of 2023 and 2024, raising Supplemental Disaster Relief Program (SDRP) payments from 35% to 70% and triggering a second round of payments. The change will accelerate delivery of the $16.09 billion in authorized aid and help reduce a portion of uncovered losses from recent disasters. However, while this support is still working its way to producers, some more than two years after losses occurred, new disaster impacts are already building across the country, highlighting the gap between when losses happen and when assistance arrives.

Background

U.S. agriculture faced a series of compounding natural disasters across 2023 and 2024, including atmospheric river flooding in California, prolonged drought across the Plains and West, major wildfires such as the Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas and Oklahoma, Midwest flooding along the Mississippi River system and multiple hurricanes, including Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, which caused significant damage to specialty crops and infrastructure across the Southeast. Together, these events created widespread and overlapping losses across both crop and livestock sectors, with AFBF estimating roughly $41 billion in crop losses across the two years, including a substantial share falling outside existing risk management programs.

In response, Congress authorized disaster assistance through the American Relief Act of 2025, including $16.09 billion for crop, tree and vine losses under SDRP. SDRP builds on earlier ad hoc programs such as the Wildfire and Hurricane Indemnity Program Plus (WHIP+) and the Emergency Relief Program (ERP), using a framework that compares a producer’s expected crop value to post-disaster production and provides a partial payment on the remaining loss.

The program is delivered in two stages. Stage 1 uses existing crop insurance and Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) records to calculate losses and apply a flat payment factor, originally set at 35%, allowing for faster delivery of assistance. Stage 2 extends support to losses not fully captured by those programs, including shallow losses, quality loss, uninsured crops and certain specialty crop, tree and quality-related losses, often relying on USDA-assigned yields, prices or plant values where farm-level data are unavailable.

It’s important to note, not all farmers are receiving assistance through SDRP. Under the American Relief Act, certain states, including Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine and Massachusetts, are delivering disaster assistance through state-administered block grants rather than the federal SDRP process. As a result, farmers with losses in these states are not currently eligible for SDRP payments, and are still waiting for aid as block grant programs are finalized.

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Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.