08/26/08 The 10-Acre Rule

The 10-Acre Rule. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. There is controversy brewing about how the department of agriculture is implementing provisions in the farm bill that say farms with 10 acres or less will no longer be eligible for farm payments. THATCHER: But the manager's statement, which includes the intent of Congress says that "we intend that if a farmer has three parcels of, say, two, four and eight acres that he could add those numbers together and it would exceed 10 and therefore qualify for benefits. But American Farm Bureau farm policy specialist Mary Kay Thatcher says USDA is choosing to ignore the congressional intent. According to USDA the provision will cut $24 million in farm payments to 255,000 farms. THATCHER: Farmers and ranchers are very concerned and I think they feel a bit blindsided. You can go out to some states and in excess of 30 percent of the farms and ranches have somewhere under 10 acres of base we don't know exactly how many would be eligible when you aggregate, but when you talk about 30 percent of farms in a state, that's a pretty sizeable number. But getting USDA to change their decision may take an act of Congress. THATCHER: The hill is disappointed that the administration is not going to do something to be helpful here. I suspect that there will have to be some kind of a technical corrections bill done on the farm bill. Thatcher says that making the Farm Bill work is just as important as getting it passed. THATCHER: We have to watch closely the way the administration implements this farm bill because that will be really just as important as passage. One of the things that we're watching very closely is a provision in the law that said, "If farmers have less than 10 base acres they no longer can receive farm program benefits. That isn't something that farm bureau supported. We don't support payment limits of any sort, but certainly we believe the administration ought to follow the intent of congress and allow people who have several parcels that added together equal 10 acres would still be eligible for payments. She says the idea wasn't to penalize the smaller operators. THATCHER: The whole premise behind wanting to eliminate benefits for people under 10 acres was that in many cases USDA was spending a lot of money to put out a very small payment. And so they came forward and said this is something we could be supportive of as a cost-saving technique. Congress bought off on that, but again, the idea was not to penalize those folks who hadn't reconstituted their farm from three or four units into one and that's the penalty that farmers are now feeling. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.