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USDA's Farm Service Agency is looking at hiring new employees for county offices to address staffing shortfalls caused in part by last year's deferred resignation program that contributed to a loss of nearly 10% of the FSA workforce.
USDA Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation Richard Fordyce told Agri-Pulse that the department is “taking a very strategic look” at where staffing gaps exist, especially at county offices, which in some cases are severely understaffed.
“First, we would be looking at those counties that were impacted most dramatically and seeing what we can do to get them some help here pretty quick,” Fordyce said in an interview.
He said he could not provide a number of how many employees might be hired. FSA is currently able to bring on temporary hires.
“We haven't necessarily nailed down what we think we could get done this year, but we're working on that on a daily basis, and looking at budget numbers and staffing numbers, and we'll get to a place here, hopefully pretty quick, where we can start to do some things,” he said.
The staffing picture varies from county to county, according to Fordyce and county committee leaders and farmers contacted by Agri-Pulse.
“We do have some county offices where DRP was probably utilized a little bit more than what would have been ideal,” Fordyce said. “The state executive directors on the FSA side are managing that by sending some folks there one day a week, two days a week.”
But while that might be a temporary fix, he added, “We want to be in a position where we can be there more than one or two days a week, and those are kind of those places that we're looking at to be able to put some staff in.”
The National Association of Farmer Elected Committees has been expressing concern for months about staffing shortfalls. In a news release earlier this month, NAFEC said that “continued understaffing in our local FSA Service Centers is creating major problems getting the work done to deliver programs that producers need to survive. We have FSA offices across the country that have no employees in them and are only open one day a week. There are also many more with only one employee.”
“FSA is still under a general hiring freeze for permanent employees,” NAFEC’s statement says. “In some cases, temporary employees can be hired. However, spending six months training a temporary employee, only to lay them off, is a waste of time and financial resources.”
“They lost a lot of people, and they didn't rehire as far as I know,” said NAFEC President Jim Zumbrink of Ohio.
“We've lost a lot of good employees,” said Doug Sombke, South Dakota Farmers Union president. “I think we've lost in the neighborhood of 40 to 60 across the state.”
David Senter (Agri-Pulse photo)Fordyce and USDA are seeking to automate more tasks at county offices, including through a “One Farmer, One File” initiative that Fordyce said should be completed by 2028.
But farmers often want to – or need to – go to their county offices for help with paperwork. “Most of us are concerned about if we hit a wrong button and make an error, how do we get it fixed?” said Craig Turner, a producer in north central Texas who serves as executive vice president of NAFEC. “Or, if we make an error with someone face to face, it's caught before it's entered into the computer.”
“We have farmers that still can't access the internet, and I know farmers where you can't hardly get a cell phone call from their home,” said David Senter, who represents NAFEC in Washington, D.C.
Workload remains an issue
Workload has been an issue at county offices, especially after the deferred resignation program, and the government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, which at 43 days was the longest in history and left employees with a backlog when they returned to work.
“We keep hearing from employees that have enough years and experience [who] planned on working a few more years, but [with] the stress … they’re retiring,” Senter said.
“If your priority is to take care of the family farm and family ranch, then our offices are critically important because they're the ones that implement the programs,” said Walter Schweitzer, president of Montana Farmers Union.
“They're the ones that kind of walk our members through what programs are available and what they should be doing to access those programs. If that’s not your priority, you don't care about taking care of the family farmer and the rancher and don't care about the conservation programs that take care of our soils, our water, then we really don't need the offices. We don't need staff.”
FSA is implementing a 30-million-acre update to base acres this year, as called for in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill, Fordyce said, “We're extremely confident that they'll be able to get that done.”
Staffing levels vary depending on the office. Danny Wood, a Colorado producer with the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, said both of the offices he deals with, in Colorado and Nebraska, “are either fully staffed or right at it. We have had no problems at all in Colorado.”
“I think the FSA and Trump's administration are doing everything they can for us,” he said.
And NAFEC’s Turner, in Texas, said he always tries to stay positive. “Change is inevitable, and when the change comes, we need to try to help be a solution, not a problem.”
