H.R. 4354: Agricultural Emergency Relief Act of 2025

The Agricultural Emergency Relief Act of 2025 is a proposed bill aimed at providing financial assistance to agricultural producers who experience significant crop losses due to various disasters. Here’s a closer look at what the bill entails:

Definitions

The bill includes several key definitions relevant to the program:

• Average Adjusted Gross Farm Income: Income generated from farming, ranching, or forestry operations.
• Disaster: Includes events like droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derechos, extreme heat, excessive moisture, winter storms, and freezes.
• Qualified Loss: Refers to losses in crops, trees, bushes, or vines caused by a disaster. This includes losses from being unable to plant, quality declines, and damage from smoke due to wildfires.

Emergency Relief Program

The Secretary of Agriculture is tasked with establishing a program to provide relief payments to producers who suffer a qualified loss during each crop year. Here are the main components:

Eligibility and Application

To qualify for payments, producers must:

• Submit an application describing their losses to the Secretary of Agriculture.
• Demonstrate that they have incurred qualified losses during the applicable crop year.

Payments

Approved applicants will receive payments, with conditions including:

• Producers must purchase Federal Crop Insurance or, if that’s not available, participate in the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program for the next two crop years.
• Payment amounts will be calculated using a formula considering previous financial data and whether insurance was obtained.

Payment Calculations

The amounts of payments are determined in two primary ways:

• Based on previous insurance indemnities and the producer's gross revenue for the crop year.
• Using revenue from the producer in benchmark years compared to disaster years, adjusted for specialty crops effects.

Payment Limits

There are caps on how much a producer can receive:

• For producers with average adjusted gross farm income below 75%, maximum payments are $125,000 for specialty and high-value crops, and $125,000 for all other crops.
• For producers at or above 75%, caps are $900,000 for specialty crops and $250,000 for other crops.

The total payments are limited to percentages of the producer’s qualified losses, depending on whether they obtained insurance.

Funding and Administration

The bill authorizes the necessary funds to be appropriated for its implementation for fiscal years 2025 through 2030, with up to 1% of these funds allocated for administrative costs.

Summary

In essence, the Agricultural Emergency Relief Act of 2025 seeks to establish a structured financial assistance program for agricultural producers impacted by disasters. It requires that eligible producers engage in future insurance coverage while providing guidelines for calculating and distributing relief payments based on their documented losses.

Relevant Companies

• CAT (Caterpillar Inc.): Likely to be impacted due to its offerings of agricultural machinery and equipment, which may see fluctuations in demand based on the state of agricultural production affected by disasters.
• DE (Deere & Company): Similar to Caterpillar, Deere produces agricultural machinery and might face increased business due to demand from producers in need of equipment for recovery from losses.