Law firms and grain producers are taking legal action against the USDA over the way the agency came up with the final county yield total for the ARC program. Payments for 2014 issued last fall by the Farm Service Agency weren’t as high as projected in some counties around the nation, especially in areas with high yields for particular crops. Ray Grabanski, president of Progressive Ag in Fargo says they have joined on to the lawsuit. He says the problem stems from the way FSA calculated the annual ARC-County payments.
Grabanski says FSA has claimed that RMA yields had to be used in counties where there wasn’t enough yield data reported to the National Ag Statistic Service to figure a yield for ARC-County payments. FSA needed five years of county benchmark yields as well as the yields for the current year.
Its estimated $100 million or more in government payments may have been lost and he says the way ARC-CO is administered is arbitrary and capricious.
At least a couple of law firms are holding meetings with farmers in parts of the Plains and Midwest. They argue that FSA did not accurately calculate county yields or implement the payments with the contract terms or the 2014 farm bill language.
