[Alyssa Pearson]

Hi Susan,

From my understanding, NMSU/NMDA policy does not allow for pre-payment on grants to any subgrantees and would provide no guarantee of reimbursement to any subgrantee that offered pre-payment on product that was ultimately unable to be delivered. All of our grants are strictly reimbursable. This also goes for Specialty Crop Block Grant Program and the Resilient Food System Infrastructure Program.

I know that not all states do things this way. If I’m recalling correctly, Arizona does do prepayments.

Hopefully this helps!

Alyssa

[Hope’s Harvest]

We do forward contracting. We had a model for it prior to LFPA and have continued it with LFPA funding. The reporting is a little tricky, but based on what we heard from our state agency, USDA doesn’t have an issue with it.

[Jacob Clark]

Our legal team said that there is no provision from the USDA that allows prepayment, so we haven’t been able to do it in Nebraska.

[Susan Lightfoot Schempf]

Thanks for the replies y’all! Good thing we have Elizabeth Lober from USDA-AMS joining us for the next F2FA CoP call, to answer questions like this one. It does seem to be a state by state / tribe by tribe issue, and not a USDA regulation, but it would be helpful to get clear guidance from USDA on this piece.