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Ag’s work goes on even in a shutdown – in some places
 

By ANN HINCH

PEORIA, Ill. — Another potential federal government shutdown is possible this Friday, despite the longest in U.S. history ending weeks ago. While President Trump and Democrats in Congress face off over southern border security measures, federal employees are preparing for being out of work again.

Kathy Hornback is one. A physical science technician with Plant Polymer Research at the USDA’s National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research (NCAUR) lab in Peoria, the 15-year employee’s work helps scientists turn agricultural products into plastics. One of the division’s main products is polylactic acid, derived from corn and used in a variety of goods.

“We like to say we find the answers before you even know the questions,” she said of the lab’s research on new products and uses. NCAUR is long famous for developing a method to mass-produce penicillin.

She is prepping for any future shutdowns by trying to time her experiments and work to be at a stopping point when she knows there could be one, to minimize the amount of data she might lose.

That was a problem at the lab during the 35-day furlough that went from Dec. 22-Jan. 25, as some experiments had to be abandoned because employees were prohibited from checking on the live plants, bugs and cultures that require continuous care (she noted there were a couple researchers who were allowed to go in during the furlough to check on more critical experiments).

“Of course, there is only so much one can do in that regard,” she explained.

As a federal employee, Hornback – like several Farm Service Agency county directors Farm World contacted during the shutdown – said she would be prohibited by the USDA from speaking to reporters. But as vice president for Local 3247 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union, she is authorized to speak for the interests of about 100 of the lab’s non-Ph.D. employees, including about 30 dues-paying members.

When the shutdown happened, she said the union was in the middle of negotiating a contract renewal; the government has extended that time equal to the furlough’s length. As of Jan. 30 she had heard from a few lab employees who already received their back wages not paid during the furlough, but contract employees who provide services to the lab are not likely to receive any missed pay.

She noted her husband is a contractor. He did snow removal at the lab during the shutdown so security and others could gain access, and the private company for which he works was paid for that after the shutdown ended. She said the company also covered his health insurance premium during the shutdown.

In the union Hornback represents a range of employees earning between $32,000 and $65,000 annually. Some of the younger ones are still paying off student loans (their jobs all require a degree) and/or raising children. One found a temporary job at a tavern to make ends meet during the furlough; others were also working second jobs or had taken out loans to pay bills.

Some employees did file for unemployment benefits, but not all – since nobody knew how long the shutdown would last, some weren’t sure it would be worth the trouble of having to pay back that first check if it arrived after they were back at work.

And some people waited to apply after new lawmakers were sworn in on Jan. 3, seeing if a GOP-controlled Congress and Trump could agree on a deal before the House switched to Democrat control.

Just applying for unemployment was a challenge, Hornback said. Illinois wasn’t quite sure how to handle the furloughed workers at first. Under state law, she said applicants need their last 18 pay stubs – but since employees access their records online instead of getting paper checks or stubs, those who had not already configured their accounts from work to be able to access them outside the office were out of luck.

“(The state) simply didn’t know what to do with us or how to handle us,” Hornback noted, adding officials did work on easing requirements to help these employees and that some checks did start arriving before the end of the shutdown.

Planning ahead

One lesson learned from the furlough is that the union will encourage employees to immediately file for unemployment when another happens. They are also being advised to electronically set up access to pay and benefits records outside of work.

“Many people have changed their spending habits, saving as much as they can and foregoing the little extras we all enjoy, since we do not know if/when this will happen again,” Hornback added.

Another downside of the union members and other lab employees missing work was experiments going by the wayside and needing reset (if possible) after returning to work in late January, which meant they were not hitting “milestones” needed for development and manufacturing. She said this may also put the lab behind related, dependent or competing research in other countries.

“People need to feel they can depend on us,” she said, adding this doesn’t even include researchers who must provide data on deadlines to satisfy grant requirements – and could not do so.

Before the shutdown ended, she did hear murmurings from employees she represents about looking for entirely new jobs. “You can’t go indefinitely” without a paycheck, Hornback said, adding at age 57, this job is also critical to her retirement income.

In addition, being out of work and pay for so long is demoralizing. “I went through two weeks just depressed,” she explained, both over lost experiments and the loss of purpose a job can give. She wasn’t alone; furloughed employees she knew stayed in contact on social media and in person for support. A few took to volunteering with local charities to fill their time.

One upside to the shutdown was the support of those outside the lab, in the community and nationwide. “It’s nice to see that there are people out there” who rallied for the furloughed workers, she said, and offered help and services during the shutdown.

Some of those outsiders were directly affected by the shutdown themselves. Hornback noted the vending machine contractor supplying the lab lost revenue from the employees being gone, as well as the food that expired. “I know we are not that big, but every dollar counts for a small business,” she said.

Young farmers, trade

After a 16-day federal government shutdown in October 2013, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) pushed for changes to the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999 (LMR) that would authorize funding for USDA to keep these critical reports afloat during subsequent furloughs.

NPPC President and Johnstown, Ohio, farmer Jim Heimerl said the 2013 shutdown disrupted producers’ ability to get paid. “There was no system to price hogs off of,” he explained.

