If you have experienced disaster/damage to crops related to the cold damage, state agricultural producers are encouraged to report these damage two the below sources. The deadline for the USDA-FSA reporting is by tomorrow (2/6/2026).

• USDA-FSA - USDA Farm Service Agency Offices in Florida
  
  • Report directly to the USDA-Farm Service Agency Office
  • More on the USDA-FSA damage reports from UF/IFAS economist, Dr. Christa Court: “I was hearing a lot about a "Friday deadline" for USDA-FSA damage reports, so I spoke with the USDA-FSA State Executive Director this morning for clarification. To support a prompt request for a Secretarial disaster designation for counties within Florida, the state USDA-FSA office has encouraged county/regional offices to convene their CEBs, by Friday, if possible, to communicate a first round of information to the SEB, which they hope to convene next week. Therefore, the most important thing to be doing is encouraging individual agricultural operations to report their losses and damages to their local/region USDA-FSA office, even if they are not currently participating in a USDA-FSA program, and especially if they can effectively document an annual production loss of 30% or more for at least one crop. It is these individual reports that are required to be used in the CEB and SEB decision processes, which are made at the county level (not the county-crop level). Agricultural operations that are unable to report to a USDA-FSA office by Friday are still encouraged to submit reports at a later date as decisions related to Secretarial disaster designations can be, and often are, updated through additional meetings of the CEBs and SEB over time as more information is received.”
    
• FL State Emergency Board (SEB) via UF/IFAS - UF/IFAS Agricultural Damage and Loss Assessment

  Online survey via the above Qualtrics link

  • More from Dr. Christa Court (the creator of the UF/IFAS survey): “In addition to all of us supporting this process by encouraging agricultural operations to report to the county/region USDA-FSA offices, my program supports the SEB for Florida by attending their meetings to share the information that my program has on the weather event, the affected agricultural acreage, and results that are coming in through the UF/IFAS Agricultural Damage and Loss Assessment. So, they will have this information available to inform the overall process, but it cannot be used to determine county/state eligibility for the Secretarial disaster designation. My information is typically used to determine if there are additional counties or crops that did not have individual reports coming into a county/region USDA-FSA office that might make the county eligible for a Secretarial disaster designation, which means an area or commodity should be investigated further before a final decision is made. This (and other uses in meetings with and decisions being made by the Office of the Governor, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the USDA, and others) is why I always describe the UF/IFAS assessment as complementary to reporting losses and damages to USDA-FSA, even though the two efforts are asking for much of the same information. I have been trying for 8+ years to overcome duplicate efforts and barriers to data sharing across organizations and we have made great strides, but aren't yet to the ultimate goal of having agricultural operations only have to report this information once.”