Every farmer and extension agent that I talk to agrees that recent changes to USDA have caused a lot of concern about the agency’s ability to serve the agricultural community. Questions have arisen about the loss of expertise in the move of some parts of the agency out of Washington and the removal of certain topics from their web sites. This is not a political blog so I won’t address those political concerns, but I did like this story by Politico about how some aspects of the changes are hurting farmers’ ability to respond to changes that we are seeing in the climate today, including increases in both floods and droughts. If you are concerned about this, you might be interested in reading the article at https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/15/im-standing-here-in-the-middle-of-climate-change-how-usda-fails-farmers-043615.
