Wichita ? Lower farm income and extreme drought in sheep-producing areas have taken a toll on the nation’s sheep flocks, prompting the U.S. Department of Agriculture to offer $18.8 million in incentives to encourage producers to keep their ewe lambs for breeding stock.

The program, announced this week by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, comes as the nation’s sheep numbers dwindle. The most recent July inventory numbers peg the nation’s lamb crop at 4.13 million, down 5 percent from the previous year.

“This new, one-year program will give these producers a final opportunity to enhance the genetics of their ewe lamb breeding stock,” Veneman said in a news release.

This would make it the third year that the USDA has offered a similar program to encourage retention of ewes, said John Drach, price support program specialist at USDA’s Farm Service Agency in Manhattan.

“The reason it initially started was to give producers an opportunity to get better quality sheep into their herds,” Drach said.

The payment typically has been $18 per ewe lamb, he said.

The combination of reduced farm income, drought and less available pasture have made many producers reluctant to take advantage of the program in the past, USDA said.

“Sheep numbers are going down,” Drach said. “Whenever producers have an opportunity to increase the genetics of their flock, it is an important announcement.”

The numbers of sheep and lambs in the United States have been dwindling since 1942, when it peaked at 56.2 million head.

It now stands at 7.8 million head, down 4 percent from the previous year, according the July count by the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Updated sheep and lamb numbers will be released Friday when the agency issues its Jan. 1 inventory of sheep and cattle numbers for Kansas and the rest of the nation.

Kansas had a total of 90,000 sheep and lambs on Jan. 1, 2003, down 10 percent from a year earlier. The state’s 2002 lamb crop was 62,000, down 14 percent from a year earlier, according to the Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service.

Sheep numbers peaked in Kansas in 1943, when 1.61 million sheep grazed the state’s pastures, KASS said.

In earlier lamb retention programs offered by USDA, Kansas producers sent in 200 applications. In the past, Kansas has typically gotten $70,000 annually under the program, Drach said.