Tuesday, November 24, 2020

FSA Flip-Flops on Actively Engaged?

 Rural Blog has a post linking to a Progressive Farmer article on a change in payment limitation regulations published here. The article interprets it as a flip-flop, easing the requirements for payment limitation determinations.  I'm not sure that's right but  I'm 23+ years out of date on these technicalities, if not more, so I'll just quote the meat of the explanation:

After publication of the rule, stakeholders notified FSA of concerns regarding potential non-intended, adverse effects to farming operations comprised solely of family members. In streamlining the definitions for consistency, these revised definitions were inadvertently made applicable to farming operations solely owned by family members. This was not the intent of this rule change, and as revised, the definitions were more restrictive than they needed to be in order to provide intended consistency in the rule. Those more restrictive definitions were not intended to apply to farm operations comprised or owned solely of family members. Therefore, this document restores § 400.601 and the previous the definitions of “active personal management” and “significant contribution” in § 1400.3 that were applicable prior to publication of the final rule on August 24, 2020. The more restrictive definitions described in § 1400.601 apply only to farming operations comprised of non-family members that are subject to a limit in the number of farm managers seeking to qualify for actively engaged in farming based on a contribution of active personal management alone.

 There's a reference to a GAO study as well, which seems to be this.

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