Summary: Historically, the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Farm Service Agency has provided personalized service to farmers through thousands of field offices scattered across the country. These county offices run various commodity, loan, conservation, and emergency disaster assistance programs. In 1994, USDA was required to combine its field offices and reduce personnel and duplicative overhead expenses. Since then, the Farm Service Agency has closed more than 370 county offices and cut its county office staff by about 28 percent. These reductions were achieved primarily by closing and consolidating smaller county offices and by reducing staff at larger county offices. This report provides information on (1) the number of Farm Service Agency county offices with three or fewer permanent full-time workers; (2) the characteristics of these offices, including their proximity to another county office, their workload, the level of program benefits delivered, the relative contribution of farming to total county income, and the number of farms and farmland acres in the counties served by these offices; and (3) the ways in which varying the criteria associated with these characteristics can affect the number of county offices that are candidates for closure and consolidation.
