Beltrami County forestland owners can seek disaster restoration aid by Friday

Private forestland owners around Bemidji have until Friday, June 5, to apply for federal disaster restoration help for woods damaged by last summer’s storm. The Emergency Forest Restoration Program can reimburse up to 75% of eligible costs for cleanup and recovery work, including debris removal, site preparation for natural regeneration or replanting, tree planting, road repair and stream-crossing restoration.

The program is aimed at nonindustrial private forest land, and eligibility depends on a damage inspection by the USDA Farm Service Agency. The land must have had tree cover before the disaster and be in a county where the program has been implemented. In practical terms, that puts Beltrami County landowners who lost timber, shelterbelts or wooded acreage squarely in the group most likely to benefit, especially if the damage left new conservation problems or threatened future use of the property.

Landowners can apply through their local Farm Service Agency office, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources says the best next step is to contact a local USDA Service Center. The DNR says applications for the Bemidji blowdown opened Feb. 2 and close June 5, 2026, with a local forester contacting applicants after approval. The USDA also says county committees can approve applications up to $125,000, state approval is required for requests from $125,001 to $250,000, national approval is needed above $250,000, and a $500,000 per-person-or-entity cap applies per disaster.

The deadline comes nearly a year after the June 21, 2025, storm that battered Beltrami County and the City of Bemidji. County officials later said winds reached as high as 120 mph and estimated that about 9 million trees were taken down, with roughly $8.3 million in damage tallied by early August. Beltrami County and Bemidji both declared states of emergency, and Gov. Tim Walz issued a peacetime emergency on June 27, 2025, citing widespread damage and thousands of outages.

State foresters and woodland experts have treated the blowdown as a long recovery job, not a one-season cleanup. The Minnesota Forestry Association says the storm hit June 21-22, 2025, while the DNR has pointed landowners to EFRP as one of the main cost-share tools available as cleanup and reforestation continue. The agency has also said salvage harvests on state-managed land near Bemidji are being used to promote forest recovery and reduce wildfire risk.