A United States Department of Agriculture disaster declaration may well be issued to cover the Big Horn Basin in the wake of the hard early frost that damaged thousands of acres of crops.

But don’t expect a windfall of cash to come from such a declaration, said Lee Craig, district director of the western half of Wyoming for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency.

“That’s just not how it works,” Craig said. “Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, that’s not how it works.”

Instead, he said farmers would get access to low-interest FSA emergency loans — he did not know an exact rate — to help them along. However, they would only be eligible for such loans if they cannot obtain money from private lenders.

Craig submitted a loss assessment report to the USDA Friday morning.

“I expect they’ll be getting back to us and asking for an additional report,” he said.

But as federal policies have evolved in recent years, the USDA has provided inventives to nudge farmers toward taking out more crop insurance policies. That is supposed to aid them in case of a weather-related disaster rather than infusions of federal payments into the area.

In 2012, the secretary of agriculture issued an official weather-related crop disaster declaration for Park County. That allowed producers to apply for emergency program assistance from FSA, provided program eligibility requirements were met.

Craig said he’s not sure when a decision on a disaster declaration will be met, or if it will be an administrative, secretarial or presidential declaration. There is little difference between them, he said.

But he said the odds of it happening are excellent.

“I think fairly high,” he said.