USDA plan could close 15 farm offices in Maine

WASHINGTON – More than one-fourth of the nation’s Farm Service Agency offices would close under a plan being pushed by the federal Agriculture Department, according to an agency document obtained by The Associated Press.

As outlined in the document, the department would shutter an estimated 665 of the 2,353 offices nationwide, including five of 15 offices in Maine.

J.B. Penn, undersecretary for the Agriculture Department’s Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services, said that he had not seen the document obtained by the AP but that the numbers cited were inaccurate.

He said the agency’s main concern was not closing offices. “We may consolidate functions, but we’re going to provide improved service.

“When you talk about closing offices, people think you’re taking away something from them,” he said. “That’s not the objective at all – we’re going to be giving them something more.”

Penn discussed the plan to modernize FSA offices in briefings this week with chairmen of the Senate Agriculture Committee and House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee. More congressional briefings were planned.

State FSA directors are coming to Washington next week for a briefing on the plan, which called for the closing of 22 of the 100 offices in Iowa.

Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, said he doesn’t know specifics of the plan but said it seems drastic.

“Shuttering nearly a fourth of the FSA offices in Iowa can only lead to more inconvenience and less service for Iowans,” Harkin said.

As the central link between farmers and the department, FSA offices help farmers obtain loans and get payments from a number of farm programs. The federal agency has changed names over the years, but its network of offices in local communities dates to the 1930s.

The department’s goal is to modernize a system now burdened with rustic technology and underused offices. The FSA uses computer systems from the mid-1980s that can’t use the Internet. The agency has an office in virtually every rural county in the nation, no matter how close together two county offices are.