For natural disasters, there's help for farmers. For tariff disasters, still working on that. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshore in for David Brancaccio. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is starting a second round of aid for farmers affected by natural disasters. The USDA says about $16 billion will be available for U.S. farms. Marketplace is Nancy

Marshall-Gensar has that. This is the second stage of the Agriculture Department's supplemental

disaster relief program authorized by Congress last year. The first stage was for major commodity crops.

Now, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden says farmers who grow things like fruits,

vegetables, and tree nuts can apply for disaster aid. So that's going to bring in more so than

in stage one of this program, a lot of your specialty crop producers in places like California,

Arizona. These growers can get up to $900,000 in aid per calendar year

if they earn at least 75% of their adjusted gross income from farming.

USDA undersecretary Richard Fordyce takes off a long list of natural disasters.

The aid covers.

Wildfires, hurricanes, floods, derageos, excessive heat, tornadoes, winter storms, freeze, smoke exposure, excessive moisture.

And in some cases, drought. Farmers will also be reimbursed for products that had to be destroyed because of a natural disaster.

For example, milk that spoiled because roads

were closed and delivery trucks couldn't get to farms. This is not new aid, though. Asked about

the status of help for farmers hurt by President Trump's tariffs, Deputy Secretary Vaden said

the Agriculture Department only woke back up from the government shutdown last week,

and now they're busy crunching

the numbers. I'm Nancy Marshall Genser for Marketplace. Markets are having one of those off days. It's not

just that all the major indices are down, which they are, it's also Bitcoin. It's also gold is down

from yesterday. So we asked Drew Mattis about it. He's a managing

director at MetLife Investment Management. You can't have an economy functioning well when only a few

companies are doing well. And now ahead of a whole bunch of data releases from the U.S.

...