University of Missouri Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute Director Pat Westhoff isn’t surprised with USDA’s revised farm income forecast. Ad-hoc payments, including the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program combined with the Paycheck Protection Program, total $32.4 billion. “There’s a lot of money between those two things. Just the CFAP funding alone would be comparable to some of our higher years of government payments in the past,” said Westhoff. “It’s not only a record level of government payments this year, but it’s a record level by a lot.” Unless there are new programs announced in 2021, Westhoff said the agriculture sector is in line for a tremendous drop in direct payments. “We’d go from more than $46 billion this year by the USDA’s estimate to something like $10 billion in 2021 if there’s no new programs announced. That’s a huge hole to try and dig out of on the farm income front.”
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