PENNSYLVANIA (WFMZ-TV) – The new state budget is helping farmers impacted by the devastating late-April freeze.<\/p>\n
Officials say growers are seeing losses of 80-100% of their summer fruits, including peaches, nectarines, and cherries.<\/p>\n
So far, twenty-eight counties have been granted disaster declarations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but farmers say getting funding from the federal government takes time.<\/p>\n
The state budget includes 10,000,000 dollars for the Freeze Disaster Assistance Recovery Grant program that was signed into law last week.<\/p>\n
“Those dollars will not replace the lost apples or cherries or peaches, and it won\u2019t help our processors and packers, unfortunately,\u201d says Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding.<\/p>\n
But it will provide some meaningful financial assistance to help farmers weather this difficult season and build a bridge to a better day,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
State officials say they are still working on specific guidelines for the program, but the process should be underway by mid-August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PENNSYLVANIA (WFMZ-TV) – The new state budget is helping farmers impacted by the devastating late-April freeze. Officials say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[77307,106822,35827,4124,28,30,29,1978],"class_list":["post-249785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-crop-loss","tag-disaster-assistance","tag-farmers","tag-federal-funding","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-state-budget"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}