GitHub Release DOI

This repository is an archive of the county boundary dataset used to determine USDA Livestock Forage Disaster Program (LFP) eligibility.

Each week, eligibility for the LFP is determined for each county in the United States. Federal law and FSA guidance describes a process by which county-level eligibility is determined by the intersection of county boundaries, the United States Drought Monitor weekly drought assessment, and the normal grazing period for each type of grazing land in each county.

Official county boundaries change, both substantially as counties and county equivalents are created and removed as well as in small ways as legal boundaries between counties are refined. For instance, the US Census has recorded 472 county boundary corrections or changes from 2008 through 2024. Thus, agencies that make regulatory actions which implicate county boundaries (such as LFP eligibility determination) must maintain records of which boundaries were used for such determinations. LFP eligibility determinations stipulate that if “any area of the county” falls within certain drought classes during a type of crop’s normal grazing period eligibility is triggered. County boundary definitions are essential to the administration of the LFP.

For more information on determining eligibility for the LFP, refer to FSA Guidance document 1-LFP Amendment 6, Paragraph 23A.

The data in this repository were acquired via FOIA request 2025-FSA-08431-F by R. Kyle Bocinsky (Montana Climate Office) and fulfilled on September 8, 2025. The FOIA response, including the original Esri file geodatabase, is archived in the foia directory.

FOIA Final Response

During the process of refining the FOIA request, the FSA LFP Program Owner revealed that the geospatial county eligibility determination is not performed by USDA staff, but instead is performed by the National Drought Mitigation Center under contract to the USDA Office of the Chief Economist. The “Program Owner” for an FSA program is a senior official or department within the agency responsible for a specific farm or loan program. On August 11, 2025, seeking clarification about the request, the Program Owner said:

FSA does not use a county boundary to determine LFP eligibility. FSA and the USDM use a tabular file of counties, states, and grazing periods established for specific pasture types in conjunction with drought data received from the USDM by physical state and county, no boundary files are used. [Emphasis added]

Accordingly, Bocinsky requested that the Program Owner contact the USDM and request the geospatial county boundary data used for the county drought determinations, including how those data have changed through time and any computer scripts or protocols used when making that determination.

In the FOIA Final Response, received on September 8, 2025, the Program Owner provided a geospatial counties dataset from the National Drought Mitigation Center, who produces the USDM. The FOIA response also provided the following explanation:

In response to your request, we compiled and are releasing in full, the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC)s geodatabase that contains the current county boundaries. According to the program owner, the boundaries are from the ESRI dataset from 2008 and are considered the industry standard for all geopolitical boundaries and reference layers. The NDMC obtained these layers prior to the 2008 Farm Bill first that included relief programs associated with the USDM as county level statistics and maps were available when the transition to GIS map development took place. The NDMC uses this data to have a consistent value for the various counties that have not changed since they were first incorporated in 2008. The NDMC has had to update some counties during this time due to changes made in redrawing and/or renaming counties and with new FIPS creations. The last such change being in 2021 that included an Alaska boundary change. This was a relatively simple change as Alaska doesn’t touch any other states with the updates not affecting the rest of the United States. The other most recent change was in 2019 that included a county name and FIPS change in South Dakota and that did not require a geometry change. The next anticipated changes that will be required are in Connecticut due to a redraw and renaming of their county level jurisdictions that were initiated at the state level. This change will be made within the existing detailed boundaries and shapefiles of these new jurisdiction units. We will be redrawing the internal boundaries based on the best available data, either from the U.S. Census, the state of Connecticut, or commercial (ESRI) sources and the NDMC will need to work directly with USDA to determine exactly how these will be implemented with regards to programs triggered by the USDM. This process has been our standard for updating changing geometry in base datasets that are used in the weekly calculations. All the data utilized in the weekly calculations are freely available on the United States Drought Monitor website under the “data” tab: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Data.aspx. The final data are updated each week during the official release of the USDM map and associated statistics and data information. These data are also the same data utilized in the making of the North American Drought Monitor. The NDMC is the official home and archive of all the data, maps, and information related to the United States Drought Monitor, and all this information is freely available at https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/.

Given the pronouns used in this narrative, it was most likely written by NDMC staff.

Considerations

A few considerations should be noted:

  1. The Program Owner states, “the boundaries are from the ESRI dataset from 2008 and are considered the industry standard for all geopolitical boundaries and reference layers.” Esri is the company that makes the ArcGIS software platform used by the NDMC for geospatial processing and analysis. There is no single dataset that would be considered an Esri counties dataset; rather, this likely refers to a county boundary data that Esri provided prior to 2008. While Esri software and the ArcGIS platform could arguably be called the “industry standard”, the counties dataset to which the Program Owner is referring is of unknown origin and provenance.

