ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 TAG: 9603120075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: TOM WEBB KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
For three generations of American farmers, a trip to the county seat to visit the USDA office has been as much a fixture of rural life as the Sears catalog and the fall harvest.
But maybe not much longer. If Congress ends traditional farm programs, those U.S. Department of Agriculture county offices will lose much of their purpose, too. In an age of government downsizing, few doubt what would soon follow.
``I think we'd have to seriously consider reducing offices,'' said Adrian Polansky, who oversees the USDA's 104 county offices in Kansas.
About 2,500 counties - more than three-fourths of the total in the U.S. - have an office of the USDA's Farm Service Agency, a far-flung system begun in the 1930s to put government help near those who wanted it.
Sixty years later, those offices are still where farmers sign up for annual crop programs, report what fields they'll plant, learn about new government rules and discuss soil conservation, crop loans and crop insurance.
If Congress completes the new Freedom to Farm legislation, many of those functions would eventually vanish - a prospect that seems to delight many farmers.
``Quite honestly, I won't miss it, and I don't believe anybody else will, either,'' said Ed Wiederstein, a corn and soybean farmer who is president of the Iowa Farm Bureau. ``But I have to give them credit. From my perspective, they have done a good job of streamlining the sign-up procedures. It was really a supreme hassle for a while.''
House and Senate negotiators still need to resolve differences in their versions of the farm bill, and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said he wants some changes before he would recommend that President Clinton sign it.
Under the Freedom to Farm system, there would no longer be an annual sign-up. Instead, farmers would sign up once this spring and stay enrolled for seven years.
Nor would farmers need to report what crops they are growing and which fields are planted. Instead, Freedom to Farm would let them collect subsidies while growing whatever they want, in whatever amounts they wish.
There would be little need for USDA officials to monitor whether farmers were obeying the rules, because there would be so few rules.
Crop insurance would still be around, but it would be optional and handled mostly by the private sector. Government-sponsored crop loans would still be available, although at levels so uneconomical that few farmers would probably be interested. And soil-conservation rules would continue, but would probably be handled mostly by USDA's soil scientists.
Downsizing is nothing new for the USDA, which has cut almost 13,000 federal workers since 1992, to roughly 100,000 employees. (That includes the Forest Service.)
At this point, it's a little fuzzy exactly what the county offices, which have 13,000 workers nationwide, would be asked to do under the new bill.
Randy Weber, associate administrator for USDA's Farm Service Agency, says they would be busy during the first year of the Freedom to Farm system. After that, Weber said, ``There will be adjustments, and there will need to be adjustments.''
The offices will still be needed, Weber believes, to verify acreage data for crop insurance; they may still be involved in making annual (or semiannual) payments to farmers; they'll still need to administer the crop-loan program; and acreage bases and other data-gathering tasks may also be necessary.
But it's unlikely that the era of USDA offices in every county would continue.
``At this point, it's somewhat difficult to make a real accurate assessment about what the bottom line is going to be,'' said Polansky of Kansas. ``For the first year, it's going to be more difficult for us to administer. ... But after a two- or three-year period, one would expect some reduction in need.''
LENGTH: Medium: 74 linesby CNB