# What is a Government Farmer?



## Palmettokat (Jul 10, 2017)

On another forum someone said he was not a "Government Farmer". Made my mind wander...I asked is that someone who raises GOVERNMETS and how do you plant them and such.

So I thought would ask REAL Farmers what they call a "Government Farmer"?


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## Aaroncboo (Sep 21, 2014)

Talk about crappy crops. Too many weeds... Lol


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

Subsidized.

Regards, Mike


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## swmnhay (Jun 13, 2008)

Yep agriculture is heavily subsidized to insure a abundance of cheap food for the masses.Some will find a angle to by pass rules or out right fraud to get bigger subsidies.

Hay isn't subsidized near as much as some grain crops.

A lot of subsidies and programs in name of conservation also.


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## stack em up (Mar 7, 2013)

I can see this thread going down the shitter real soon....

I don't like taking subsidies, but I take them anyway. I'm not going to put myself and my farm at a disadvantage for the sake of pride. If markets were truly supply/demand, people in USA would be spending a lot more money on food per year. Like Cy said, it's a way to guarantee cheap food.


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## somedevildawg (Jun 20, 2011)

Well....it does create cheaper food but it's artificially cheaper, not in reality....folks always like to say we have cheap food costs, and that's true to the guy/gal that buys their food at the grocery store, but when the subsides are added it's not so cheap anymore, so there ya have it....if I were "King for a Day" I would abolish all of the gubmit subsides and lets just pay what the food costs....but it's all tied to SNAP, school lunches (got to serve breakfast nowadays so I should say school feeding, for free..), and such. I personally think that we should do away with all of them subsides with some exceptions. It's all fraught with fraud and abuse....makes me sick that we got ourselves in this position, but it took some time. 
One example....planting and never intending to get a crop. We call those guys government farmers....it's a tough way to make a living but lots of em do it every year, no real oversite in place to prevent it apparently cause it's the same ones year after year. 
Same thing with these covid PPP payments, there will be abuse from the corporate executive down to the greenhorn....it's a sad trait amongst us humans, it's called greed.


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## BWfarms (Aug 3, 2015)

I took subsidized grass seed due to hurricane flooding but it wasn't Government, it was backed by the premiums I paid into Farm Bureau Insurance. They heavily sponser enough crap that I was willing to take something for the 'free' money I gave them.

I don't bother applying for Government subsidies, I don't even qualify. It's for the best anyways, less meddling.


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## swmnhay (Jun 13, 2008)

All Farmers get a black eye when someone commits crop insurance fraud.It doesn't happen near as often as some think.There are checks and balances to keep it from happening.A automatic audit happens after a claim gets over so much and you have to have scale tickets or bins measured.

Unfortunatly it does happen and tends to be large farms that have multiple entities that can shuffle grain to make one farm look bad.Yea if they are crooked it would be easy for them to do!


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## JD3430 (Jan 1, 2012)

Luckily I don't qualify for any gubmit handouts being a lowly mulch hay farmer.  It's sink or swim. :lol: 
Happy Memorial Day.


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## slowzuki (Mar 8, 2011)

No subsidies up here for hay farming. Not even Government funded Ag extension services. We do have a property tax deferral to help prevent good ag land from being developed as we don’t have land zoning in most areas.


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## Uphayman (Oct 31, 2014)

Pretty hard to escape farm subsidies......tell your lender your going to pass on insuring the crop that he's supposed to borrow you money for. See how that works out......

"The Department of Agriculture (USDA) sets premium rates for federal crop insurance so that the premiums equal the expected payments to farmers for crop losses. The federal government pays about 60 percent of total premiums, on average, and farmers pay about 40 percent. "

(From USDA 2018)


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## Tim/South (Dec 12, 2011)

I qualify to get $33 per head of cattle in innovatory. I will cash that check.
I would be much happier if the government would fix the price fixing and level the playing field. I fear too much lobby money has changed hands for that to happen.
I can see where there will be no cattle on this farm in the future. Been some cattle here since 1840's.

I wonder how many city folk accepted the $1200 stimulus check?


