What About Rice

We provide the calculations for estimated ARC and PLC payments for a sample rice farmer

Photo by Tam Mai on Unsplash

In today’s post we will try to estimate the 2025 rice ARC or PLC for a farmer in Crittenden County, Arkansas.

For ARC, the current price is $15.07 per cwt and the county benchmark revenue based on county yield of 7,386.9 pounds per acre is $1,113.21. The ARC guarantee under current rules is 86% of this number or $957.36.

USDA currently estimates the price for this rice at $12.00 per cwt. Therefore, final harvested revenue assuming same yield would be about $886.43. This would result in an ARC payment of $70.93 and since this is less than 10% of benchmark revenue, that would be the allowed ARC payment.

For PLC, let’s assume the PLC yield is 7,000 pounds per acre. The effective reference price for rice under current rules is $14.00 per cwt. This results in a $2.00 per cwt payment multiplied by 7,000 results in a PLC payment of $140. Therefore, PLC would pay more.

Now, let’s update it for the House Ag proposals. This would raise the effective reference price to $16.90 per cwt, up from the current $14.00 per cwt. The ARC benchmark price would also rise to $17.00 per cwt from the current $15.07 per cwt.

Here are the new calculations: