On May 19, the US Department of Agriculture published an interim rule on the Strategic Economic and Community Development program under Section 6025 of the 2014 Farm Bill.
This rule, which goes into effect on June 19, sets aside up to 10 percent of funds appropriated to a handful of Rural Development (RD) programs to focus some of the program funding on regional projects rather than a single community development plan.
The new program includes the Local and Regional Food Enterprise guaranteed loan program that is a subset of the Business and Industry program. All written comments for this interim rule must be received on or before August 18, 2015.