Terry Hickenbotham, Ph.D., (left) and John Jinkins, Ph.D., were awarded the awarded the John E. Lee Award for Sustained Excellence in Group Economic Analysis.
Terry Hickenbotham, Ph.D., and John Jinkins, Ph.D., agricultural economists with the Economic and Policy Analysis Staff of USDA’s Farm Service Agency, were awarded the John E. Lee Award for Sustained Excellence in Group Economic Analysis for their excellent work in analyzing farm program payment distributions and the impacts of payment limitation proposals put forth by Congress and several administrations.
Ten years ago, Hickenbotham and Jinkins began estimating the potential impacts of lowering the payment limit for direct and counter-cyclical programs for the 2002 Farm Bill. Little did they know that their work would play a key role in shaping the 2002 and 2008 Farm Bills, and potentially the 2012 Farm Bill, thus winning them the John Lee Award.
There has been long-term interest in minority participation in farm programs and questions have been raised as to whether there is evidence of discrimination in the delivery of farm program benefits. Their analysis has been used by the Department of Justice and USDA in numerous cases of discrimination filed against the Department to examine the equity of farm program delivery.
“We were very gratified to receive this recognition for our analysis and believe that beyond us, commendation is due to the many folks at USDA that have made tremendous efforts to effectively implement payment limits,” said Jinkins. “We hope our analysis of pending payment limit legislation has informed policy makers about the effects changes in our complex payment limit statues can have on different types of farms and different areas of the Nation.”
After recognizing changes needed to take place with the existing payment limitation regulation, they worked in collaboration with the Kansas City accounting and database staff to develop a payments database that reflected the attribution of all program payments to individuals (actual “warm bodies”) as opposed to business entities. Prior to this, USDA was sometimes only able to identify payment to a corporation or other type of entity that received a payment but not the actual people who may have owned the corporation and benefited from the payment.
The analysis of farm program payment limitations by Hickenbotham and Jinkins spans from the development of statute into contributing insights for farm program implementation. Their research will be used in future policy decisions on farm program payment limitations.
