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Shining Light on Farm & Food Policy for 20 Years.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Farmers and ranchers looking to serve their community next year can now be nominated for the Farm Service Agency’s county committees. This year, the Department of Agriculture is streamlining the process with the addition of a GIS tool for producers to make nominations and vote.
The chief of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service expressed confidence that the agency could hire the staff it needs to handle a sharp increase in climate-related funding, despite many applicants for soil conservationist positions lacking a key job requirement – a class in soil science.
USDA plans to send Emergency Relief Program and Emergency Livestock Relief Program pre-filled applications directly to eligible producers in early summer for those with qualifying disaster losses for the 2022 calendar year.
Farm groups are calling for Agriculture Department loan program payment rates to be increased in the upcoming farm bill, while agency officials look at other ways to make the programs more accessible and flexible for producers.
The administrator of USDA’s Farm Service Agency, Zach Ducheneaux, says USDA is rethinking the way it structures farm loans to lower the risk of default.
Western producers in areas once dealing with devastating droughts scrambled to keep their livestock safe and fed this winter as a series of storms caused record-breaking amounts of precipitation. Now, the snowpack is beginning to melt, and there are concerns about potential flooding.
Senate Agriculture Committee staff are going through requests from 98 senators detailing what they want to see in the farm bill as the committee works to get a bill ready this year.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told members of a House Appropriations subcommittee Monday that he has hired more staff to track foreign farmland purchases after a three-year gap in his department’s application of disclosure penalties.