Hello Friends,
Nothing makes me feel older or more out of touch than getting a text message from my daughters. I’ve mastered LOL!, OMG! and a few other acronyms, but generally I just feel bad and request clarification.
I often hear from our FSA (oops), Farm Service Agency customers that “generally we don’t know what this means because we don’t know your language.” Even though I vowed almost 30 years ago when I first starting working here that I wouldn’t use acronyms, I find myself using all of them. I will try to clarify the most commonly used ones. If I don’t touch on some, ask your office to provide you a copy of an exhibit that explains most of our acronyms.
CED: County Executive Director, often interchanged with Can’t Explain Diddly
COF: County Office
COC: County Committee, an elected board of farmers that oversee the operations of the county office and hire the CED on a yearly basis. They also hear appeals and determine which programs and to what extent programs will be offered in their area.
LAA: Local Administrative Areas, each office covers either one or more counties. The total area that the office covered is divided into three (one county offices) or five LAAs. Each is divided by types of agriculture within the area and tries to divide the number of total farmers equally.
CRP: Conservation Reserve Program, this program removes environmentally sensitive land from crop production and installs conservation measures in exchange for yearly rental payments and cost share funds to install the measures.
NAP: Non-Insured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, which provides insurance type coverage for most crops that regular Crop Insurance is not available. I know, it really should be NICDAP, but we specialize in three letter acronyms.
TAP: Tree Assistance Program, which provides cost share assistance when commercial growers of fruit trees, bushes or vine crops lose their plants due to unusual adverse weather events.
FSFL: Farm Storage Facility Loan Program, provides low interest loans to help farmers market their commodities. Loans are available for hay storage facilities, grain facilities, fruit and vegetable storage facility, and others.
MAL: Market Assistance Loans, used to allow farmers to store certain harvested commodities such as corn, soybeans, wheat, honey, etc. This is also designed to let farmers better market their commodities by providing loans on crops at low interest so they are not forced to sell at harvest to pay off bills.
Unfortunately, publishing space only allows for less than 10 percent of the current acronyms to be covered. You can look forward to this fall when a new batch will be “rolled out” with the new farm bill programs.
If you see me and ask what others mean, I’ll try not to respond IDK.
That’s all for now,
FSA Andy
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