2025 Wheat ARC or PLC, Which is Better

We respond to a reader's question on which will pay more for 2025

Photo by Darla Hueske on Unsplash

In response to our blog post from yesterday, we had a reader ask us the following:

“The reference price for wheat, as you reported is likely increasing to $6.35/bu. for the 2025-26 crop year. Many growers in our area selected ARC-County earlier this year based on a reference price that was projected at $5.55/bu. PLC looks a lot more favorable at the higher reference price of $6.35/bu. than ARC-County especially since early projections are estimating the 2025-26 average wheat price around $5.30/bu. I’m hoping growers would get a chance to change their election from ARC-County to PLC since the reference price will be changing. Have you heard any discussion of this happening?”

This reader is located in Whitman County, Washington which has some of the highest yields in the country (easily topping 165 bushels per acre in a good year which 2025 may be).

To answer his first question, we ran calculations on estimated ARC and PLC payments for Whitman County assuming that final county yields are equal to the ARC benchmark yield. Remember that this throws out the high and low yields for the last five years and takes the average of the remaining three yields. Here is a table of these results: