Decision on CSP case expected this month

By BRUCE HOTCHKISS
Senior Editor

EASTON, Md. — A determination will be filed no later than Jan. 14 on whether three prominent Eastern Shore farmers, and the owners of land which they till, will be required to send back to the USDA an estimated $1 million.
They received the grants under contracts signed about five years ago from the now defunct Conservation Security Program and performed all the conservation projects for which the money was issued.
Last year, the Office of the Inspector General declared the contracts invalid on a technicality and ordered the USDA’s  Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Talbot County to get the money back.
The farmers — the Hutchison Brothers and Mike Elben in Cordova and Sonny Eaton in Queen Anne — contending that staffers at the NRCS office helped them to complete the complicated contracts, filed appeals.
Karen King, a hearing officer for USDA’s National Appeals Division, took three days of testimony in November. She said the record of the hearings was closed on Dec. 14 and that she has 30 days to file her determination.
It is reported that Robert Serio, a famed agricultural attorney from Arkansas, representing the three farmers and a total of 12 landowners — four each — whose land they crop, had submitted requests to subpoena for the hearing two NRCS staffers who were among those who assisted the farmers in the preparation of the contracts.
That request was denied. A request to obtain the precise wording of the reason for that denial had not yet been received at press time.
Both staffers, for whom those subpoenas would have been issued, have been transferred out of the Talbot NRSC office, one to Washington and the other to another Maryland county.
The CSP was designed, essentially, to reward proven stewards of their farmland with USDA money to carry their efforts to another level — to expand them, enlarge them, improve them.
The program, launched by USDA and NRCS in 2005-06 attracted farmers in Maryland and four other states in which it was offered. 
About 500 Maryland farmers signed CSP contracts. As it turned out, much later, 15 of the Maryland contracts were judged to be incorrectly drawn, all on the Eastern Shore and all emerging from the Talbot County NRCS office.
The Hutchisons, Elben and Eaton contracts were drawn in 2006. Audits by the Office of the U.S.  Inspector General (OIG) were conducted in Maryland in 2007 and the auditors returned in 2008
Interestingly, in that period, the then current Farm Bill expired, as did the Conservation Security Program, the Farm Bill of 2008 was enacted and a new CSP created, called the Conservation Stewardship Program.
Same acronym, all new program.
Nonetheless, although the former CSP no longer existed, and although the farmers and their landowners had accomplished all the work required by those contracts, and although in light of that, Jon Hall, Maryland state conservationist, said that repayment would be waived, the NRCS, under orders from the OIG, forged ahead and demanded full repayment.