Why Working for FSA Is Worse These Days

 Sec. Vilsack testifying, link was posted to the Facebook FSA group. At the start he observes that it's no longer true that the county executive director of the FSA office is among the best paid in the county and that serving the public by working for the government has lost some cachet.

AFIDA and Congress

 CRS has a paper on the issue of foreign ownership of agricultural land in preparation for the upcoming farm bill.  Two items of note--about half the acreage included in FSA's AFIDA data is forest land (apparently a lot of which is in Maine) and China doesn't show up in the discussion of the owners of the most land.

They mention possible problems in FSA's data, including a request to GAO to look at it.  I am sure there are problems. 

The Hole In FSA Management?

 FSA has something called Box Onespan, which appears to be an on-line signature manager. I'm guessing from messages on the FSA Employee group on Facebook that FSA continues to have a hole in its management. 

What hole?  Someone who worries about the day-to-day operation of the county office; someone who is the authority on the common tools used in the office, who worries about training and answering questions.  Instead there's an ad hoc network of county personnel sharing information and tips.

The hole existed, I think, when I worked there and likely still exists. The problem is management in DC is specialized so no one has a unified picture of how things come together in the county office.  

IIRC there were occasional efforts in ASCS/FSA to come up with such a picture: training classes for counter clerks, manuals for district directors, and sometime the area/regional directors in DC would have a take. 

[Updated to eliminate double negative in title]

New EWG Report on Distribution of Farm Payments

 Various newspapers picked up the EWG report.

The lede for one: "The top 10% of recipients of federal farm payments raked in more than 79% of total subsidies over the last 25 years ",  

Here's the EWG report.

Elsewhere they note that the Trump administration changed the reporting of payments--I think FSA must be reporting payments to assignees, so likely using the payee data, not the payable. 

[Update: they note the change in reporting reveals which financial institutions get the most payments: " Surprisingly, the financial institution that received the most farm subsidies was the USDA. The USDA’s Farm Service Agency, or FSA, alone got almost $350 million in farm subsidies between 2019 and 2021, more than any other financial organization." Not a surprise to anyone who understands how the payments word.]]

Professor Evaluations

 I follow a fair number of professors on Twitter, mostly historians. I occasionally see tweets complaining about the student evaluations they receive. 

I don't have any sense at all of how student evaluations compare with other evaluation setups, like reviews of products on the Internet, or reviews on Yelp. You'd think it's likely that the evaluations would be somewhat similar--that is, my perception of product and service reviews is that they tend to be more favorable than my intuition is.  Certainly when I evaluate I tend to lend to the positive so I assume that's true of others.

Sometimes the evaluation reported in the tweet is critical, and often the reaction is dismissive.  I suppose that makes sense--if you get some criticism which is useful, it's not going to irritate you enough to tweet about.  But the dismissive bit strikes me as reflecting insecurity and aggravates me enough to blog about evaluations.

Anyhow, I remember an evaluation I got once from my presentation on some program; don't remember which one.  It was mixed, to the effect Bill knows his stuff, but he drones in a monotone. 

😀

It was, and is, true.  It was useful.  IIRC this was near the end of my career in making presentations, and likely accelerated it.  It was much easier to sit in the rear of the meeting room whild one of my employees made her presentation and pat myself on the back for putting her forward. 

Complexity of Modern Life

 Had to go to my bank branch today and talk to a real person, who was very helpful BTW.  It was the first time in years.  I had told a bank rep on the phone earlier that I was confident I could follow the instructions in their online tutorial and manage the matter online.  

I was wrong.  Whether it's bad memory or fact, I got very confused, partly because of what I perceived as changes in the way the website operated, partly because the software I was running didn't work according to my expectations.  I thought, if you can fill out some fields in a form on line, you ought to be able to fill out all of them online.  As it turned out, filling out the remaining fields with ink was fine.  

I think part of what's happening these days is the addition problem--we add new programs or new features to old programs and we change the organizations.   But the new or changed is not tested to be consistent and compatible with the old.  The builders of the new have a different take, a different approach,, to their construction, so users/clients/customers find their expectations are faulty.  

My wife and I experienced that today, but when I read posts on the FSA employee group on Facebook I see county office employees (and presumably their farmers) having similar problems with what Congress and the administration do. 

