OT-CRP question

I'm on the third year of a 10 year crp contract.
When i signed the contract it was for 140 acres.After the first year they said there was only 127 tillable on the farm and cut my payment back.Now they say there's only 109 acres there.They say there using GpS and it's a lot more accurate now.I told them i wanted out and was told i would have to pay back all three years payments plus a fine.It would cost over
30000 to get out.I told them i didn't realize i was dealing with loan sharks.They said i made the deal and would have to live with it.Anyone else loose acres?I could probably get 30 to 40 bucks an acre more than the crp now.

Didn't lose CRP but lost farmed acres that FSA paid indirect and direct payments. Lost only a couple of acres. Surprised they were off by 10%, mine roughly 4%.

We lost a very small percentage of the acreage on our CRP. I'm surprised to hear they underestimated your acreage by as much as they did, but that's the deal. Look at it this way: You should be happy they didn't make you pay back the rent they overpaid you for the first three years.

Did you sign up and pay for the measurement service when you did you contract? I did. Now they can do the computer overlays on the aerial and be fairly close. They still have to inspect it later and NCS to do the plan.

Was any part of it woodlands or creek bottom? They won't pay for that.

Guess you could hire your own surveyor and dispute theirs.

I'd start with getting a copy of the aerial that they are using. They can print it off but they will have copies in the file. Then walk it yourself and see how accurate they are. Let us know. You can still do what you want with the non-crp ground.

try this link to give you a ball park acreage. it should find the missing 20 acres, thats quite a bit of ground to come up short. put the points on the property corners and it will calculate acreage.
poke here

out here they pull a map up on a screen and then draw a line around the area and that gives them the total. Save yourself the aggravation and take some time and go in to your office and have them do it in front of you. If its not worth your time to do that then i guess you don"t mind being shorted.

That works, was real close on my farms.
I had to move the google map a long way north and east from where it srarted.

Ray, post your property description so we can all look at it from google earth and try to see what is going on there.

if you have 140 acres tillable and they want 109 farm or cash rent the rest if you only have 109 acres whats the problem?

The problem is they say the whole farm is in the crp.What am i supposed to farm?

They wouldn't let me see how it was measured.They take it as a personal offense if you question them.

They did want me to pay it back with a penality
but when i mentioned contacting a lawyer they never said any more about it.

4870 state route 47,fort loramie ohio,45845

I don't think they can keep that information from you. Tell them you are making a request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). BTW we're almost neighbors, I live just south of U.S. 36 about 2 miles SE of St. Paris

Hi Ray, I'm close to it but can't get 4870. Are you north or south of 47? How far east of Short Rd? Lots of trees in the area. I've got the map centered on a pond just south of 47 between Short Rd and Oran Newport Rd. Where are you from the pond? thanks.

when you ask for welfare you get burned

Boy, its almost enough to make you not want to ask for guvment money any more, isn't it? What's this world coming to? What's all this accountability stuff? Are we all going to have to go back to WORK and actually PRODUCE SOMETHING?

Some days, you just can't make a cent. . .

Signed,
One of the taxpayers making all this possible for you. And getting a little tired of it, by the way. . .

Have someone with GPS on a tractor ,sprayer or Fert truck come drive around it they can tell you exactly how many acres are in it

If YOU signed the contract in the beginning (not buying previously enrolled land), wouldn"t you know the correct acreage total? After all, it is CROPLAND, with a production history, that gets enrolled. As far as access to records- they have no right to prevent that, but for another check- go to your agronomy dealer. Here, most have the very same maps and acreage info used by the uffda office.

Most of the businesses selling crop insurance have GPS equipped ATV's that can drive around your crp and give you the acres down to three decimal points. FSA should have set some baoundary stakes. If they didn't insist they do that.

Gordo

Well Ray, if your 140 is just south of 47 and east of that driveway on the west side of the pond, I can make that field come out at about 140 acres going around the farmhouse and including that part of the tilled ground going east and south of the house. It doesn't include the wooded portion below that which has an open patch in the middle.

Just looking at the 3 wooded parcels south and west of the farm house, I get 8, 2, & 2 acres. If this is your place, I can see where they got the 127.

There is about a 4 acres stretch of woods along the south anchored on the southwest corner. I didn't include that in my original 140.

Google is using the 2010 FSA maps. I'm not sure where they come up with the 109 and may have made a mistake somewhere.

I don't have a problem walking into the fsa office and speaking to someone and looking at the file. But then I can get along with anybody. If they won't let you look, then you may have to go up the ladder. Around here it is the county agent himself who goes out with his gps and stakes out the ground. He has a note in the file to call me when he measures ours so I can meet him and go with him. The aerial maps with trees hides some the ground underneath so they aren't totally accurate. See if you can agree with them on a new survey and surveyor and pay the costs to stake it.

