In 2020, crops sector received 65 percent of Paycheck Protection Program loans for agriculture

Errata: On November 9, 2021, the chart and text were revised to clarify that the Paycheck Protection Program eligibility simulation was carried out on both commercial and intermediate farm operations. No other data or findings are changed.

As part of its response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the U.S. Federal Government implemented the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Agricultural producers could use forgivable loans from this program to help keep employees on payroll and offset some of their operating costs. The maximum PPP loan amount was 2.5 times the monthly average profit plus payroll and eligible overhead expenses, such as the employer’s share of insurance payments and unemployment taxes. If used on eligible expenses within the first 24 weeks of disbursement, PPP loans were fully forgiven. According to data from USDA’s 2019 Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS), 72 percent of all farm businesses (operations with gross cash farm income of more than $350,000 or smaller operations where farming is reported as the operator's primary occupation) had either positive net income or positive payroll, which met the two most important eligibility requirements to apply for PPP loans. Individual Small Business Administration (SBA) loan data indicated that almost 121,000 farm operations applied for a total of $6.0 billion in PPP loans in 2020. That accounted for 17 percent of presumed-eligible farm businesses based on the 2019 ARMS. Out of the total PPP loans that was disbursed to farm operations in 2020, $3.9 billion (65 percent) went to crop operations, and the remaining $2.1 billion (35 percent) went to livestock operations. This chart appears in the Amber Waves finding “U.S. Producers Received Almost $6.0 Billion From the Paycheck Protection Program in 2020,” released October 2021.