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The Texas ASCS state office, when it assigned disaster yields for the specialty crops 

 several years ago, arbitrarily used "blended yields" that attempted to combine dryland and 

 irrigated yields. 



First of all, none of the vegetable or specialty crop production in the Texas High Plains 

 is dryland production-it is all irrigated. That right there means that all the producers in this 

 region of several thousand square miles are being deprived of a fair yield for their cultural 

 practices. 



Second, it makes little common sense, I believe, to lump together irrigated and dryland 

 yields and apply the resulting average to everyone. Clearly, such an "average" assigned yield 

 is unfairly high for dryland producers and unfairly low for irrigated producers. 



Perhaps the worst result of the way vegetable yields were established in Texas using 

 "blended yields" is that there is an unacceptable disparity between Texas assigned yields and 

 New Mexico assigned yields in the High Plains area. As I said earlier, the High Plains growing 

 area overlaps both Texas and New Mexico. The state line down the middle is just an arbitrary 

 line on a map. However, the two state ASCS offices clearly did not coordinate the setting of 

 vegetable disaster yields for the High Plains in recognition of this fact. No, the two states' 

 assigned yields are not even close to being similar. 



A good example here is pumpkins. I know of fields in my area used to produce 

 pumpkins that are just a couple of miles apart and essentially the same type of land— as to soil 

 type, climate, water, and so on. However, one field is in New Mexico and the other just down 

 the road in Texas. That New Mexico land last year had an assigned disaster yield of 40,000 

 pounds of pumpkins per acre, while the Texas "blended yield" was 20,000 pounds per acre. 

 As a result of this 1 00 percent disparity, those farmers with pumpkin fields in both states (and 

 I know of at least one) got disaster payments of a several hundred dollars per acre in New 

 Mexico, but were not even eligible for any payments at all in Texas, even though it is the same 

 disaster and essentially the same amount of loss in both! 



