Livestock disaster-assistance payments have more than doubled in real terms since the mid-2010s, concentrated in Texas, Oklahoma, and the Plains/Mountain West drought corridor

Summary

Federal livestock disaster-assistance payouts (USDA FSA's Livestock Forage Disaster Program/LFP, Livestock Indemnity Program/LIP, Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Fish/ELAP, and the newer Emergency Livestock Relief Program/ELRP) have roughly doubled in real terms in the recent drought years (2021-2025 average of ~$2.1B/year in 2025 dollars) versus the 2015-2020 average (~$1.0B/year) — a 113% real increase. 2023 was the second-highest year on record ($2.62B nominal, $2.77B real), behind only 2014's exceptional post-2012-13-drought catch-up payments ($4.5B nominal, $6.1B real). The growth is geographically concentrated: Texas and Oklahoma alone account for 28% of all payments made 2021-2025 ($2.78B of $9.92B), and the top 10 states (TX, OK, CA, MO, KS, MT, NE, SD, LA, WY) account for roughly 70%. These are USDA's disaster-assistance programs, not crop/livestock insurance in the traditional sense; this corpus does not carry USDA RMA's Livestock Risk Protection (LRP) insurance line separately (see caveat below), so the insurance half of the question is answered qualitatively from public reporting rather than from a queried table.

What was measured

Query: askamerica ag.fsa_commodity_payments, summed payments by disbursement year, filtered to program_description matching LFP (Livestock Forage Disaster Program, the flagship drought/fire forage-loss program), LIP (Livestock Indemnity Program, livestock deaths from adverse weather including drought-driven heat stress), ELAP (Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Fish, drought/wildfire losses not covered by LFP/LIP), and ELRP (Emergency Livestock Relief Program, a 2022-2025 Congressionally mandated top-up specifically for 2022-2024 drought and wildfire losses). Excluded: the discontinued, pre-2011 'Livestock Compensation Program' and small legacy/organic-cost-share lines that are not disaster-driven. Dollar figures were converted to real 2025 dollars with the connector's CPI-U deflator (adjust_inflation).

State breakdown used the same program filter for disbursement years 2021-2025 (the recent drought window: severe-to-exceptional drought hit the Southern Plains and West in 2022-2023, the Central/Southern Plains again in 2024-2025), joined to geo.state_ref on FIPS.

The growth

Nominal annual totals: 2020 $0.34B → 2021 $0.81B → 2022 $2.52B → 2023 $2.62B → 2024 $1.67B → 2025 $2.30B. In real (2025) dollars the 2021-2025 average is $2.10B/year versus $0.99B/year for 2015-2020 — a 2.1x increase. Two caveats temper a simple 'growth' narrative: (1) the single largest year in the whole 2008-2025 series is 2014 ($6.1B real), a catch-up disbursement for the historic 2012-13 drought — so the current run of high years is elevated but not unprecedented; (2) 2024's ELRP figure and part of 2025's reflect a mandated federal payment for losses that occurred in 2023 and 2024 but were disbursed later (USDA announced roughly $1.07B in ELRP payments for 2023/2024 losses in May 2025), so some of the apparent 2025 'growth' is really 2023-24 drought losses paid out on a lag, not a new 2025 event. 2017 shows no rows in this table (a gap in the USDA FSA source feed, confirmed via data_coverage checks), not a true zero.

Where the growth is concentrated

Of the $9.92B in LFP+LIP+ELAP+ELRP payments disbursed nationally 2021-2025, Texas ($1.40B, 14.1%) and Oklahoma ($1.38B, 13.9%) together account for 28.0%. The next tier — California, Missouri, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Louisiana, and Wyoming — brings the top-10-state share to roughly 70%. This matches the geography of the 2022-2024 Southern Plains/Texas-Oklahoma flash droughts and the broader Western/Northern Plains drought that has run through 2025. A formal concentration check (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index across all 50 states) reads 680, which is 'unconcentrated' by the DOJ/FTC 50-unit benchmark — but that statistic is diluted by the sheer number of states; the more informative fact for this question is the two-state (TX+OK) and top-10-state shares above, both of which show real concentration in the traditional cattle/drought belt rather than an even nationwide spread.

Data coverage and the insurance gap

This corpus's ag.rma_crop_insurance table (USDA RMA Summary of Business) carries no livestock commodity rows at all — a direct search for cattle/livestock/swine/lamb commodity names returned zero matches. That means USDA RMA's Livestock Risk Protection (LRP) and Livestock Gross Margin (LGM) insurance products, which are genuine federally-subsidized insurance (as opposed to the FSA disaster-assistance programs analyzed above, which are direct payments, not insurance), are not queryable in this connector. Public USDA/CRS reporting (see sources) confirms LRP policy counts and liability have grown substantially over the past decade as cattle producers increasingly use it for price risk, but LRP indemnities are triggered by price movements, not drought, so they are a distinct instrument from the drought-driven disaster-assistance total reported above and are not included in the $9.92B figure. This is flagged as a genuine coverage gap in the connector, not folded into the drought total.

What This Report Does Not Answer

• Quantify growth in livestock-related federal insurance payments (RMA LRP/LGM): askamerica's ag.rma_crop_insurance table carries no livestock commodity rows (confirmed via a direct commodity-name search returning zero matches for cattle/livestock/swine/lamb) -- a genuine connector coverage gap, not a data-doesn't-exist finding. Answered qualitatively from public USDA/CRS reporting instead of a queried figure, and kept separate from the disaster-assistance total so the two are not conflated.

Every query behind this report

8 warehouse calls ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT DISTINCT program_description FROM ag.fsa_commodity_payments WHERE program_description ILIKE '%livestock%' OR program_description ILIKE '%forage%' OR program_description ILIKE '%LIP%' OR program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%' OR program_description ILIKE '%emergency assistance%' OR program_description ILIKE '%grazing%' ORDER BY 1

SELECT "year",
  CASE 
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' THEN 'LFP (Forage Disaster)'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%INDEMN%' THEN 'LIP (Indemnity)'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%' OR program_description ILIKE '%HONEYBEE%' THEN 'ELAP'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK RELIEF%' THEN 'ELRP (2023-24)'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%LIVESTOCK COMPENSATION%' THEN 'Livestock Compensation'
    ELSE 'Other livestock'
  END AS program_group,
  SUM(payments) AS total_payments
FROM ag.fsa_commodity_payments
WHERE program_description ILIKE '%LIVESTOCK%' OR program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' OR program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%'
GROUP BY "year", CASE 
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' THEN 'LFP (Forage Disaster)'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%INDEMN%' THEN 'LIP (Indemnity)'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%' OR program_description ILIKE '%HONEYBEE%' THEN 'ELAP'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK RELIEF%' THEN 'ELRP (2023-24)'
    WHEN program_description ILIKE '%LIVESTOCK COMPENSATION%' THEN 'Livestock Compensation'
    ELSE 'Other livestock'
  END
ORDER BY "year", program_group

SELECT "year", SUM(payments) AS total_drought_livestock_payments
FROM ag.fsa_commodity_payments
WHERE program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' 
   OR program_description ILIKE '%INDEMN%'
   OR program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%'
   OR program_description ILIKE '%EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK RELIEF%'
GROUP BY "year"
ORDER BY "year"

SELECT s.state_name, s.state_abbr, SUM(f.payments) AS total_payments
FROM ag.fsa_commodity_payments f
JOIN geo.state_ref s ON f.state_fips = s.state_fips
WHERE (f.program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' 
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%INDEMN%'
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%'
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK RELIEF%')
   AND f."year" BETWEEN 2021 AND 2025
GROUP BY s.state_name, s.state_abbr
ORDER BY total_payments DESC
LIMIT 15

SELECT s.state_abbr, SUM(f.payments) AS total_payments
FROM ag.fsa_commodity_payments f
JOIN geo.state_ref s ON f.state_fips = s.state_fips
WHERE (f.program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' 
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%INDEMN%'
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%'
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK RELIEF%')
   AND f."year" BETWEEN 2021 AND 2025
GROUP BY s.state_abbr

SELECT DISTINCT commodity_name FROM ag.rma_crop_insurance WHERE commodity_name ILIKE '%cattle%' OR commodity_name ILIKE '%livestock%' OR commodity_name ILIKE '%swine%' OR commodity_name ILIKE '%lamb%' ORDER BY 1

SELECT "year", SUM(payments) AS total_drought_livestock_payments
FROM ag.fsa_commodity_payments
WHERE program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' 
   OR program_description ILIKE '%INDEMN%'
   OR program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%'
   OR program_description ILIKE '%EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK RELIEF%'
GROUP BY "year"
ORDER BY "year"

SELECT s.state_abbr, SUM(f.payments) AS total_payments
FROM ag.fsa_commodity_payments f
JOIN geo.state_ref s ON f.state_fips = s.state_fips
WHERE (f.program_description ILIKE '%FORAGE%' 
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%INDEMN%'
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%ELAP%'
   OR f.program_description ILIKE '%EMERGENCY LIVESTOCK RELIEF%')
   AND f."year" BETWEEN 2021 AND 2025
GROUP BY s.state_abbr