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## Palmettokat (Jul 10, 2017)

Well as the saying goes as a stupid question...I had not thought about crop insurance but did not realize there really was that much subsidzing in the farming industry. Well I say that for really at one time knew the web site where all those numbers are posted and what I found was there was a lot going to land owners who did not farm themselves.

I also did know there are government grants for certain crop or use of land.

On the crop insurance, had a friend who worked with crop insurance. He told me one day on fraud cases he run into. Per him when there is fraud it seemed there was a dirty adjuster.


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## r82230 (Mar 1, 2016)

Seem some folks see the amount of $$$$ that go to the USDA and think 'wow looky at all money going to the farmers'. Little do those folks realize that the majority of the USDA budget goes else wear (SNAP is a pretty large replicant IIRC ).

Larry


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## Tim/South (Dec 12, 2011)

r82230 said:


> Seem some folks see the amount of $$$$ that go to the USDA and think 'wow looky at all money going to the farmers'. Little do those folks realize that the majority of the USDA budget goes else wear (SNAP is a pretty large replicant IIRC ).
> 
> Larry


80% goes to free food programs. Trump wanted to remove free food from the USDA umbrella. Was nixed on the notion. If the American people knew how much money was spent each month on entitlements there would be a revolt. As long as the farm bill is disguised as helping farmers provide affordable food then it looks better.


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## IH 1586 (Oct 16, 2014)

I never wanted to go back to having insurance or anything that requires reporting but this is my first year with rain insurance. Decided a little insurance would be a good thing. So I guess I'm back to getting hand outs if it were to ever quit raining.


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## swmnhay (Jun 13, 2008)

The farm program was changed after the 80’s and that’s when they started subsidizing the crop insurance more.Instead of being based just on bushels per acre it became based on revenue.it was called a safety net.Well one thing it did do when taking some risk out of farming was to drive up rent and land prices because it lowered the financial risk.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

We USED to be in the farm programs but I haven't messed with it in YEARS... I used to take Grandma to sign the farm up and make the "program elections" and stuff, read up on it and attended the meetings to learn about it, because when we row cropped cotton subsidies were basically about half of rice, but still about double corn or any other grain crop... when we quit cotton when the boll weevil program upped our expenses 20% overnight and went all sorghum and soybeans, we took a hit, but the program payments were really falling by that point anyway under "Freedom to Farm" (the 96 farm bill) and a lot of the new stuff it introduced. We actually didn't take as big a hit as we would have a few years earlier, because of 'decoupling', when USDA was trying to encourage farmers to try more diverse and different crops, rather than sticking to the "status quo" which in many cases was, whatever had the highest gubmint payments that would grow in their area... That was when they started trying to move the program from "paying farmers not to plant" to more of a 'safety net' mentality, while upping subsidies to insurance and stuff and moving to market-price driven "deficiency payments" that increased as crop prices fell through their own convoluted figuring process, versus just plain "base acres by crop" type pricing. I remember the old "set aside" acres back during the mid-late 80's when they were actually paying farmers NOT to plant certain percentages of your acres to help eliminate the surpluses that were swamping the markets at the time... that REALLY got city folk's dander up! Back then to participate in the program, you HAD to agree to set asides defined by the gubmint and to the terms of the set-aside. SO there were years when we were paid X amount to NOT plant up to about 25% of our acreage, as I recall (I was a teenager then and helping Grandma and Dad do the paperwork). We found out that we could PLANT haygrazer on our set-aside acres, SO LONG as we DID NOT HARVEST IT until after the set-aside period was over in October, then we could bale it to our heart's content... so we'd plant the set-aside acres in haygrazer and cut it a day or two after the set-aside period elapsed, in case they checked, and then baled it up. Harder to make dry hay that time of year, but it worked pretty well actually, and provided hay for our cattle.

When Grandma passed in '06, Dad took over the farm business and basically cut me out of the loop; I was just a "hired hand" in his eyes I suppose... He reneged on a lot of the agreements Grandma and I had made over the years. Spring of '07 he tosses me the USDA program paperwork and tells me "you go sign up for the money for me, but I'm not paying you your share like Grandma did"... That was kinda the last straw for me and I tossed it right back to him and said, "if you're gonna cut me out, get it yourself!". Kinda PO'd him but that was his tough luck-- I'd had enough and he'd already cut me out of some other things, so I didn't really give a rip at that point. He'd been puttering with it ever since. We had quit row cropping altogether after 2003, but we still had base acres on the Needville place and thus were entitled to the "guaranteed payments" which is a part of the program, with the rest being "deficiency payments" based on crop prices versus base prices for the year, etc. SO some years they got a few hundred bucks up to between 1-2K, some years not. The cattle and hay programs down here in Texas are a bad joke from what I've seen... Dad was running around the farm taking pictures of a half-dozen or so dead cows after the 2010 drought for some gubmint payment for dead livestock from the drought; think he said he got about $300 out of it... (wouldn't buy one replacement heifer LOL I heard of folks up in the Panhandle who suffered through HUGE fires up there that burned DOZENS of miles of fence to the ground, lost hundreds or thousands of head of cattle burned to death in box canyons and stuff in the Permian Basin, etc. who tallied up over a half-million in direct losses and put in for the "gubmint assistance" after doing about 200 pages of paperwork and only got paid about $300-400 in the end... IOW not worth the time or effort.

Last dealing I had with USDA/NRCS offices here was when I was trying to get "fencing and watering assistance" from NRCS... they pay half of cattle watering and cross-fencing costs, which on the surface sounds good, BUT when they print off TWELVE PAGES of how to build a fence to THEIR standards, and another 20 pages on how to install a water system for the back 40 to THEIR specs, and you realize that it's gonna cost you $12,000 bucks to install it THEIR way, to get $6k back, and you have to keep it up for 20 YEARS or risk having to pay the money back... I reverted to my original plan-- built a boot for the subsoiler and chiseled in 400 feet of 3/4 inch poly pipe to the back 40 and put 2 10 foot diameter steel troughs back there with float valves on them, whole project was about $600 bucks... The fencing was the same thing. i can't afford help like that! LOL

Anyway, for awhile guys like Senator Luger from Indiana wanted to do away with farm program payments entirely and make it ALL subsidized crop insurance... that was another of those "I can't afford help like that" moments IMHO... when the program made it "mandatory" to have crop insurance, we usually just got the "Cat" (catastrophic) insurance through the county USDA office-- $100 per crop per county, so if you grew all your crops in one county and had corn and cotton, it was $200-- 100 for cotton, 100 for corn, in one county. If you had ground in TWO counties being used for crops, it would have been $400 for corn and cotton if both were being grown in both counties... or $200 if you only grew corn in one county, and only cotton in the other... Cat coverage only paid like 50% of the "county yield" (which was a figure from about 1950 the figure was so low) times 50% of your acres time 50% of the average price for the year, so IOW if you were completely wiped out you MIGHT get a 50% of 50% of 50% payment (like Roscoe P. Coltrane) or 1/8 of the money, in a BEST CASE SCENARIO... better than nothing I guess. We did "buyup" crop insurance for a few years as production prices increased a LOT in the mid-late 90's and we were trying to cover our investment better, even though we "farmed on our own nickel" and didn't borrow ANY money to grow a crop (Grandma paid off the last of the farm loans with gas well money in the early 80's and the day she came home from the bank for the last time she said then "the day we ever have to borrow money again to farm is the day we quit farming!") We got 75% one year, 80% one year, and like 85% one year-- we never could afford the 90 or 95% coverage, as the price REALLY jumped at that level... The cost wasn't terrible, but when we DID have a weather event and crop damage or losses, ultimately the payments were basically either just enough to cover our part of the premiums (which at that time was farmer paid 50%, gubmint paid the other 50% of the insurance premiums) so basically it was at best a break-even proposition, so after seeing how it worked first hand, we just dropped it and went back to "cat" coverage... the crop insurance program is there to protect the bankers loaning money to produce crops, NOT the farmer... Saw plenty of guys "farming the system" over the years as well, seems they could always get a good payoff, but then EVERY DOLLAR they farmed with was borrowed too... Oh well, that's "the system" and I can't afford help like that LOL 

Later! OL J R


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## endrow (Dec 15, 2011)

There is far more at your local USDA office other than the FSA,free lunch line . NSRCS/ conservation district and FSA and The extension service/ County Agent . All those are important resources for me . It is not all about free lunches. . Many farmers in this area want nothing to do with it but when there is a program that pays ,they are first in line trying to late file and get the bucks and then complain about having to comply.


