Dickey County Agriculture and Natural Resources 2014 Farm Bill Breana Kiser Dickey County Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension Agent

Farm Bill Decision Aid http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/farmmanagement/farm-bill

The 2014 Farm Bill Decision Aid is an educational tool that analyzes the Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and county Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC). It does not consider individual farm level ARC option of the possible benefits of the Supplemental Coverage Option crop insurance available with PLC enrollment.

Farm Bill Decision Aid Spreadsheet

Input Existing Base Acres and Planted and Prevented Planted Acres. 4 year average. Program will adjust numbers to proportionally to equal out to total base acres. Choice is the Existing Base or the Reallocation, once you go through all the steps will help decide which route you may want to go.

Next Decision (easy) FSA provides the existing CCP (Countercyclical Payment) Yield The ability to update the yields. Enter the actual yields provided and will show an updated yield to choose the higher of the two yields. This is only pertains to PLC, won’t effect you if you don’t choose this program. However, you should update these yields because it will go on the FSA records and can be utilized in future farm bills where they can be very beneficial. Update works: Say only grew crop for one year and it will be included in the 5 year average multiplied by 90% which would be the new payment yield.

Last two input screens are a little harder based from county yields. Last two are based on individual farm numbers history. County yields are used for the county ARC program. Need to establish the revenue benchmark and revenue yields. Difficult to project what the yields would be in the next five years. Way to enter it would be to look at what has happened in recent history and use a five year Olympic average or use a straight average to input for the next five years. The program will automatically highlight the crops due to base acres from the previous inputs.

The last input screen is looking at national year marketing prices. Prices will be used to look at the actual revenue for ARC and then also for PLC since it is based off of ARCing year average prices compared to the reference price. Input what projections up to the year of 2018. Numbers are based off of USDA’s most recent projections for 2014 marketing year and just left the flat. But can input slightly increasing or decreasing prices to look at the effect.

The analysis shows the answer based on the inputs. If out projections of county yields and county prices are correct which we know are not correct. So the best thing to do is look at a couple of scenarios that will help determine the best choices for you farm.

Questions?