Oats Estimators Are Up — Same Story as Barley: No PLC
We provide spreadsheets for all states and counties in the RMA database
Note: These spreadsheets will be for paid subscriptions only.
Right on the heels of the barley files, I’ve posted 2025 oats ARC-CO versus PLC spreadsheets, now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, North Dakota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Texas. If you ran the barley numbers, oats will feel identical — because it plays out the same way.
There is no PLC payment for oats in 2025. The final market-year average price came in at $3.23, which sits above the $3.05 effective reference price. When the MYA is at or above the effective reference, PLC pays zero, and that’s exactly where oats landed. So just like barley, the PLC column is on the sheet only to match the other crops. Ignore it — it shows $0, and nothing you enter will change that.
That leaves ARC-CO as your whole oats story. On the Your Fields tab you only need two inputs: pick your county and enter your base acres. The sheet pulls that county’s ARC-CO figure and multiplies by your acres for an estimated payment. There’s a PLC yield column for consistency with the other files, but it’s optional and does nothing for oats — leave it blank.
Because ARC-CO is a revenue program, it pays where 2025 county yields came in below the benchmark, and that varies county by county, so pull up your own. The prices are already loaded — a $3.84 benchmark price and the final $3.23 MYA — and the benchmark yields are the official FSA figures, paired with the real harvested RMA yields for 2025.
Two reminders that carry across every one of these crop files. First, for 2025 you don’t elect — you automatically receive the higher of ARC-CO or PLC, and with PLC at zero, that’s simply ARC-CO. Second, when you budget the check, don’t forget the back-end reductions: these figures already reflect the 85% payment factor, but your actual payment still gets trimmed about 5.7% for sequestration, all subject to the payment limit.
Pull up your state, drop in your counties and acres, and you’ll have your 2025 oats read in a minute.
Here are the spreadsheets:
