FSA director retires
The following is reprinted with permission from the Pipestone County Star written by Debra Fitzgerald
Mark Zinnel, Pipestone County Farm Service Agency (FSA) Executive Director, retired effective Wednesday, Jan. 3.
The 58-year-old’s career with the USDA FSA spanned 35 years and 3 months. The Slayton-area native started that career in Murray County and went next to Mahnomen County. When the Pipestone County position opened in 1998, he decided it was time to return to home country.
“It was probably the best decision I ever made,” he said.
Having started as a program technician, Zinnel said he liked to get out into the country and get his hands dirty. But his primary role was to administer all USDA farm programs. There are about 1,500 owners and operators in Pipestone County, he said, and he works with about 500 of those, including a handful of certified organic farms.
For the last few years, there have not been a lot of subsidies paid to Pipestone County producers, he said –– $4,467,037 total, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. That amount represented only 0.5 percent of the total U.S. subsidies paid out in 2016 and gave Pipestone County a ranking of 58 among Minnesota counties receiving subsidies. Polk County received the most subsidies in 2016 ($43,259,271) followed by Marshall, Lac qui Parle, Swift and Renville counties.
Subsidy payments per county vary year-by-year, sometimes significantly. In 2015, for example, total subsidies paid to Pipestone County producers was $14,803,936. Subsidies are paid for corn, soybean, conservation reserve programs, wheat, disasters, livestock, sunflower, barley, oat, and canola, to name only some of the most common in Minnesota for any given year. In Pipestone County, the majority of the 2016 subsidies were for crop insurance payments ($3,423, 456).
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