Data Sharing in USDA

 It's been almost 25 years since I retired. In my absence USDA has made progress in getting data sharing among agencies.  

Consider this release about Emergency Relieft Program payments. 

(I guess I'm losing my grasp on what's happening in USDA--I'm not at all clear on how these payments fit with crop insurance, NAP, or other programs.  My impression, which may well be wrong, is  that the Biden/Vilsack regime is following the precedents of the Trump administration's use of CCC funding.

Anniversary of AS-400

 Saw a Facebook post in 2016 commemorating AS-400 (leaving the county FSA office).  Clicked on the hashtag and found some posts about job opportunities working on AS-400 programs, some dated relatively recently (i.e., 2021).  

IIRC the changeover from the System/36 to the AS-400 was happening as I retired in 1997. So the System/36 lasted maybe 10-15 years; the AS-400 maybe 20 years or so. 

Stanford Research on Farm Programs and Politics

 Here's a Stanford Phd candidate doing research on the relationship between participation in farm programs and political views.

AFIDA Holes

 This points to possible problems in how FSA enforces the AFIDA legislation. I once was responsible for that.  I hoped someday to integrate AFIDA reports into the general system for updating land ownership once we got a common geospatial database with SCS.  

I retired before that happened.  It sounds as if it hasn't happened since.  Just another silo.

Views of USDA--From Outside and Inside

This report says the federal government doesn't get good marks for its services.  But USDA is one of the highest ranking departments.  Meanwhile I remember seeing the results of a survey of employee satisfaction within different agencies--IIRC USDA scored near the bottom.

Why? I'd suggest part of the answer might be this: farmers served by FSA seem usually to have close relationships with their local office--that was my impression early on in the 1970s and it seems to be continuing now, judging by the Facebook FSA group.  But the local employees seem often to be unhappy with the national office; again I think it was true in the 70s and remains so now. (More accurately I think the employees are ambivalent, so they might easily voice discontent on a survey while being more balanced in a face-to-face. 

Granted FSA is only a small part of USDA but the dynamic might well work for most of the agencies.  My guess anyway. 

Social Security Administration and FSA

Washington Post yesterday had an article on the difficulties caused by SSA's switch to remote service.  The agency has over 1200 field offices. 

I'd love to see a comparison of SSA and FSA operations during the pandemic.  FSA would, I think, come out better, mostly because farmers have a history of interacting with their local office because farm programs are annual while usually people only need SSA once.  That may be oversimplification, but that's my guess.

But I'd also expect other differences, partly due to the county committee structure, partly the clientele, partly different histories and norms. 

SSA does have unions, as opposed to the NASCOE and farm loan groups.  They also have at least one Facebook group, as with FSA restricted to active and retired employees.

USDA Is Last (in Vaccinations)

 That is reported by GovExec here: " The Veterans Affairs Department and Social Security Administration joined USDA in bringing up the bottom of the pack, with all three agencies holding vaccination rates under 88%." 

I suspect the three agencies share a feature--extensive field staffs located in red states.  I know from some posts on the Facebook page for the FSA employee group that whether or not to get the shots caused some angst.  FSA for one is culturally conservative. 

Buying Out Coal Miners as We Did Tobacco Producers

 Took me a while but after seeing Alec Tabarrok suggest buying coal mines and discussion on twitter of paying coal miners, I realized there's precedent--we bought out tobacco farmers, or rather their tobacco quotas, back when the FSA tobacco program was eliminated. 

See this ERS page.

Vaccine Mandates

 I gather from this post in the FSA Facebook Group that the issue of complying with the federal vaccine mandate is controversial. I ran across a post somewhere today which indicated the actual process of implementing the mandate was going to take a while.  

I wonder whether with the delta surge declining will the administration actually go through with it.  It sounds as if even when implemented there would be a drawn-out process for penalizing anyone who didn't get vaccinated, so it may become a dead letter. We'll see.  In the meantime there's a lot of angst out there, and it may be creating conflict in small offices where there's strongly held divergent opinions.   

We who support the Biden's position need to remember the human costs of how it's implemented. 

What FSA Employees Have to Deal With

 I'm taking the liberty of doing a screenshot of a post in the Facebook FSA Employees group:

When you're serving many people in all parts of the country all year round, you run into unusual situations, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic.  County employees have to deal. 

