Maine farm offices to close

BANGOR – The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to streamline and consolidate Farm Service Agency offices across the country could affect five of Maine’s 15 offices.

Maine took the hardest hit in New England under the plan, which aims to shut down more than a third of all FSA offices across the country, 713 of 2,351 offices nationwide, according to a summary the USDA provided to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Vermont, Rhode Island and New Hampshire offices will remain untouched, while two of the five offices in Connecticut will close and two of the seven in Massachusetts will shut down.

David Lavway, Maine’s FSA director, said Tuesday that five of Maine’s 15 offices already are “off the table” and will remain untouched. They include the offices in Fort Kent, Presque Isle, Houlton, Machias and Scarborough.

“Seventy percent of our loans are in Aroostook County,” Lavway said. “We are going to review the 10 other state offices and see where our farmers are located.”

An internal task force will look at distances from offices to farms and each office’s work load to determine which offices should be consolidated, but Lavway stressed that none of the state’s 62 full-time employees will lose their jobs.

“This is not a job-cutting process. It is an efficiency process,” he said.

The USDA, however, offered an employee buyout aimed at reducing as many as 655 jobs nationwide.

As the central link between farmers and the USDA, FSA offices help farmers obtain loans and get payments from a number of farm programs.

But Lavway said the FSA computer system is outdated and cannot link to the Internet.

“The county system also goes back to the 1940s,” he said. “We need to look at how best to serve our farmers. We need to look at our eight farm loan teams and where they are, so we can serve our farmers properly.”

Lavway stressed that five is the target number of offices to close but that the task force’s research may reveal that only two or three offices should close, particularly due to Maine’s large geographical size.

He said a plan for restructuring Maine’s FSA system should be submitted to the USDA by Nov. 15.