Pea Program in Idaho

The headline said… Program open for pea growers…so I called Lance Phillips of the Farm Service Agency in Twin Falls to find out about it. “If you raised a pulse crop between 1998 and the 2001 crop years, you may be able to establish a base acres which would allow some of our support payments to kick in. Now, these support payments are not the same as all of our bases, the bases for wheat, barley, oats have two aspects to them for our direct counter-cyclical program, one is our direct payments, one is our counter-cyclical,  when the prices go very low, that we provide support payments for. These new pulse crops will not be eligible at this time for the direct payment but if the prices do go down below a certain level it will be eligible for the counter-cyclical payment.”

 In simple terms,  without having the Attorney General here, does that mean that a farmer who ‘s raising a pulse crop under the assumption that he’s going to make X number of dollars, if he does not get that he can collect?

 (Phillips) “No! That is not the way this program is enrolled. The pulse crops that we’re talking about are basically setting up a history between ’98 and 2001, if they raised these crops during that time, it has nothing to do with what they are currently raising but what they raised between 1998 and 2001.”

If any part of that went over your head, (208) 733-5380.