The 2025 Soybean Estimator Is Ready Too
We update the soybean spreadsheets too
Note - The original soybean spreadsheets were for all subscribers, these spreadsheets are for paid subscribers only.
A few of you wrote in almost the minute the corn spreadsheets went up: “Where are the beans?” Here they are. I’ve posted the 2025 soybean ARC-CO versus PLC files for the same states, and they work exactly like the corn version — so if you’ve used one, you already know your way around this one.
Open the file and start on the Your Fields tab. Pick your county from the drop-down, type in your base acres and your FSA PLC yield, and the sheet does the rest: it pulls the county’s ARC-CO figure, runs your PLC off your yield, shows which program pays more, and multiplies the winner by your acres for an estimated dollar payment. Do up to 25 fields and it totals them at the bottom. To redo a field, select its blue cells, hit Delete, and type the new numbers.
One thing carries over from the corn write-up worth repeating: ARC-CO is a county number and won’t change no matter what you enter, while PLC moves with your own yield — which is why that’s the only yield the sheet asks for. And for 2025 you don’t elect; you automatically receive the higher of the two.
The soybean inputs are already loaded — a $12.17 benchmark price, a $10.40 projected MYA, and the $0.31 PLC rate that follows from it. As with corn, this stays a living file: when the MYA moves with a new WASDE, change the one blue MYA cell on the county tab and everything recalculates, PLC rate included.
Just keep the crop’s character in mind as you read your numbers. That $0.31 PLC rate is thin — only about $12 to $14 an acre on a typical bean yield — so where ARC-CO doesn’t trigger, the floor is low. And because 2025 was a strong bean year across much of the Midwest, ARC-CO stays quiet in a lot of counties and PLC quietly wins. Where yields did slip below benchmark, though, ARC-CO comes alive: your county will tell the story.
Pull up your state, drop in your fields, and you’ll have your soybean read in a couple of minutes. If your state isn’t up yet, send me a note.
