At USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), South Dakota rancher Zach Ducheneaux provides leadership on agricultural policy, administering loan programs and managing conservation, commodity, disaster and farm marketing programs.
What are your takeaways your first year in the position?
The staff we’ve got doing the job are every bit as dedicated to delivering services and programs to the producers as the producers are to producing the food and fiber that we need in this country and in the world. Some of the staff keep hours that you frankly would not believe. I share with our producers when we get out in the country that if they ever see a retired FSA employee looking for work, hire them to help calve your heifers because they don’t seem to sleep.
Additionally, over the past year, we have been very engaged in finding flexibility within our existing programs. We’ve made some significant changes to our Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees, and Farm-raised Fish Program (ELAP) and our Emergency Conservation Program (ECP), as well as the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to try to get more producers participating in them because we see the value of these federal resources.
Where do we stand today in terms of the vaccine mandates and vaccination rates for FSA employees?
We hear a lot of folks are hearing concerns from team members worried that their colleagues are not getting vaccinated and concerned about their safety at work. I want to underscore the importance of getting the vaccine so FSA employees can protect themselves, their coworkers, the producers they serve, and the communities they live in. That’s the safest pathway we to getting back to the normal operation all of our producers and staff want.
As you look out at 2022, what are you most excited about?
There isn’t a day I don’t wake up excited about this job and what I get to do that day, let alone in the next few years. I am excited about several of our initiatives that are focused on improving access to programs, especially for America’s producers who have been historically underserved by our programs. We’ll also continue to improve our disaster assistance and safety-net programs. That way, our FSA programs give producers something to plan on instead of being a victim to the commodity markets and weather. We are excited to continue our work, including our initiatives to advance the Administration’s efforts to combat climate change through programs that support climate-smart agriculture like CRP.
What is your top priority during your time at FSA?
Something I really believe we need to address is the way we do agricultural financing. It was the one thing I highlighted in my letter of interest when I was offered the chance to interview for this role. We’re not going to make multigenerational change doing agricultural finance the same way we’ve been doing it for the past 60 years. We need to ensure producers can make an actual living from that operation. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack noted that 89% of all farmers and ranchers make more than half their income from jobs off the farm. We need to find a way to improve agricultural finance so that’s not the reality. That’s really the focus I bring to the agency because that’s my background — helping producers navigate the realities of current financing availability. That’s why I am such a big fan of our FSA loan programs. We should expand them as much as we can.
