Washington, D.C.– U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue  announced Wednesday that many Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices will reopen temporarily in the coming days to perform certain limited services for farmers and ranchers.

According to a media release, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has recalled about 2,500 FSA employees to open offices on Thursday, January 17 and Friday, January 18, in addition to Tuesday, January 22, during normal business hours. The offices will be closed for the federal Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday on Monday, January 21.

In almost half of FSA locations, FSA staff will be available to assist agricultural producers with existing farm loans and to ensure the agency provides 1099 tax documents to borrowers by the Internal Revenue Service’s deadline.

“Until Congress sends President Trump an appropriations bill in the form that he will sign, we are doing our best to minimize the impact of the partial federal funding lapse on America’s agricultural producers,” Perdue said.  “We are bringing back part of our FSA team to help producers with existing farm loans.  Meanwhile, we continue to examine our legal authorities to ensure we are providing services to our customers to the greatest extent possible during the shutdown.”

Staff members will be available at certain FSA offices to help producers with specific services, including:

• Processing payments made on or before December 31, 2018.

• Continuing expiring financing statements.

• Opening mail to identify priority items.

Additionally, as an intermittent incidental duty, staff may release proceeds from the sale of loan security by signing checks jointly payable to FSA that are brought to the county office by producers.

Information on the locations of FSA offices to be open during this three-day window will be posted:

• On the USDA website.

• On Twitter at @SecretarySonny and @USDA.

• On USDA’s Facebook page.

While staff are available in person during this three-day window, most available services can be handled over the phone. Producers can begin contacting staff on January 17 here.

Additionally, farmers who have loan deadlines during the lapse in funding do not need to make payments until the government shutdown ends.

Other FSA Programs and Services

Reopened FSA offices will only be able to provide the specifically identified services while open during this limited time. Services that will not be available include, but are not limited to:

• New direct or facility loans.

• New Farm loan guarantees.

• New marketing assistance loans.

• New applications for Market Facilitation Program (MFP).

• Certification of 2018 production for MFP payments.

• Dairy Margin Protection Program.

• Disaster assistance programs, such as:

o Livestock Indemnity Program.

o Emergency Conservation Program.

o Wildfires and Hurricanes Indemnity Program.

o Livestock Forage Disaster Program.

o Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish.

While January 15, 2019 had been the original deadline for producers to apply for MFP, farmers have been unable to apply since December 28, 2018, when FSA offices closed because of the lapse in federal funding.  Secretary Perdue has extended the MFP application deadline for a period of time equal to the number of business days FSA offices end up being closed, once the government shutdown ends. These announced days of limited staff availability during the shutdown will not constitute days open in calculating the extension. Producers who already applied for MFP and certified their 2018 production by December 28, 2018 should have already received their payments.

More information on MFP is available at www.farmers.gov/manage/mfp.

Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue says his agency is working with the Office of Management and Budget to find ways to reduce the impact of the government shutdown on farmers and ranchers. Farm Service Agency offices across the country are closed and it’s causing several challenges for producers.

“We’re working with OMB to see if we can find some relief in that area,” Perdue says on Fox Business. “We’re hoping to work up some strategies very soon to get these offices back open soon.” In the meantime, the Food and Drug Administration is planning to expand its daily food safety work amid the continuing lapse in funding. High-risk food safety inspections could start up again as soon as of Tuesday. Also, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service remains on the job.

Perdue also tells Fox Business that the agency’s food safety work hasn’t been disrupted at all. “We’re not shortcutting any type of food safety issues there at USDA in our meat processing,” he says. States are also hustling to get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program February benefits out to recipients starting this week, which Politico says is a big logistical and communications undertaking.

For the second-straight year, President Donald Trump spoke at the American Farm Bureau’s Annual Convention. While the president used his speech to try and build support for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, he did bring up subjects near-and-dear to the hearts of U.S. farmers.

While he’s looking to build the wall, the president did offer one exception to his hard-line stance. He promised to make it easier for seasonal farm workers to enter the country in spite of his hoped-for wall. Farmers have been struggling to find enough labor to operate their farms. “A lot of people don’t understand that,” Trump told Farm Bureau members. “You need people to help you with your farms and I’m not going to rule that out.”

The Washington Post says the farm organization has stood behind the president, even as the delegates were set to debate whether or not to toughen its policy stance on tariffs that were a direct result of Trump’s trade war. Trump only talked for s short time about China, saying that talks were “going well.” He said the USDA was doing everything it could to help farmers deal with the impacts of the government shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history.

The partial government shutdown is having a profound and cascading impact on American farmers and ranchers. Because of this, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture is calling on Congress and the Administration to rapidly get to a settlement and end the shutdown as soon as possible.

The organization says in a news release that, “We know that some USDA employees are working on a limited number of programs, but we also know that all hands on deck are required to successfully direct every program American farmers, ranchers, and communities depend on.” The organization says that includes successful implementation of the 2018 Farm Bill.

Jeff Witte is the Secretary of Agriculture in New Mexico and the President of NASDA. He says, “The impacts of this shutdown are real. Not only are farmers and ranchers unable to use a host of existing USDA programs they depend on, they also can’t use the programs now available in the recently enacted farm bill.” Witte says if farmers can’t access those programs, the financial stress and challenges farmers are facing will only get worse. Many farmers depend on the Farm Service Agency for loans and need the shutdown solved as soon as possible.

The Trump Administration included a range of agricultural demands in its list of formal objectives for trade talks with the European Union. That list came out late last week when EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom was in Washington to visit with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

Malmstrom reiterated last week that the EU will not be negotiating on agriculture. However, Reuters notes that if a wide-ranging trade deal is to be accomplished, something will have to give. The administration wants to bring down tariff and non-tariff barriers to U.S. agricultural goods that are a result of European skepticism about American agricultural practices, especially biotechnology. Agriculture has been a big sticking point in recent attempts to establish a trade deal between the U.S. and EU. Malmstrom told reports after the meeting with Lighthizer that the parameters of the discussions haven’t been decided yet.

The USTR push to crank up full-fledged negotiations comes after a meeting in December with ag groups that pushed hard for their products to be included in the discussion. Now that the U.S. objectives have been made public, the USTR could be ready to start negotiations as soon as 30 days from now.

Dry weather appears to be having an impact on the potential Brazilian soybean harvest, at least according to some market watchers. A weak El Nino pattern brought dry weather to central and southern Brazil in December. The below-normal rainfall combined with seasonally hot temperatures has led to some net-drying conditions in the key soybean producing states of Mato Grosso and Goias.

A Farm Journal report says those two states produce roughly 40 percent of the country’s soybean output. The net-drying conditions are seen by market experts as trimming the region’s potential soybean harvest. Last year, the Brazil soybean harvest hit a record number, coming in at 120.3 million metric tons. The December World Ag Supply and Demand Estimates raised its latest projection to 122 million metric tons for this year’s harvest.

The recent weather pattern may prevent that number from going up between now and harvest. Mostly dry forecasts through the first half of January coincide with the key production stages of flowering and early pod-filling. A potential downward revision to Brazil soybean output would likely cause soybean prices to respond in spite of more-than-ample supplies around the globe.