The 2018 Farm Bill in
available for sign up now until March 16, 2020. If a farmer fails to sign up by
this date, their farms will be enrolled the same way they were in the previous
2014 Farm Bill. They will not receive a payment if one is due in 2019, if they
do not sign up before the deadline. Farmers - be sure to sign up before the
deadline. At this time, farmers are
signing up for the first two years of the Farm Bill 2019 and 2020 and then they
will be permitted each year thereafter for the last three years.
Farmers can chose between
three choices:
ARC-CO: Agricultural Risk Coverage – County
Revenue coverage based on national price and county yield
PLC: Price Loss Coverage
Price
coverage based only on national reference price
ARC-IC: Agricultural Risk Coverage – Individual
Whole farm program, all crops
planted by each FSA farm number must be ARC-IC
and payment based on crops
planted
To help evaluate the three
choices, farmers should evaluate potential payment yields.
Over 50 Farm Bill meetings
have been held across the state. Farmers can find the information from these
meetings by going to farmbill.umn.edu and can view the workshop presentations,
workbook and comparison sheets for ARC-CO and PLC for every county in state.
A calculator is available
on several sites, and farmers are encouraged to compare payment amounts based
on their estimates for price and yield at: z.umn.edu/ARC_PLC.
ARC-CO
uses county yields and marketing year average prices to determine a
benchmark revenue guarantee. Yields will come from county crop insurance
reported yields. Yields varied widely across the state in 2019, but if you
think county yields will be well below average, you might want to choose ARC-CO
option.
PLC uses
reference price to determine payments and for 2019 and probably for 2020 the
reference prices are $3.70 for corn, $8.40 for soybeans and $5.50 for wheat.
If the marketing year average price is higher than these reference prices,
there will be no PLC payments.
ARC-IC
uses the farmer actual crops planted and compares those yields to previous
five year average yields and marketing year average price and determines if
actual income falls below the benchmark revenue.
If the farmer feels yields were poor in 2019, that might encourage
signing up for ARC-CO. If a farmer feels prices will be below
the reference prices in 2019 and 2020, that might encourage signing up for PLC. If the farmer had FSA farm numbers
with all acres prevented plant, that would max out the ARC-IC payments
in 2019. However, the scenario changes if a farmer was able to plant one acre
and their payment would be calculated on how that crop performed.
Farmers should get into the FSA office and sign up as soon as possible
after they have done their own investigating on which option they feel is best
for them.
Dave Bau, Extension Educator, Ag
Business Management, U of M Extension Regional Office,
Worthington, 507-372-3900 ext 3906, bauxx003@umn.edu
