Now You Can Run Your Own Farm’s 2025 Corn ARC-CO vs. PLC Numbers
Now You Can Input Your PLC Yields for up to 25 Fields (Farms)
Note: We provided the original spreadsheets for all readers of the blog. These updated spreadsheets are for subscribers only.
Over the past few days, I’ve posted county-by-county ARC-CO versus PLC estimates for 2025 corn across a good chunk of the Corn Belt, and the same question kept landing in my inbox: “That’s fine for the county, but what does it mean for my farm?” So I rebuilt every state spreadsheet to answer exactly that.
Open any of the updated corn files and the first thing you’ll see is a new tab called Your Fields. It’s built for you to fill in, and it does the arithmetic for up to 25 fields at once. You only touch three columns:
Your county — pick it from the drop-down list. No typing, just click.
Base acres — your corn base on that field.
Your PLC yield — the actual PLC yield for that farm, which is sitting on your FSA-156EZ.
That’s it. The moment you pick a county, the sheet pulls that county’s benchmark yield, its 2025 yield, and its ARC-CO payment. It then takes your PLC yield, figures your PLC payment, compares the two, and flags which program pays more — green for ARC-CO, gold for PLC. Enter your base acres and it multiplies the winning per-acre figure by your acres to give you an estimated payment in dollars for that field. At the bottom, a total row adds up your acres and your total estimated payment across every field you entered.
Need to redo a field? Just select its blue cells, press Delete, and type the new numbers — the row clears and recalculates on the spot. You may get an error if you try to delete the county, just simply input the new county.
One point worth understanding as you read your results: ARC-CO is a county number. It’s the same for every producer in the county regardless of your own yield, so that column won’t change no matter what you type. PLC is the piece that moves with your farm, because it runs off your PLC yield. That’s why the only yield the sheet asks you for is your PLC yield — everything on the ARC-CO side is already locked in at the county level.
And remember the rule that makes all of this matter: for 2025, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, you don’t elect anything. You automatically receive the higher of ARC-CO or PLC, county by county. The spreadsheet simply shows you which one that’s going to be and roughly what it’s worth.
This is a living spreadsheet — keep it current with one number. Every figure in the file runs off the projected market-year average (MYA) price, and that price moves with every WASDE report. When it changes, go to the second tab, “ARC-CO vs. PLC by County,” and type the new price into the single blue MYA cell at the top. That’s the only thing you change. The PLC rate now calculates itself — it’s the effective reference price ($4.42 for corn, shown right beside it) minus your MYA — so the moment you update the MYA, the PLC rate, the whole county table, and your “Your Fields” tab all recalculate top to bottom. Don’t treat the payment figures as frozen in time; as the marketing year plays out and the MYA firms up, drop in the current number and your estimate stays honest.
A couple more housekeeping notes. The benchmark yields throughout are the official FSA figures, while the 2025 county yield is the real harvested RMA number — so treat the output as a solid estimate, knowing FSA’s final payment figures may come in a little different. For the states that split irrigated and non-irrigated — Nebraska and Kansas — there’s a separate file for each practice, so grab the one that matches your ground.
Behind the Your Fields tab, the full county detail is still there on the second sheet if you want to see the whole state, along with the methodology tab that walks through every calculation.
Pull up your state, drop in your fields, and you’ll have a per-farm read on your 2025 corn program payment in about two minutes. If your state isn’t posted yet, send me a note and I’ll add it. Soybeans are next in line.
