Some farmers in Dickinson County who were enrolled in one of the USDA’s largest commodity support programs for the 2024 crop year believe they were significantly underpaid. Scott Titterington, who farms near Milford, says they’re holding a meeting next week in Spirit Lake.
“Just a few of us farmers who have been digging into this situation decided the best way to try to present what was going on was to have a public meeting and invite all of our neighbors and farmers and ag lenders and people who had an interest in what was going on,” he says, “just to try to educate everybody about what we have learned so far.”
The Agricultural Risk Coverage program provides payments when a farmer’s revenue for a specific crop falls below the historical average. Titterington says it appears ARC payments to farmers in neighboring Emmet and Kossuth Counties were around $90 an acre. “We thought something similar to that was coming for Dickinson County and we wound up getting paid around $30 an acre based off of some calculation errors, we think, that come from the national office in Washington, D.C.,” he says.
Titterington says they’ve learned just over 98,000 acres of Dickinson County farmland was enrolled in the ARC program in 2024. Based on the estimates for Emmet and Kossuth Counties, the USDA would have paid all the Dickinson County farmers who got ARC payments for those 98,000 acres millions more. “We’re hoping it can be corrected, but I think that’s going to involved some work from everybody reaching out to congressmen and senators and people that work in Washington, D.C. to try to get the USDA to dig deeper into the situation and hopefully fix it,” Titterington says.
The meeting to plot strategy will be held Tuesday, January 6 at 10 am in the Dickinson County Expo Building in Spirit Lake. If the weather doesn’t cooperate on Tuesday, Titterington says they’ll meet Wednesday at the same time and in the same place in Spirit Lake.
(By Ed Funston, KILR, Estherville)