Ag Officials Won’t Close Farm Offices The Move to Downsize the Farm Service Agency Had Almost No Public Support.

By Lori Nitschke

WASHINGTON — Smiles broke out from Washington to Red Cloud, Neb., as the U.S. Agriculture Department announced Tuesday that it was backing off from a plan to close more than 700 Farm Service Agency offices nationwide.

The plan would have closed 23 of Nebraska’s 81 offices and 22 of Iowa’s 100 offices.

The plan, called “Farm Service Agency Tomorrow,” had virtually no public support and was shelved indefinitely Tuesday.

Brian Wolford, who oversees the Farm Service offices in Nebraska, said the offices administer 45 federal commodity and other farm programs, and “producers strongly rely on our staff to inform them about the programs.”

Nearly every modern agriculture secretary has launched an effort to close some of the offices, but the plan announced by Mike Johanns in September seemed to wilt more quickly than most.

It caught members of Congress off-guard and generated town meetings in places such as Auburn, Neb., as local residents tried to figure out how to stop it.

The Senate adopted a proposal last month to prevent the plan from taking effect, but the House did not consider it.

The closing plan met strong opposition in towns such as Red Cloud, where the offices are prized for their service to farmers and for the jobs and traffic they bring to the community.

Terri Post, director of the Webster County office in Red Cloud, had the day off Tuesday, but farmers were calling her at home to share their happiness. Post felt the same way.

“We’re thrilled and the producers are thrilled,” she said, noting that six of the seven Farm Service employees in her office have worked there for more than 20 years.

In a Tuesday letter to the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, one of Johanns’ deputies noted the opposition, saying the department would “set aside the ‘FSA Tomorrow’ approach and timetable.”

Agriculture Department Undersecretary J.B. Penn said the USDA continued to believe that a review of the system and its 2,351 offices was necessary. More than 400 have two or fewer full-time staff members, he said, and nearly 500 are within 20 miles of the next nearest office. The offices’ computer systems predate the Internet and are becoming increasingly difficult to service and operate, he said.

Johanns has said that many farmers have better computer equipment at home. But Post said the farmers her office sees were afraid of being forced to fill out cumbersome forms online for government programs.

Even younger farmers who are proficient on computers worried that it would take them a long time to complete the forms because they can access only dialup Internet service, Post said.

Johanns had said that he planned to use money saved by closing some offices to update computers and train employees.

The Nebraska Farm Bureau said such upgrades are necessary, but it supported the decision to shelve the plan.

Neil Harl, a retired Iowa State University agricultural economist, said Johanns erred by not telling farmers that the cuts were necessary to help tame federal spending and that other cuts might have to be found in commodity programs instead.

Harl also said the Agriculture Department needs to undertake a broad study of all its local offices, including the Farm Service Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and determine how it can best streamline operations to provide continuing service to farmers.