Management

In today’s farmdoc daily article, we continue our multi-part series presenting a view of the Farm Bill through perspectives of policy design. This article turns to the farm payment programs in Title I of the Farm Bill and explores the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) row crop programs. If the words of statutes determine the operation of policies and the distribution of benefits, then the PLC and ARC programs offer straight-forward examples.

The calendar continues to countdown towards the scheduled expiration of the 2018 Farm Bill, but there have been no public indications that either the House or Senate Agriculture Committees have…

In today’s farmdoc daily article, we look at the intersection of base acres and reference prices. A mandatory base acre update that better aligns program payments with planted acres will impact states and crops to different degrees depending on where Congress established reference prices relative to market prices. It is at this intersection that the political collisions within the farm coalition occur as farmers, commodity factions, and production regions are pitted against each other.

In today’s farmdoc daily article, we take a further look into a potential mandatory base acre update in the 2023 Farm Bill. There are three basic arguments for requiring a mandatory base acre update — improved equity or fairness in the programs, better aligning of payments with reality and producing CBO savings to use as an offset. However, there are at least an equal number of reasons Congress would decide not to do so, some of them justifiable and others simply political or factional matters.

One of the enduring puzzles of American farm policy involves the acres for which farmers receive farm program payments. Decoupled base acres — a substantial reform in the 1996 Farm Bill — attempts to address that puzzle. Up until the 1996 Farm Bill, federal support for program crops had been plagued by the problem that the federal assistance incentivized planting. Moreover, it provided the most incentive when prices were the lowest and crops oversupplied, which only contributed further to the supply and price problems. Base acres may present myriad problems of its own, but history teaches that the alternatives could be much worse or more problematic.

We provide background and county-level payments for Agricultural Risk Coverage at the county level (ARC-CO) for corn. Payments are shown after the 2018 Farm Bill was implemented in 2019 and…