One of the provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is that farmers will automatically be paid the higher of ARC or PLC for the 2025 crop. It does not matter what program you elected at the local office; you will be paid the higher of the two.
Therefore, we decided to try to project the estimated ARC-CO on a national basis and then compare it to the projected national PLC payment and then take the higher of the two numbers.
USDA provides a spreadsheet that shows details for all of the counties that have ARC data; however, it is still based on the old 86% guarantees and 10% of benchmark maximum payment.
We updated the spreadsheet to show that the guarantee is now at the 90% level and allowed for a maximum payment of 12% of benchmark revenue. We also needed to update the spreadsheet to reflect the new updated benchmark price since that increased due to the changes in the effective reference prices calculations.
We then projected final ARC-CO payments for each county and then took the average of those payments to arrive at the estimated average ARC payment per acre. Now, this is just an average and if we applied it for every acre and added it up, we would have a more accurate number. However, the information available on acres for each county does not reflect all acres plus there is about 23,000 lines of data to review, so we just took the average and called it good.
We then assumed various yield projections on a national basis. The result assuming that national yields are at the 100% of Olympic average yields is as follows:
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