Assistance program
Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops
$1.4 Billion committed in FY2025–FY2026
- Agency
- Farm Service Agency, Agriculture, Department of
- Assistance
- Not Applicable
- CFDA number
- 10.096
- What it does
- MASC will provide eligible specialty crop producers with marketing assistance payments that will help them engage in activities that aid in expanding domestic specialty crop markets or in developing new markets for their specialty crops. Eligible specialty crops include the following: fruits (including dried fruits), vegetables (including dry edible beans and peas, mushrooms, and vegetable seed), tree nuts, nursery crops, Christmas trees, floriculture, culinary and medicinal herbs and spices, honey, hops, maple sap, tea, turfgrass, and grass seed.
- Who benefits
- Not Applicable
- Who applies
- To be eligible for MASC, a producer must be in the business of farming at the time of application and be entitled to an ownership share and share in the risk of producing a specialty crop that will be sold in calendar year 2025. In addition, a producer must be one of the following: a citizen of the United States; a resident alien, which means “lawful alien†as defined in 7 CFR 1400.3; a partnership organized under State law; a corporation, limited liability company, or other organizational structure organized under State law; an Indian Tribe or Tribal organization, as defined in section 4(b) of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (25 U.S.C. 5304); or a foreign person or foreign entity who meets all requirements as described in 7 CFR part 1400. Federal, State, and local governments, including public schools, are not eligible for MASC payments.
- Authorized by
- 15 U.S.C. § 714c(e)
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments