The department will provide about $350 million in assistance payments to eligible farmers, it said.
The effort is “to try and compensate a bit those farmers who suffered the loss of value because of the distortion of market during the pandemic,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at a press conference in Vermont.
The majority of the resources will go to smaller farms, he said.
Qualified dairy farmers will get payments for 80% of the revenue difference per month based on an annual production of up to 5 million pounds of milk marketed and on fluid milk sales from July through December 2020, the department said.
