Too many hands down on the farm? - government subsidies

Insight on the News, April 4, 1994 by Russell Shaw

Summary: Some cost-conscious critics say farmers are getting too much assistance, and they want Congress to eliminate federal farm service programs in rural communities that are becoming suburban areas. To compromise, the Agriculture Department may consolidate services in regional offices, but that might be too little, too late to recover the huge sums agents have already spent.

Less than 45 minutes from downtown Atlanta and home to 375,000 people, Gwinnett County typifies the fast-growing suburbs of the Sun Belt. Gleaming office parks, regional shopping malls and dozens of subdivisions with pricey three-bedroom homes are planted on land where cotton once grew and dairy cows once grazed. And in the last 25 years, the county's population has quadrupled.

Gwinnett County has fewer than 24,000 acres of farmland left and loses about 1,500 acres a year. The 1990 U.S. Census counted 593 farm residents in the county, less than 0.02 percent of the population. Yet as in many other booming counties, a shrinking agricultural base hasn't been enough to shut down the local office of what critics call one of Washington's most pork-prone agencies - the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Stabilization and Conservation Service, or ASCS.

Of the nation's 3,150 counties, more than 2,700 have local field offices. Their chief function is to dispense money to farmers for conservation programs. In fiscal 1993, the service spent more than $2.8 billion, $1.8 billion of which went to the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays subsidies to farmers who agree not to farm their erosion-prone land for 10 years instead of encouraging farmers to plant crops that stop erosion. Today, more than 36 million acres of American farmland lie in wait. Concerned that the 7-year-old program's tab was ballooning out of control, Congress forbade the service to take on more farmers in fiscal 1994. Despite the freeze, the service paid $778 million in salaries and office overhead. The remaining money was used for other conservation programs.

To supporters, the service's field offices are valuable liaisons between the federal bureaucracy and America's farm communities. But critics question whether such rural programs belong in counties with booming subdivisions and shopping malls - where few, if any, farms remain. Some believe that the field offices that do little or no business should be closed.

Critics add that the field offices are part of a multibillion-dollar operation that, because of bureaucratic inertia and congressional interference, has for decades beat back consolidation attempts. Critics point out that when the ASCS program was created in 1938, more than 30 percent of Americans lived on farms. Today, about 2 percent of Americans live on farms, and that makes for costly farm programs. Several inefficient field offices have been shown to spend more than $20 in operating costs for every $1 paid to farmers, prompting critics to ask whether it's really the Agriculture Department's role to continue expensive field operations in suburban counties where there may only be a handful of postage stamp-sized farms.

Proposals to streamline the service by closing and consolidating some offices have been on the table for nearly a decade. John Block, agriculture secretary under Ronald Reagan, was one of the first ardent supporters of consolidation.

"In 1985, during President Reagan's second term, I planned to close four Department of Agriculture field offices in New England," says Block, now president of the National-American Wholesale Grocer's Association. "Believe it or not, there are few full-time wheat farmers left in states like Rhode Island and Connecticut, and I thought we might save a few bucks by consolidating several of the farm-service offices in that region."

Block recalls, however, that his move was thwarted by "a few Northeastern senators" who warned Reagan administration officials that if the offices were closed, they might withhold their support on pending foreign-aid funding issues.

The setback did not quiet the critical voices on Capitol Hill, which were buoyed by a 1991 report by the General Accounting Office. GAO noted that while there were service field offices in more than 85 percent of America's counties, the percentage of counties that fit the standard definition of a rural farm community had declined from 63 percent in 1950 to less than 16 percent. The study also said that 32 percent of the service's offices dispersed less than 3 percent of the service's program benefits in 1986.

The GAO report caught the eye of Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, who became a steadfast advocate of field-office consolidation. "The leadership required to achieve savings would set a constructive example of how one department can tighten its belt and improve its services to taxpayers and farmers alike - an example that should be replicated in other departments," Lugar said when he kicked off his consolidation campaign in February 1992. Key elements in Lugar's proposals for field-office consolidation found their way into streamlining proposals presented later that year by Edward Madigan, agriculture secretary under George Bush.