Ag Policy
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Split ARC and PLC to Maximize Payments
Under the 2014 Farm Bill, a farm will need to decide between ARC and PLC on a covered crop-by-crop basis. However, many farmers have multiple farms registered with the FSA office(s). These farms may be composed of operations in multiple counties or states; multiple entity ownership; or for a number of other reasons. Since the election is by […]
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FSA Extends 2012/2013 Emergency Assistance to August 15, 2014
The FSA announced today that they are extending the deadline for Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program (ELAP) deadline for 2012 and 2013 losses from August 1, 2014 to August 15, 2014. This deadline applies to assistance for damages incurred between October 1, 2011 and September 30, 2013 (the governments fiscal years). […]
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FSA Issues Another Update on Base Acres Reallocation
The FSA issued a release Notice ARCPLC-7 (issued on Wednesday July 30, 2014) on additional information regarding reallocation of base acres. As previously discussed many times in this blog, each “farm” will have an option to update their base acres to reflect the average acres in production during the 2009 to 2012 crop years. This […]
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Base Acre Reallocation Options Under the 2014 Farm Bill
FarmdocDaily just released today an analysis of the base acre reallocation options under the new farm bill. The report gives a very good analysis of the base acres by the various major crops and the variances between base acres and planted acres for 2012. Here are charts of the major crops by base acres and […]
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USDA Offers Assistance to Farmers and Ranchers Affected by Fires
Just north of where I live is burning a very large forest and range fire. The latest numbers I saw showed close to 300,000 acres or about 400 square miles have been burnt and only about 20% of the fire is contained. The local USDA FSA office for Okanogan/Ferry Counties (which are two of the […]
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ACA Subsidies: One Court Strikes Down, Another Upholds
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Tuesday morning that the insurance subsidies granted through the federally run health exchange, which covered 36 states for the first open enrollment period, are not allowed by the law. Subsidies provided by state ran exchanges would still be allowed. The highly anticipated opinion in the […]
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Help on Updating Your Payment Yield
Farmdoc Daily released information on Friday on updating your farm payment yields. These payment yields will be used in calculating any PLC payments and will not affect ARC calculations. However, if the option to update yields will result in higher yields, it will usually pay to update the yield since future farm bills may refer […]
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ARC-IC Allows for Maximizing Flexibility (Perhaps)
Under the new farm bill, Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) has two elective components. You can either elect county coverage on a covered crop by crop basis (ARC-CO) or elect to have ARC apply to all crops grown on your farm (ARC-IC). If you elect county coverage, you will be paid on each covered crop’s base […]
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Trends in Irrigated Ground
I have seen numerous farmers with farm ground in normally non-irrigated areas of the corn belt put in irrigation over the last couple of years. Based on this, I thought I would recap the trends shown in irrigated ground from the 2012 AG census In 1997, there were 15 states that had more than a […]
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Transition Period for LGM-Dairy to DMM is Announced by FSA
The 2014 farm bill now provides for a new Dairy Margin Management (DMM) program. Dairy farmers have been able to take advantage of Livestock Gross Margin-Dairy (LGM-Dairy) under current crop insurance provisions. However, the 2014 bill provides that a dairy farmer cannot take advantage of both programs to prevent “double-dipping”. In addition, the LGM-Dairy insurance […]