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## Palmettokat (Jul 10, 2017)

luke, reading some of your points reminding me of the ole saying...I'm from the government and here to help you...

Over the years have seen some fields when they were planted knew it was only for crop insurance payment.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

endrow said:


> There is far more at your local USDA office other than the FSA,free lunch line . NSRCS/ conservation district and FSA and The extension service/ County Agent . All those are important resources for me . It is not all about free lunches. . Many farmers in this area want nothing to do with it but when there is a program that pays ,they are first in line trying to late file and get the bucks and then complain about having to comply.


Extension service is a good resource, for sure... don't believe EVERYTHING they tell you, particularly when it comes to "farm income" or "expenses" of certain recommendations, trials, or projects they do... but I got a lot of good info over the years from the field trials and research stuff they do. My biggest gripe with them is how they and the friggin' state make the pesticide licenses such a TOTAL PITA to get and keep... they don't do much of ANYTHING to help the farmer on that score... lets face it, in this day and age, you SHOULD be able to do the class(es) and take the test online, or at most, sit in a quiet room or in front of the secretary at the extension office and take the friggin' test, just to make sure "nobody is cheating" and be done with it, but NOOO... gotta go halfway across the state to some friggin' training program that they only do maybe once or twice a year... over half the farmers in the US work a "day job in town" and farm on the side, time off, nights, and weekends, but you gotta go to a bunch of extension meetings to get your CEU's to keep your pesticide license... meetings they ONLY schedule in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day, never "after work" or on weekends... SO to go to a meeting you have to TAKE TIME OFF WORK that you need to be saving for field work or harvest... That always irritated the sh!t out of me...

As for NRCS, I'm sure they help in SOME areas where you have a lot more issues to deal with like wetlands, drainage, and highly erodible land, etc... but here they're pretty much a joke... When I went to check on cost-share for cross-fencing and water installation to back pastures, they printed out a rule book half an inch thick and their requirements were SO extensive it would have cost me 10X the cost to do it "their way" to qualify for cost-sharing to get half back, than it did to just do it "my way" and be done with it... and it works JUST AS WELL for 1/10th the cost... PLUS then you're in a "contract" with them for 20-30 years that you have to keep it up per their requirements, or they can come back on you and demand the money back with interest... even 20 years later... FORGET THAT!!! They don't do windmills or solar wells or stock ponds for cattle in our area-- every idgit that buys a 10 acre horse "ranchette" in our area would be in there wanting a windmill or pond dug, so they don't even offer... Otherwise I've never had anything they do remotely apply to me or be of any use to me...

As for FSA, well, the programs are mostly a joke now... the payments have dwindled to nothing compared to the old days, and the requirements are higher than ever for "compliance"... I wouldn't even bother with it anymore myself, if I was row cropping grain. The only exception *might* be if I were crazy enough to try farming cotton again; the loan program on cotton was pretty good, if it even still exists... I know a few years ago they dropped cotton from even being a program crop, just the way they dropped wool and mohair back in the 90's, and tobacco in the 2000's... used to be pretty good amount of wool and mohair being produced out around Junction and Sonora back then, but when the program went away, it's wasn't profitable anymore, so all the wool and mohair buyers went out and the wool and mohair ranchers sold off all the goats and sheep and switched to cows... some of those rock-covered juniper infested hills, a cow will nearly walk herself to death trying to find enough to eat, but I guess it makes them more money than sheep and goats, they're almost all gone now! My wife's cousins used to farm tobacco, they had quota, but sold it when the program ended and it became simply unprofitable to grow unless you had a BUNCH of acres, and they didn't... at the same time, the bigger guys were all scrambling to pick up ANY quota they could for a good price, just so they could increase acres or production or whatever to be profitable, and so they soon found it was more profitable to sell the quota than to grow tobacco, so they quit and put their tobacco fields into grass and hay for cows... Still farm a little corn and beans on the southern hills of SW Indiana, but some of 'em are hanging that up too from what I hear...