(While I'm on FSA, I'd mention farmers.gov, which has developed over time. There's also some Youtube videos--I'd have a link which I found yesterday but am having problems with Chrome.  Here's a starting point.

"Depopulated" ?

When there's a surplus of eggs because of disruptions of supply chains, what do you do?  You "depopulate" some hens?  No, you kill them.  But either way you say it the FSA program won't cover it.

Digitized Forms

I read the FCW piece on this report. I'd forgotten there was a law requiring agencies to digitize their forms and make them fully on-line, including e-signature, but there is.

The report shows agencies haven't met the legal deadline for many of their forms: USDA is one of the laggards. 

I remember back in the early 1990s working to use WordPerfect 5.0 to design forms, or rather to convert the form designed used the old tools to a digitized form.  WordPerfect had a table feature with which, using a lot of patience, you could create a pretty close version of the old printed forms.  The Forms shop in MSD took up the challenge and did a lot of the ASCS/CCC forms before I retired.

Of course there's a big difference between the forms we did and what the law requires--I gather the ideal now is a fillable pdf file with e-signature activated.  I don't know how far FSA has progressed in meeting that goal.

I'm cynical enough to believe that most forms which meet the law's requirements probably are still poorly designed for online operations.  I expect the same human factors are operating with forms as they were with cars--the early cars were designed as "horseless carriages". I wonder how many filing cabinets FSA offices have filled with paper copies. 

[Updated--I see that FSA's newest form, FSA-2637, is a fillable pdf which can be signed on-line. Good for the people who did this.]

The Long Slow Progress of Direct Deposit

Been 25 years or more since FSA started pushing direct deposit (it was just starting back in the mid 90's before I retired)  According to the notice about 82 percent are now direct deposit/ Since I retired they've come up with a waiver provision, presumably for hardship, but only 5 percent of the paper check people have a current waiver on file.  

It seems that it's still the producer's option--she "invokes" the waiver for one of the three permissible reasons, there's no burden on the FSA to determine the validity. I'm curious whether compliance with the requirement is greater among the other agencies which issue payments to the public. Somehow I expect farmers to be more resistant to the change.

Might have helped to sell the idea to note that having direct deposit makes it easier and more foolproof to get benefits issued by IRS, as has happened now several times this century.

Of course the answer is for everyone to get a basic bank account with fees paid by the government, but that would be against the American individualistic ethic, so a nonstarter.

Modern Farmer Is Confused

Modern Farmer has a post on the new loan program intended to help in establishing title to heir property.  It has some problems, and I feel nitpicky today so I've bolded the errors I find:

"For instance, if a land owner died without a will, that land would be divided up among the owner’s heirs. Once they passed on, the land would be further divided among their heirs. While property might be in a single family’s control for generations, they don’t have legal title or claim to the land. That means they cannot easily sell the land or consolidate fractured acreages...."  [My comment: usually it's the father dying intestate, with the children inheriting the land in common, not divided. When a child dies, her ownership share is inherited by her children, and so on. One of the owners can appeal to the court to force a sale of the land and divide the proceeds among the heirs. That is a way whites have used to buy land cheaply: forced sales. Even when there's no forced sale, the person farming on the land doesn't have clear title, a prerequisite to mortgaging the land.]

"After the Civil War, the federal Homestead Act gave Black families land, mainly across the South, and many of them became land holders for the first time.... [The Homestead Act and  the Southern Homestead Act weren't effective in getting black farmers land. "Gave" is wrong--the charge was $50 for 40 acres, which was a significant sum in 1866 (perhaps $700 to 12,000 in todays money). I know of no statistics or study showing the relative importance of the different ways in which blacks accumulated land, but my impression is that hard work, scrimping, and good relations with selected white owners were key.]

"That became a bigger problem after President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Services came into effect. At the time, the USDA established a loan program to help farmers..." [ASCS had nothing to do with the loan program, which had originated in the New Deal, and was by 1961 administered by the Farmers Home Administration. The current day Farm Service Agency is the successor to ASCS and to the farmer loan programs of FmHA.]

 I don't trust the rest of the writer's facts, based on her errors in these portions.