Farm owners recently received letters from the FSA national office if the farm had any FSA history of planting corn, soybeans or small grains. Congress required FSA to mail the letters as part of the Farm Bill implementation.

In many cases multiple mailings were sent to the same address.

For example: both a husband and wife each received a letter. If the farm owner does not operate the farm, the farm operator will be receiving a letter soon.

The purpose of the letter was to notify farm owners of what type and number of acres of each crop that was reported to the local FSA office during the years 2008-2012.

The idea being that if something was reported incorrectly that now is the time to provide documentation to support changing planting history.

However, crop acreage bases that were established years ago from a prior Farm Bill cannot be increased, regardless of current planting history.

For that reason the new Farm Bill may not be that popular for many producers that are now planting many more acres than the old farm acreage base.

It is not uncommon for some farms to have zero base acres, even though there may be 50 acres of corn planted every year 2008-2012.

That is not the case throughout the corn belt where most all farms have “base” acres. So for the most part, the letters do not mean too much around here locally.

Essentially, farm owners could decide to reallocate base acres among the program crops, but base acres cannot be increased from the pre-2008 base.

An example could be reallocating an oats base to soybeans to reflect current planting history on the farm.

The option to reallocate among programs crops should be available later this year.

The whole idea is to prepare for possible enrollment of two new Farm Bill programs: Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC). These programs are designed to work in conjunction with crop insurance.

Again, locally many producers may not be interested as crop insurance is not widely used by local producers.

Time will tell and owners and operators will have plenty of time to review scenarios for their farm as Penn State is developing programming to help make decisions. More information will be provided as available.

Contact the Farm Service Agency office at 724-482-4800, Ext. 2, if you have any questions or concerns.

Patricia Vogel is a manager at the USDA, Farm Service Agency.