USDA Update

By Rod Johnson

October 10, 2003

It is time for another BIG THANK YOU to the W.I.F.E. organization for their outstanding support of the Kiowa County Farm Service Agency. W.I.F.E. members again "invaded" the FSA office to help file and mail CRP producer payment summaries to producers. Every time you get a chance, be sure to thank a W.I.F.E. member for all they do for agriculture.

Kiowa County USDA Agency Offices along with other Federal Offices will be closed Monday, October 13, in observance of the Columbus Day Holiday. Offices will reopen on Tuesday October 14. The Loan Deficiency Payment (LDP) rate for Monday, October 13 will be the same as the Friday, October 10 rate. Requests for LDP’s faxed to the FSA Office before 5:00 a.m. Mountain Time, receive the LDP rate for the previous day.

With the help of W.I.F.E., the Kiowa County FSA Office processed and mailed approximately 1500 CRP payments that amounted to $5.8 million. Direct Deposits of CRP payments should be in most bank accounts by the time you read this. Producers who receive checks by mail should receive payments within the next week. If you have not received information about your CRP payment by October 17, give the FSA office a call and we will find out if there is a problem.

Before the second half of the 2003 Direct Payments can be issued, a complete acreage report must be filed for all cropland acres on a farm. Most of our farms have completed acreage reports. We will eventually be mailing a letter to producers who need to complete acreage reports.

The Colorado State FSA Committee has adjusted the unharvested payment factors used for computing Crop Disaster payments. The State Committee’s decision will affect a large number of 2001/2002 disaster payments already issued. Nearly all unharvested factors were increased with the exception of millet, which remained unchanged, and grain sorghum which was substantially reduced. The higher factor for wheat will result in the wheat payment being raised but the lower grain sorghum will result in an overpayment. On some farms the wheat factor may offset the grain sorghum but will cause the office to recalculate all farms paid prior to September 22 that had unharvested factors applied, which is nearly all farms in the county. We are not sure when we will get this all sorted out but producers with unharvested acres of grain sorghum in 2001 or 2002 may be required to make a partial refund of their disaster payment. In most cases this refund may be able to be set off of other payments. We will continue the processing of disaster payment applications later this month after finishing CRP and the second half of 2003 Direct payments. As of October 1, 2002, we had processed 1337 applications for payment (about 36%). We estimate we still have over 2400 applications left to complete. We have been making good progress in recent weeks on operators’ applications and hope to be processing owners’ applications by sometime in November. With the large volume of applications left to do, we anticipate we will still be processing disaster applications after January 1, 2004.