If it wasn't for artificial demand via ethanol and corn sugar, half the corn farmers in the country would go broke... without the cotton program, which had a 3 year tapering-off "transition" payment, I figured in about 3-5 years probably half the cotton farms in the country would just switch to beans and corn or sorghum... cheaper to grow and more profitable, because cotton's SO expensive to grow there's no money in it without the program payments. A lot of rice farmers in this area have hung it up too... they cut the subsidies and changed the rules, and a lot of landlords started just keeping the land and the payments and shredding it twice a year with a bush-hog and keeping the payments on the rice fields themselves... and a lot of farmers cut loose land that wasn't high yielding or cost too much to irrigate anyway... I was at a field day one time and two rice guys were talking near me, and I overheard the one guy telling the other they weren't planting a grain of rice that year... no money in it... His grandpa was about to have a fit, because they'd ALWAYS grown rice, and he couldn't imagine doing anything else, and he said he'd put pen to paper and had figured that they WOULD lose money on every single rice acre they planted, so he wasn't planting ANY... switching it to cotton and sorghum (cotton's cheaper than rice to grow, but higher than corn and sorghum and soybeans and wheat and everything else small grain).

The rice program is a joke too nowadays from what I've heard...

Later! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Palmettokat said:


> luke, reading some of your points reminding me of the ole saying...I'm from the government and here to help you...
> 
> Over the years have seen some fields when they were planted knew it was only for crop insurance payment.


Yep, seen that too...

Some REALLY beautiful red medium loam soils up near College Station, over toward Snook and back toward the Brazos River-- bottomland and plains... They grow some BEAUTIFUL crops out there, cotton, corn, sorghum, and beans mostly... I went up there years ago because there were a few good parts places and a place that sold older equipment at good prices... One time I was up there around the end of May, so the cotton should have been about six weeks old or so, about ready to start squaring and about a foot and a half tall... Well, I pass this one field and there's probably 200-300 acres of cotton, JUST popped out of the ground maybe 2 inches tall at most... some of it still cotyledons... I was just shocked and amazed... I mean, NOBODY plants cotton THAT late and can get a crop... the bugs simply eat it to the bone... ONE YEAR we had a spell where it rained like every other day for about four months straight... it was the winter and spring of '96, because that's when I was in the police academy... I mean we had friggin' ALLIGATOR WEED growing in the cotton fields, it was SO wet (that stuff only grows IN STANDING WATER, like slow moving creeks and ponds!) Anyway, that year EVERYBODY planted their cotton within about a week or ten days in the middle of May-- I know because I took my state peace officer's licensing exam on Friday, and we had a week off before graduation the week after that, so I went home and put the disk and hipper on the two tractors, and hipped the field, disked in the Trifluralin, set the disk off and hitched up to a fertilizer knife applicator and knifed in the fertilizer, and then hipped the fields up pulling the drag harrows behind them to smooth the beds, and then planted the crop, all in that week we had off. Of course then the rain shut off like a valve closed and everything burned to a crisp, we didn't even get a stand because we had an old blackland planter that ripped the row down nearly flat and we lost all the moisture and it never rained to bring the crop up... So the next year I bought an ancient 7100 Deere planter with peanut hopper bottoms and plate bottoms, and swapped it over to Kinze meters... save the moisture and get a better stand!) We had another year like that a few years earlier, but it didn't turn into a blazing drought with less than 1/10 inch of rain over about 3 months like it did in 96, and everybody was about 3 weeks or so late planting, but EVERYBODY planted within about week's time, all at once... EVERYBODY made GOOD cotton that year, very few bugs... BECAUSE it was simply TOO WET for ANYBODY to slip out there and plant some a couple weeks early (which they used to do trying to get the "first bale in the county" and get printed in the paper and the buyer's would compete to buy it for a dollar a pound, nearly double the usual price, so THEY got in the paper too), there was no place for the early hatching bugs to start to munch and multiply, and then move into EVERYBODY ELSE's fields about the time the early cotton started getting "tough" and the younger cotton was tender and juicy and like a free buffet for the bugs to come raging in and feast and multiply... In the average year, this is EXACTLY what happens, and so the last guy to plant basically inherits everyone else's bugs as the fields start to mature one by one and the bugs have feasted and multiplied and move on looking for more tender sweet juicy pickings, and eat the last guy out of house and home!

