Part 510 - General Operating Procedures 



510.53(a) 



(accidently or unintentional) and acting in good faith to comply. 

 The graduated sanction provision provides that the penalty shall be a 

 reduction in program benefits of no less than $500 and no more tham 

 $5000, depending upon the severity of the violation. This provision 

 does not apply to sodbusted land. 



(b) SCS will help ASCS determine the severity of the violation. 

 ASCS and SCS have established a tcible of penalties based on the 

 seriousness of the violation and the size of the field in violation. 

 ASCS will determine the size of the field in violation. SCS will 

 determine whether the violation is in a low, medium, or high severity 

 category, based on the Erodibility Index (EI) of the field in 

 violation. 



(c) ASCS will determine whether the person made a good faith 

 effort. SCS will be asked to help the County ASC Committee determine 

 whether the failure of the person to actively apply the approved 

 conservation plan was inadvertent or accidental. Note that this does 

 not apply to situations where the person is required to be using an 

 approved conservation system. 



(d) ASCS will maintain records of persons given graduated 

 sanctions to ensure that the once-in-five years rule is followed. 



(e) SCS will determine the Erodibility Index (EI) of the field 

 in violation. This determination will be made only after SCS has 

 completed a Form ASCS-569 and transmitted it to ASCS with an "X" in 

 the block identifying that the person is NOT actively applying the 

 approved conservation plan, and after ASCS has notified SCS that ASCS 

 has determined that the graduated sanction applies to this case 

 because ASCS has determined that the person acted in good faith amd 

 that the person is eligible under the 5-year rule. The EI for a field 

 will be determined by identifying the EI for the predominant soil map 

 unit in the field. The predominant soil map unit in a field is the 

 soil map unit that has the greatest acreage within the field. If 

 there is no soil map unit that clearly has the largest acreage within 

 the field, a weighted average EI will be calculated for the two 

 largest soil map units within the field. The EI for the field will 

 not be a weighted average of all soils map units within the field, 

 because fields with many soil map units will require detailed 

 calculations that may be subject to error. 



r 



510-46 



(180-V-NFSAM, Second Ed., Amend. 6, May 1991) 