Go talk to the SCS office as well. Maybe they are a little friendlier and each has a stake in the crp plan. They have similar but a different map that goes by soil type. In our county, the fsa and scs have different ends of the building with a center door and foyer with a door to the left for one and a door to the right for the other so they are separated and do their own thing. They have separate break rooms so I'm not sure they even talk to each other much. The SCS office keeps all the old aerial photos that go back to 1937 or whenever. It's interesting to get copies of the old maps to see how the farm houses and roads were back then. They will have the latest map as well. Good luck but you can't till trees and the gov doesn't have to pay for trees either. Let us know how it goes.

I would nicely object to there acre estimate.

A lot of times a person at the FSA office, who has limited knowledge of farming and probably almost no knowledge of your farm has ran a GPS on your farm off the aerial image.

I have been sitting beside them when they 'redo' the acres in question. I have done this several times in several county offices. All of the time they have been real decent to deal with.

A lot of time there is an innocent mistake for a boundary or something that is kinda hard to tell on a map. "Oh that is a waterway, I thought it looked like a fenceline."

I am glad they go back and double check some things. As a taxpayer, I don't want to be paying someone for something I am not getting. Wierd idea these days, I know.

And if when you are beside them, and see the acres come up, if it is 100 or 140, take it as a fair number, and thank them for their time.

south of 47,probably 1/2 mile west of short road.
The pond is on the west side of my house.The house and pond land were out of the same farm.The farm in question is south and west of the pond.

Thanks Glennster, I just got done measuring all my acreage and lost five acre. I always thought that the girls at the office were a little generous.

Yours is the one I found Ray. When I said east of the driveway, I meant west of the driveway. For anyone else looking at google, your place north of Dayton a ways and west of I-75.

By all means, fix the acreage with fsa. They have a better computer program. I've spent hours at our gal's desk trying to plot out acreage options. But I'm not to sure you want to change the crp to production again. At least your $ can be counted on. Not so with crops. Must be some kind of issue to even get it into crp. I wouldn't gripe too much.

Your experiences with your FSA office are not at all consistent with my own. I have found them to be helpful and very concerned that each farmer or landowner gets what is fairly due to them.

As the landowner, you should certainly know whether you have 140, 127 or 109 tillable acres. You also agreed to the terms of the contract up front. I'd say at this point you need to put your ego in check and try to get along with people who are doing their job.

measure it yourself....go here

http://acme.com/planimeter/

Mike(WA).......I"m with you.

Gordo,
Would like to communicate with you via email on GPS on Canadian lake.
LA in WI

Yes,i agreed to the terms of the contract up from,and they changed the contract after the fact.You don'tknow the facts,but are eager to make snide remarks.You need to check something.

You must live in a cave somewhere if you haven't taken goverment money,or your a big liar.You've never red a newspaper,ridden a bus,airplane,taxi,telephone, etc,there all goverment money supported.

If you find my remarks to be snide, so be it. You may be surprised to find I can be even less tactful.

Your CRP contract specifies a rate to be paid PER ACRE. You can hardly expect CRP to pay you for acres that are laying under roads, are otherwise untillable, or simply don't exist. It would be no different than to continue to give food stamps to a welfare mother for children she does not have.

I am surprised to hear that your FSA office was uncooperative, but I suspect they ceased to be cooperative about the same time you brought in Lawyer-Man. Which brings up a question? Why do you ask for advice here when you have Lawyer-Man on your side? Is it because you are too cheap to pay his fees or are you too stubborn to listen to his advice?

My advice, for what it is worth, is free. I suggest you try to mend fences with your FSA office. If your attorney advises you differently, well, that's why he gets paid.

I only have one square field on all of my farms. That one is a sixty acre one. The ASCS sent me a notice that my acres where "adjusted" after they renewed their maps. That field was only fifty-four acres after "adjustment". So I called and had them sent out the county field man. He and I chain measured the field. Came out sixty acres right to the decimal point. He went back to the office and I went in the next day. The county supervisor told me that the computer maps where the official measurement and that chain measuring was too "inaccurate" to be used.

So I appealed to the county board. One of them is retired from working in the office. She will vote however the super wants her too. The other is a horse women that only got on the board to keep the "crooked" farmers honest, her words not mine. The other being an actual farmer. 2 to 1 vote that the computer was correct. I appealed to the state board and also got a lawyer. He had to get a court order to get them to actually show us how they arrived at the acreage. I laughed my behind off when they showed us how they where doing it. Whoever had made the maps had inverted the slide they made the maps off of. The college educated know-it-alls where measuring the field across the road. Turns out that only one woman "knows" how to run the equipment and she will not let any of the others run the acreages. She is not even from this county she came from another office that they cut staff from. She does not even know the roads around this county. She was only printing off a small map for everyone else to look at. If they had looked at the bigger slide they would have seen the difference in the roads.

So it cost me a five hundred dollar lawyer bill just to prove my land stayed the same.