No 2025 PLC Payment for Barley — but Don’t Stop There
We will calculate the estimated barley ARC-CO payments once we get RMA yield data downloaded
There’s no PLC payment for barley for the 2025 crop year. The final marketing-year average price came in at $5.46, just above the $5.45 effective reference price — so PLC has nothing to pay.
$5.45 effective reference − $5.46 final MYA = −$0.01, floored at $0
Barley cleared the reference price by a single penny, and that’s all it takes to zero out PLC. But a zero PLC is only half the picture, because for 2025 the program pays the higher of PLC or ARC-CO automatically — and on the ARC-CO side, barley looks very different.
The ARC-CO side starts with a higher price. ARC-CO uses the barley benchmark price of $6.10, not the $5.45 PLC reference. That $6.10 sets both the guarantee and the payment cap. Take a county with a 75-bushel benchmark yield:
