Introduction

Local Farm Service Administration (FSA) county committees are key players in the US Department of Agriculture. These committees are composed of local farmers elected to serve in both advisory and administrative roles and act as a mediator between the USDA and local agricultural communities. Farmers are nominated from the local community to run in elections, and, when elected, serve on a county committee for three-year terms. Any farmer who participates in FSA programs or sends their FSA office certain information about their farm operation can vote in their local elections. Most county committees consist of three members, though there are rare cases where larger combined administrative areas may have more than three committee members.

County committees have broad duties and powers within the modern agricultural system. They choose the FSA County Executive Director who staffs the local office, act a first point of contact for mediating disputes, set important metrics that impact disaster payment eligibility, and more. However, these committees have been historically dominated by white members, with minimal representation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous farmers, leading the USDA to create positions for appointed voting members in some areas where disadvantaged farmers are underrepresented.

Creation of FSA County Committees

To learn more about the unique history and structure of the county committee system, check out the Life of Administrative Democracy by Joshua Galperin (2020).

Local county committees were initially created to manage the allotment and conservation system made necessary after the devastation of the Great Depression and the dust bowl. To ensure that the market wasn’t over-saturated with certain agricultural goods (mainly wheat, corn, and cotton), and, thus, that market prices were too low to sustain farmers when they sold their goods, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which created subsidies for farmers to keep their field yields within quotas. These quotas were set at the federal level, but local administrators were tasked with distributing allotments among farmers in their area. This is where county committees come in. Farmers elected to their county committees were charged with implementing this system on the local level, deciding who among their community would receive allotments, what size those allotments would be, and determining whether local farmers were producing over their allotment and were, therefore, ineligible to receive subsidies.

Over the 20th century, county committees would be bounced around to different bodies within the USDA, but their longest home was within the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) from 1961 to 1994. It is important to keep in mind, however, that from their creation in 1933 to 1994, elected county committees were primarily engaged in administering the price support and allotment system, deciding who in their community was allowed to grow a certain amount of commodity crops and still be eligible for price support payments. In 1994, however, the UDSA underwent a major reorganization, folding together the ASCS and the Farmers Home Administration (FHA), to create the Farm Service Administration (FSA). When it came time to choose which form of local representation would be kept between the ASCS’s elected system and the FHA’s appointed system, the USDA chose the elected system, gave the USDA and the Secretary of Agriculture the authority to use county committees for “almost any activity” (Galperin, 2020; p. 1224), and made the elected county committees mandatory.

Two key issues have arisen from this reorganization that impact the farming system today. First, by making county committees mandatory, the USDA cannot make significant reforms to the system alone. Instead, Congress must act to change or remove the county committee system. Second, because the FSA inherited the FHA’s loan and credit portfolio, local farmers elected to county committees now have access to their competitors’ financial information and have power to make decisions that can deeply impact the health and viability of their farms. Thus, the local county committee system which was a key player in weaponizing the agricultural system against Black farmers (as discussed below) was empowered.

Discrimination and Weaponization of the County Committee System

To learn more about how county committees were weaponized over the course of the Civil Rights era, check out Dispossession by Pete Daniel (2013).

Given the powers entrusted to county committees through the 20th century, it may come as no surprise that they gained the reputation for enriching an already wealthy class of “good ol’ boys” and using the allotment system to punish Black farmers who sought to have their constitutional rights recognized. The first failure of this system was one of wholesale exclusion. An article published in the Columbia Law Review in 1967 noted that although there were more Black farmers than white in many communities across the United States, only seven Black farmers had been elected to county committees, all as non-voting second alternates. Supervision of these elections were done by community committees, which were similarly non-representative. Only 113 community committee members of the 37,000 committeemen in the South were Black. Thus, both power and accountability for the just use of that power were firmly in the hands of white farmers across the South. Note that this detailed data was and is key in illustrating the exclusion of Black farmers from the electoral system. However, this level of detailed demographic data on members of county committees is no longer publicly available. For a detailed discussion of the accountability problems that arise from this, read or brief Barren Soil: How the data desert impacts accountability at the USDA.

Figure 1: The ASCS County Committee Electoral System

Dispossession (Daniel, 2013) records the experience of Black farmers operating within this system. One particularly salient story is that of Thomas C. Johnson, a Black farmer operating in Mississippi. Though he had 315 acres cleared for farming, he was given only a 45-acre cotton allotment. After requesting that the all-white county committee raise his allotment, ASCS field workers found that a field that had always measured 3 acres in past years in fact measured 4.3 acres. He was not only compelled to destroy over an acre of his cotton, but also pay $9 ($90 in 2024 dollars) for the remeasurement of his land when he appealed the decision.

When faced with evidence about the lack of representation in the ASCS, USDA administrators blamed Black farmers for not participating in county committee elections, but when civil rights organizers began to organize Black farmers to run for and participate in county committee elections, the backlash was incredible. Black farmers were turned away by armed white police when they tried to register to vote in elections, farmers’ homes were firebombed, teargassed, and shot at, and family members lost their jobs. While hearings were held about the lack of representation and voter suppression, little was done to reform the system, leading a reporter for the Southern Courier  in Montgomery, Alabama to conclude, “The worst bureaucratic appointment could not be worse than the people elected county manager in the black belt counties… Perhaps elections should be seriously considered to be the most open avenue for discrimination in the ASCS.” (Daniel, 2013; p. 138)

County Committees Today

Though elected county committees are now under the FSA and the allotment system is no more, problems with representation persist. County committees have evolved into bodies that act as a gatekeeper to key programs, loans, and benefits. A Pigford Claimant we spoke to highlighted how changes within the USDA have affected her experience with the FSA: “…usually, if we have somebody… go there with us, or someone that can call to let them know that we’ve come in, we may get better service, but when it was all white, we [would] get denied.”

 As mentioned earlier, county committees select the County Executive Director, the key local USDA staff member who staffs the local USDA office. So, while county committees are not directly involved in loan and credit decisions, they have influence over the people who are making those decisions. Furthermore, if a farmer disputes a decision made by their FSA agents, their first line of recourse is the county committee itself, who can request detailed financial information about farmers who, in truth, are their business competitors. In a hearing of the Equity Commission, Farmer JP Haynie III highlighted his and others’ experience with their local county committee, urging the USDA and Congress to act.

County Committee testimony begins at 1:40:00

Summing up his testimony, he stated, “I think the county committee system needs to be abolished. I think we need to look at how other organizations in the federal government are run, and not so much control is given to powerful traditionally white men and women in the farming community in these county offices that are able to use our information against us.”

Furthermore, accountability and representation continue to be an issue. As outlined in our brief, Barren Soil, though the USDA has taken nominal steps to provide a mechanism to increase representation within county committees by allowing appointed voting members to serve if their committee is not representative, the USDA no longer publishes detailed demographic information on the demographic makeup of county committees. Thus, farmers, advocates, and other members of the public cannot see if these changes are actually making county committees more representative. Furthermore, representation is not inclusion. Just because a Black farmer serves on a county committee does not mean that they have real decision-making power. A Pigford claimant we spoke to said: “Well, I’ve served on the county committee…. But the thing about that was that they had made all the decisions before I even got into the room. Really… and so they only told me after the fact.”

 The USDA’s county committee system remains a point of contention because of its history of racial discrimination, lack of transparency, and continued representation issues. Many advocates argue that its structure is outdated and needs reform or abolition, but legal barriers and institutional inertia prevent swift and meaningful changes. Without data transparency and public accountability, it is difficult to assess progress or hold the USDA accountable to its promises of equity.