During that shutdown, meatpackers continued to report LMR data to the USDA but the resulting reports were not being published. In addition to the loss of price data for farmers, it affected the futures market for live hog and cattle contracts, so livestock stakeholders pushed for provisions in 2015 to prevent it from happening again.

While this served hog producers during the recent shutdown, it didn’t cover USDA reports on cold storage meat and exports that didn’t come out during that time as scheduled. Heimerl also noted USDA support staff who work in trade were out of their offices, which meant some deals were pushed off or just didn’t happen.

“We need to keep those trade lines open,” he said, explaining if staff are prohibited for a month or more from answering calls and letters, some trading partners in other countries won’t wait on a contract. He pointed out staff is also needed to continue working on eliminating the 20 percent tariff on pork to Mexico, leveled in exchange for U.S. metal tariffs.

He noted some U.S. Trade Representative Office trips overseas were canceled by the shutdown. While there’s no guarantee of such a trip always resulting in contracts for U.S. farmers or ag retailers, “you always wonder if that deal was going to make it,” he mused.

“Very disappointing” is how Alan Kemper described the shutdown closing USDA offices like the Farm Service Agency (FSA). The closure delayed farmers’ ability to get loans – such as for land and grain storage – and some producers from getting Market Facilitation Program (MFP) payments authorized last summer to help offset export losses because of tariffs on ag goods including soybeans, pork and wheat.

 “For a lot of younger farmers, that means they may need that payment after the first of the year to pay vendors and meet obligations” and won’t get it in time, said Kemper, president of Kemper Farms near Lafayette, Ind., and a past president of the American Soybean Assoc.

He also said this is the time of year farmers sign up for some programs through their local FSA offices and update production records for crop insurance.

He criticized the shutdown especially on the heels of Trump’s 2018 trade disputes with China and other partners “that we can’t support,” and said the shutdown sends a bad signal to other countries that the United States government isn’t functional.

Kemper thinks the administration doesn’t understand that “fair trade isn’t necessarily free” and doesn’t appreciate how much work U.S. ag trade groups have put into years of trade relationships, only “to have it wiped out by a couple guys in the White House.”

Speaking the week before Trump signed an order ending the shutdown, he referred to the news that USDA had authorized the early reopening of some FSA offices, though without pay. “I’m very glad to see them opening so (the loss of services) will be alleviated.”

Another group of employees who worked during the shutdown without pay were federal meat inspectors. Heimerl said the packers he knew still saw them coming to the production lines as usual. “That’s very important to keep food safety going,” he said in crediting their work.

Dave Milligan, treasurer with the National Assoc. of Wheat Growers (NAWG) and a Cass City, Mich., farmer, worried one about the effect of the shutdown on overseas marketing promotion. He talked about the importance of keeping the USDA Market Access and Foreign Market Development programs funded.

Like Kemper, he mentioned the problems it could have created for beginning farmers. If the shutdown had happened a year ago, Milligan said it would have had a detrimental effect on his own son’s ability to buy land and secure an operating loan for his farm.

‘A lot of expense’

One impact he felt of the shutdown was on NAWG itself. There are 20 member states that pay dues to it on behalf of involved growers, and dues are calculated based on bushels produced over a five-year average. There was no USDA report in January for production, so NAWG had to extrapolate data from the most recent report in 2018 to calculate that.

“There’s a lot of expense” that resulted from the shutdown, Milligan said, including wages for employees who couldn’t work during it but are still guaranteed back pay. “It’s a bad deal all the way around. I’m not blaming either side; it’s just a bad way to do business.”

As for what led to the shutdown – Trump and the Democrats wrestling over funding a border wall with Mexico – he said “we need something” to keep out drugs and unchecked immigration. Milligan doesn’t know that a wall is the right kind of check (for example, he said, drug suppliers could fly them over with drones), but “there’s a right way to come into the country, and there’s a wrong way.”

He does not favor the most recent or another possible shutdown this Friday as a tactic for negotiation. He viewed the most recent shutdown as Trump making offers to Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer and them rebuffing those offers to make Trump look bad, even though they had once supported former President Obama’s ideas to stem illegal immigration.

Heimerl, whose farm handles about 500,000 pigs a year and also houses cattle and row crops on about 3,000 acres, sees no positive from a shutdown. “I think we can work it out democratically,” he said of the border security dispute, and not “like in a sandbox.”

Kemper worries more farmers may decide to exit the industry than is typical in any given year, after this past year’s difficulties – trade disputes, the shutdown, continued low commodity prices and higher interest rates causing them stress. His advice as a longtime farmer, to others, is to network with other farmers and find support there, as well as in their churches and neighbors.

“I think that’s the value of community in agriculture,” he said.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown resulted in a loss to the economy of approximately $11 billion, $3 billion of which it pegged as unrecoverable. Hornback could not as readily quantify a month’s lost federal ag lab research for farmers.

“You won’t see (the effects) today,” she explained, saying it could be months or years before those are apparent.

While she “can’t believe” federal government facilities would shut down again Friday, she said, “All we can do is try to move forward and deal with it, if it happens.”

2/13/2019