  2. Furthermore, “industry standard” does not necessarily mean “federal standard”. The county boundaries in this dataset differ substantially from those of the US Census county boundary dataset, the authoritative county boundaries of the United States.

  3. The intersection of counties and USDM drought class polygons happens on a weekly basis. In their response, Program Owner acknowledges that the counties dataset used by the NDMC for this process have been updated since 2008, but there is only one file provided (the “current county boundaries”). It is unclear whether archives of past versions of the FSA LFP county dataset exist.

🗂️ Contents

Data Processing

The 2025-09-04 FOIA response contains two zipped archives: one containing an Esri file geodatabase with the county definitions, and one containing two python scripts of code for processing and clipping USDM shapes to the counties dataset and calculating zonal statistics. The processing script fsa-lfp-counties.R:

  1. Unzips the zipped archive.
  2. Reads the Esri file geodatabase into a spatial object in R using the sf package.
  3. Writes the spatial counties data to fsa-lfp-counties.parquet in Brotli-compressed Apache Parquet format.
  4. Extracts Esri metadata from the file geodatabase, and writes it in XML format as fsa-lfp-counties.xml.
  5. Copies and renames the USDM processing scripts to the base directory.
  6. Renders this document into README.md.

Data Description

The data are in the NAD 1983 Albers contiguous USA coordinate reference system (ESRI:102003), though metadata suggest that CRS has been transformed from what was originally a geographic reference system (most likely WGS 84 EPSG:4326). The dataset contains several columns that are derived via Visual Basic or Python processing scripts, as well as geographic statistics (length and area). These columns are not well documented, but can be inferred from the data.

Variable Name Description
ISCONUS Whether the county is part of the Continental United States
ISTOTAL Whether the county is an outlying territory of the US
StateFIPS A two-digit FIPS state code
WKID The Well-Known ID for a spatial reference system (SRS) — presumably the original
CountyName The county name
CountyFIPS A five-digit FIPS state and county code
StateAbbr The state abbreviation
ShowCounty A boolean field presumably related to internal USDM mapping
Shape_Length The boundary length of the county, in meters
Shape_Area The area of the county, in square meters

📍 Quick Start: Visualize the FSA LFP Counties data in R

This snippet shows how to load the fsa-lfp-counties.parquet file from the archive and create a simple map using sf and ggplot2.

# Load required libraries
library(sf)
library(ggplot2) # For plotting
library(rmapshaper) # For innerlines function

## Load the fsa-lfp-counties parquet file
counties <- 
  # You can read straight from online
  # sf::read_sf("https://sustainable-fsa.github.io/fsa-lfp-counties/fsa-lfp-counties.parquet") %>%
  sf::read_sf("fsa-lfp-counties.parquet") %>%
  # transform to WGS 84
  sf::st_transform("EPSG:4326") %>%
  # Shift and rescale AK, HI, and PR
  tigris::shift_geometry()

# Plot the map
ggplot(counties) +
  geom_sf(data = sf::st_union(counties),
          fill = "grey80",
          color = NA) +
  geom_sf(data = counties,
          aes(fill = StateAbbr), 
          color = NA,
          show.legend = FALSE) +
  geom_sf(data = rmapshaper::ms_innerlines(counties),
          fill = NA,
          color = "white",
          linewidth = 0.1) +
  geom_sf(data = counties |>
            dplyr::group_by(StateAbbr) |>
            dplyr::summarise() |>
            rmapshaper::ms_innerlines(),
          fill = NA,
          color = "white",
          linewidth = 0.2) +
  labs(title = "FSA LFP County Boundaries",
       subtitle = "Used for calculating program eligibility") +
  theme_void()

📜 Citation

If using this data in published work, please cite:

USDA Farm Service Agency. Livestock Forage Disaster Program County Boundaries. FOIA request 2025-FSA-08431-F by R. Kyle Bocinsky. Accessed via GitHub archive, YYYY. https://sustainable-fsa.github.io/fsa-lfp-counties/

📄 License

  • Raw FOIA data (USDA): Public Domain (17 USC § 105)
  • Processed data & scripts: © R. Kyle Bocinsky, released under CC0 and MIT License as applicable

⚠️ Disclaimer

This dataset is archived for research and educational use only. It may not reflect current USDA administrative boundaries or official LFP policy. Always consult your local FSA office for the latest program guidance.

To locate your nearest USDA Farm Service Agency office, use the USDA Service Center Locator:

🔗 USDA Service Center Locator

👏 Acknowledgment

This project is part of:

Enhancing Sustainable Disaster Relief in FSA Programs
Supported by USDA OCE/OEEP and USDA Climate Hubs
Prepared by the Montana Climate Office

✉️ Contact

Questions? Contact Kyle Bocinsky: kyle.bocinsky@umontana.edu