Ag Policy
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ARC-IC versus ARC-CO
The FSA issued some regulations on the calculations of PLC and ARC late last month. This notice provides a good overview of how the FSA will determine the payment calculations under PLC and ARC. ARC is broken down into ARC at the County Level (ARC-CO) and ARC at the farm level (ARC-IC). We had provided […]
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Dairy Margin Management Options
The new farm bill brought in an additional dairy margin management program that will be effective September 1, 2014 (perhaps later if FSA is not ready). Dairy farmers currently have Livestock Gross Margin (LGM) Insurance under the crop insurance program. It would be nice if dairy farmers could take advantage of both programs, however, the […]
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When to do Individual ARC May Be Tough to Decide
I originally thought that most farmers would want to pick county ARC since it makes a payment on 85% of base acres versus picking individual farm ARC since it only makes a payment based on 65% of base acres. However, in running some scenarios through the ARC analysis, it may be tougher to choose than […]
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PLC/ARC Updates
One of the questions we are getting is “When would individual ARC make more sense than county ARC?”. As most of our readers know, ARC and PLC makes payments based upon base acres. In the case of county ARC, the payment is based upon 85% of base acres. In the case of individual farm ARC, […]
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USDA to Award $6 Million for Farm Bill Help
The USDA announced yesterday that they will be awarding $ 6 million to help farmers analyze their farm bill options primarily related to ARC and PLC. There will also be tools to analyze the options for dairy producers under the new Dairy Margin Protection Program that should start September of this year and the Noninsured Crop Disaster […]
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Where are all the Chickens?
Following up on a few of our previous posts on cattle and hog numbers from the 2012 AG census, we now will review chickens. As you might guess, we count cattle and hogs in the millions, but we count chickens in the billions. As of 2012, there were about 8.5 billion chickens marketed for the […]
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Does Warren Buffett Practice What He Preaches?
President Obama sometimes refers to the Buffett Surtax when promoting a new budget or tax law changes. This surtax refers to the famous Omaha investor (Warren Buffet) who talks about volunteering his willingness to pay a higher income tax rate than the current law provides for. However, much of Warren’s wealth is not current income […]
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The Long-Term Trend in Hog Numbers
We recently reviewed the trend in cattle numbers based on the 2012 census. Those numbers show a decrease in cattle numbers and we had assumed that hog numbers would actually show a small increase in numbers due to the recent profitability numbers for hogs. However, since the last census was in 2007 which was before […]
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What if USDA Average Prices Occur?
The USDA has provided their long-term price outlook for the major crops over the next few years. Since ARC and PLC are both based upon what the average marketing price by crop year will be, I decided to run another analysis assuming that these prices occur. PLC has no yield variability, while ARC can be […]
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2012 Cattle Inventory
Most everyone knows that the cattle inventory numbers have been trending down for a few years now. The 2012 Ag Census confirms this. In 1997, there were 34.2 million cattle on hand. Over the next 15 years, this steadily dropped to a final 28.95 million cattle in 2012. As we can probably guess, the top state […]