SO, here's this HUGE cotton field just breaking the ground good in the middle of all these other fields for miles around it that's already got cotton a foot and a half high in it about to start squaring ahead of bloom... I'm shaking my head in amazement and I get to the parts place and get my stuff and I'm chit-chatting with the owner and telling him about the field of SUPER LATE cotton I saw, and wondering what the h3ll they were thinking... "INSURANCE COTTON!" was his instant response... "we got guys who do that every year... they KNOW that the bugs will eat it into the ground, which is why they plant it... when the bugs eat it and it's a total loss, they take the insurance claim and plow it under...

To me, that's nuts... why plant a crop *INTENDING* to never produce it?? I mean, Dad and Frank, the neighbor, used to have a laugh with their inside joke, Dad would go over to drink coffee and eat kolaches with him and he'd say, "Well, Did you get your cotton planted?" "Yep, how about you??" "Yep, sure did-- time for us to go file for our disaster payments!" LOL Course that was mostly a joke, though the extended drought of the 50's was tough and a number of bad years piled up there when Eisenhower was in office... But I always figured if you were just out to "farm the system", why bother... if you don't want to produce a crop, just get out of farming...

Later! OL J R


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## Tim/South (Dec 12, 2011)

Luke, Is the pesticide test not offered online? I took the chemical applicators class and test online.

The cross fencing program through NRCS is not a complicated ordeal. It requires H-Braces. Other than that, the requirements are normal, at least in how we always fenced. It pays $1.80 per foot which is much more than cost of material with T-Posts and barb wire.
FSA is a life saver when we have a natural disaster like tornadoes, flood, drought, lightening strikes on cattle etc.
FSA is handling the Corona relief package the government passed for cattle owners. Not really an FSA program yet they have the chore of processing applications.
Most things in life are as simple or as complicated as we want to make them.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Tim/South said:


> Luke, Is the pesticide test not offered online? I took the chemical applicators class and test online.
> 
> The cross fencing program through NRCS is not a complicated ordeal. It requires H-Braces. Other than that, the requirements are normal, at least in how we always fenced. It pays $1.80 per foot which is much more than cost of material with T-Posts and barb wire.
> FSA is a life saver when we have a natural disaster like tornadoes, flood, drought, lightening strikes on cattle etc.
> ...


Not here, not that I've found out about anyway... Every time I check the closest testing place/date is about 6 months out and at least 200 miles away... which is total BS IMHO, considering that EVERY county has an extension office... it's not exactly rocket science anyway, but like the CDL's, the harder they make it to get them the more hoops you have to jump through, the more inept the licensees are LOL Typical gubmint bureaucracy.

