Consolidation again urged for farm offices

PRINCE FREDERICK, Md. — A proposal to consolidate local farm offices, hastily scrapped last year amid outrage from farmers and Congress, is being pitched again as an effort to modernize a Depression-era network.

This time, officials are promising to be much less aggressive — even as they point out that the offices have too few trained employees and some computers so old they can’t connect to the Internet.

“I don’t want to close offices just to be closing offices,” said Teresa C. Lasseter, the new Farm Service Agency (FSA) administrator. “The only reason we would be closing offices is to provide better service.”

No changes will happen without public hearings and talks with Congress, she said, and state-level officials will have significant control over where cuts are made.

The local office is essential to a farmer’s bottom line. Producers must visit there to sign up for an array of government payments and loans.

More than 2,300 counties — virtually every rural county in the nation — have an FSA office. But that is no guarantee it will be open on a given day, or that a farmer will find answers in a single visit.

A business wouldn’t operate that way, said Keith Widdowson, who runs the Somerset and Worcester county offices in Maryland. The offices on the Eastern Shore are 18 miles apart, with two employees each.

If one staffer leaves, the other must juggle farmers lined up at the counter and tend the phones alone — and be a specialist on dozens of programs.

“It’s not an efficient way to run the office,” Mr. Widdowson said. “It worked years ago, when we had enough staff, but not anymore.”

Merging might mean a longer drive for some farmers, but the result would be better, faster service, he said.

Still, many farmers can’t get past the idea of a longer drive.

“It would mean we’d lose valuable time trying to go to an office that’s far away,” said Brinsfield Lowe, who grows soybeans, corn and vegetables farther north in Dorchester County. Sometimes only one employee is working at his local office, in Cambridge, but Mr. Lowe thinks he gets good service.

Amy Farrell worries about the idea of merging the offices she runs in Calvert and St. Mary’s counties because some producers there would face a 90-minute drive. Still, Miss Farrell is reassured that state-level officials, not Washington bureaucrats, are being asked to design an overhaul.

“We’ve built up a good trust with all our farmers and producers, and if we can understand why we may have to consolidate, we can make the farmers understand why we have to consolidate,” she said.

It was Washington bureaucrats who handed down the order in the fall that 713 offices, more than 30 percent, would have to close.

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