Don’t expect the recently announced federal payments to small
pork producers to
help Georgia farmers much, says a University of Georgia
economist.
On Jan. 12, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman
outlined ways the U.S.
Department of Agriculture will
help struggling small pork producers. But the farm size
limits that restrict the payments
will likely cut out many Georgia family farms.
“It’s hard to say exactly how many dollars would go to
Georgia,” said John
McKissick, an Extension
Service agricultural economist with the UGA College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences.
“We have a number of producers in that category. But they
don’t have a large
number of hogs. And many of them have gone out of business,”
McKissick said. “So
the payments will help some. But they will leave out a lot
of family farms that are over
the size limit.”
The restrictions could hit hard on Georgia’s already
suffering hog business.
“The pork business in the state is suffering,” McKissick
said. “This
latest tragedy is that the producers are facing the lowest
prices since the 1930s. Minus
inflation, they’re actually the lowest prices this century.
“In Georgia, we lost our last packer two and a half years
ago,” he said.
“So we get even less than the national price for our hogs,
because we don’t have the
buying power of our competition.”
As a result of those factors, Georgia’s hog numbers
steadily dropped since the 1980s.
“Right now we have roughly one-fifth of the hogs we had
in 1980,” McKissick
said, “and roughly one-fourth of what we had as late as
1990.”
The last Hog and Pig Report by the USDA Agricultural
Statistics Service shows that as many as 290 Georgia
farms can qualify for these
payments.
“Operations under 2,000 head had only 30 percent of the
production in the state
last year,” McKissick said. “The numbers may sound big. But
the amount per
producer would be relatively small.
“You miss many of our real commercial producers who
depend on pork for their
income but are still family farms, not the large
operations,” he said. “But they
won’t be eligible for any of this help.”
Eligible farmers will get up to $5 per slaughter-weight
hog (or the equivalent for
feeder pigs and other swine) marketed during the last six
months of 1998.
Farmers will be paid only on up to 500 market hogs (or an
equivalent number of feeder
pigs). The maximum payment will be $2,500 per operation.
No payments will be made to farms whose 1998 gross income
was over $2.5 million, as is
true for USDA’s crop disaster assistance programs.
Glickman said farmers are eligible if they sold fewer
than 1,000 hogs during the last
six months of ’98 and are still in operation today. They’re
not eligible for payments on
hogs marketed under fixed-price or cost-plus contracts.
Farmers should apply for direct payments at their local
Farm Service Agency office from
Feb. 1 to Feb. 12. Payments will be made around the end of
February.