Well, maybe NRCS is easier where you are, because when I looked at the cross-fencing program, they printed off FOURTEEN PAGES of rules/regulations/requirements for the fencing to meet their standards, all of which had to be complied with in full, or not eligible for cost share. They inspected after you were done. I mean they covered EVERYTHING from post spacing, post length, depth, number and type of wires, spacing, staple type and kind, H brace construction requirements, corner construction requirements, you name it. Then of course there's the "must be kept in place and maintained for 20-25 years (can't recall which ATM) and subject to spot inspection at any time... and if say in 15 years the cattle market went to sh!t and I decided to h3ll with it and sold em all and plowed the fields back up for row crops, well, if they spot check you and the fences are gone, they demand 100% of the money back, plus interest, back to the original cost-share payout. Same thing with the cattle waterers in the "back 40" cost-share deal... 30 pages of instructions, specifications, and requirements... First, they determine where you want to put it in relation to the well, measure the distance, and calculate how big a pipe you need... I knew the site I wanted was 400 feet from my old man's well, so he looked in his book and popped up with "Oh, you'll need an INCH AND A HALF water line, minimum... I was like "I got no way to put that in... that big I'd need PVC, and you can't run PVC through a subsoiler with a boot on it! I was gonna use 3/4 poly tube!" "Nope, not big enough, too much pressure drop"... I'm like, "I don't give a sh!t what the pressure is at the trough, not gonna be a house there and the cows don't care... if you're putting 10 gallons a minute in the well end of the pipe, you HAVE to get 10 gallons a minute out the other end, since water is incompressible..." "Sorry, has to be done to OUR specs..." Then he tells me I have to dig the site out a foot deep, basically a pad big enough for the trough, and ten feet all the way around it, completely backfilled with coarse stone after having a ground cloth installed in the hole... then they have a contractor deliver the trough, which is a double-thick concrete trough about 10x15 feet long, which is SO thick that they have to have it hauled in and set with a roll-off truck with a winch on it, because it's TOO HEAVY to be moved afterwards... they REQUIRE the double-thick concrete for "durability"... THEN once the trough is set, you have to pour a 3 foot wide concrete "sidewalk" all the way around the stone pad, to contain the stones so cattle don't track them out into the field... Gotta have the stonework to keep the cattle from chewing up the ground around the trough with their hooves, and ground cloth to allow water to percolate but contain the cowsh!t in the gravel pad... I mean, it was RIDICULOUS... I was like "h3ll all I wanted was a couple 750 gallon galvanized troughs and a 400 foot poly water line to the back pasture... not looking for a swimming pool at the Hilton... You're talking about something that will cost me $10,000 bucks to install... I was looking for cost share on a $500 job!" "Sorry, we don't do that... gotta go in by the regulations..." I just shook my head and walked out... NO WAY was I spending ten grand to MAYBE get five back, *IF* it passed their muster when they came to look at it...

I just bought a roll of poly and a couple troughs and we put it in with a booted subsoiler behind the 5610, Jay running the tractor in low gear idling and I walked along behind rolling the roll of tubing and feeding it down through the subsoiler boot into the ground as we went... works like a champ, been there nearly 20 years, still works fine.

Different areas are probably better... we're too [email protected] close to friggin' Houston, that's our biggest problem. Later! OL J R


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## Palmettokat (Jul 10, 2017)

I admit there is much I don't know but here our county agents work hard to help us get our pesticide license. Would say counties in Texas are larger than ours but think they pull about three or four counties together on these test and the continuation education. I did find a company on line who offered the ce but had no reason to check out the details.

On money to help with sprigging grass for pasture or hay here we have a one year requirement to keep it that way, the year it is sprigged. Surprised me. They do check it after being sprigged. I was allowed to get help on a piece of land with only a one year lease.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Palmettokat said:


> I admit there is much I don't know but here our county agents work hard to help us get our pesticide license. Would say counties in Texas are larger than ours but think they pull about three or four counties together on these test and the continuation education. I did find a company on line who offered the ce but had no reason to check out the details.
> 
> On money to help with sprigging grass for pasture or hay here we have a one year requirement to keep it that way, the year it is sprigged. Surprised me. They do check it after being sprigged. I was allowed to get help on a piece of land with only a one year lease.


Interesting... I don't think we have any sprigging assistance program here, not that I've heard of anyway...

Course being too close to Houston, and all these farms getting chopped up into 5 acre "ranchettes" as the older generation dies off, they'd probably be overwhelmed with requests for everybody wanting to sprig Coastal or Jiggs bermuda or whatever for their horses, "claiming" it was for cattle, but within a few months or a year, the cows would mysteriously disappear and be replaced by horses I bet...

I know Dad had me go to NRCS years ago and inquire about a stock tank/pond and windmill/solar well for cattle program, and they told me flat out "Nope, don't have that here-- we'd be swamped with requests as every city yahoo moving out here would want cost assistance for a shiny new windmill in their backyard and a fishing pond "stock tank" LOL Yup, true enough!!!

Later! OL J R


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