By Amy Melissa Overstreet, NRCS Public Affairs Specialist and SC StrikeForce Coordinator
It was a collaborative effort to bring more than 100 producers and seven U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies together in one StrikeForce county in South Carolina to reach farmers and ranchers who may not know about the services each agency has to help producers.
“Assessing the needs of our clients is top priority,” said Ann English, South Carolina NRCS State Conservationist. “Our goal is to extend our outreach beyond our traditional client base and reach those potential customers that perhaps we have not made contact with before.”
More than 100 producers attended a StrikeForce meeting to learn about USDA programs available to help them.
More than 100 individuals attended, including farmers, landowners, county council representative, mayors, educators, and state and local officials from across the state. A panel made up of representatives from Natural Resources Conservation Service, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Farm Service Agency, Southeast Regional Office of the Food and Nutrition Service, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Rural Development, and Risk Management Agency were available to share information and answer questions.
“I’ve worked with farmers all over the country,” said Minority Landowner magazine publisher Victor Harris, who was in attendance. “You have South Carolina’s agricultural leaders all on one panel and I encourage you to take advantage of this unique opportunity to ask them questions.”
The day-long meeting included presentations from agency leaders, followed by a question and answer panel. Attendees then signed up for one-on-one consultations with agency representatives of their choice in the afternoon, depending on their needs.
“These people got a great overview of each agency, but the individual consultations enabled them to really focus on the particular program or service that could benefit them,” said English.
In March of 2012, Secretary Vilsack traveled to South Carolina to announce that 19 counties in the state would be included in the StrikeForce Initiative, because of their classification as persistent poverty counties. StrikeForce is a USDA effort to coordinate activities among all agencies and leverage the expertise of community-based organizations, land grant universities and extension services to better serve persistent poverty communities and socially disadvantaged farmers.
