Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Small Farms topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Panel refines small-diversified-farm definition to reduce reporting burdens
Summary
Panelists recommended clarifying the draft's 80-acre threshold and 'two crops per acre' language to mean crops grown simultaneously, not seasonal rotations, and proposed a tiered approach to reporting requirements for smaller diversified farms.
Panelists discussed concerns from public comment letters about how the draft defines "small diversified farms." The draft used an 80-acre maximum and a "two crops per acre" threshold; panel members said the phrasing was confusing and could create disproportionate reporting burdens for farms with many small, intermingled plantings.
Ruth Dulquist Willard and others recommended clarifying that the two-crops-per-acre test refers to crops grown simultaneously in the same area rather than crops rotated across seasons, and that some farms should be assessed on a whole-farm basis rather than a per-crop basis. The panel considered a tiered approach within the 80-acre maximum (for example, a 0'30/40-acre tier with fewer required practices and a 40'80-acre tier requiring more of a set of best-practice criteria), but did not adopt fixed cutoffs at this meeting. Members urged more specific regional criteria to distinguish truly diversified farms from larger farms with discrete blocks of individual crops.
Panelists also noted practical reporting burdens: highly diversified farms often sell produce by count or bunch and do not track weights in ways that make per-crop nutrient budgets straightforward. The panel agreed to continue refining the definition for the final report and to propose clearer guidance and potential regional flexibility to avoid imposing unworkable tracking requirements on small diversified growers.
