Dr. Jim Mintert helped cut through the clutter of the new farm bill during the Wednesday Hoosier Ag Today seminar at the Indiana-Illinois Farm Equipment Show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. The director of Purdue’s Center for Commercial Agriculture has joined Farm Bureau, Indiana Corn and Soybean and others in recent weeks around the state helping producers understand the new options farm bill under the farm bill, and he told HAT he finds most farmers are appropriately learning the bill sequentially.
“We need to do base acre reallocation if we’re going to do base acres change, now. We need to do the yield updates now, and then the program election, we’ve got some time to study that a little bit, so most people that I’ve visited with are focused on base acreage reallocation potential and the yield update decision and just starting to think about which of these programs might be more advantageous.”
When updating options on base acres, Mintert said there is one option that stands out as most likely to be the best one.
“If you have an opportunity to reallocate base acreage towards corn and away from soybeans, we think that would be something you ought to look at very closely. In a lot of situations, probably most situations in the Corn Belt, we think that will be advantageous because we think the program payments under corn will be larger than under soybeans.”
Farmers can update yield history and/or reallocate base acres through Feb. 27, 2015.
The program election decision has to be made by the end of March. He said for most Indiana farmers it will be most advantageous to look closest at the Ag Risk Coverage County Program.
The real decision point and the reason the Agriculture Risk Coverage program at the individual farm level is not so attractive is the fact that payments on that program are only made on 65% of your base acres, whereas in the other two programs (ARC county level and Price Loss Coverage) payments are made on 85% of your base acres. So, that for many farms in the Corn Belt makes the Ag Risk Coverage at the individual farm level relatively unattractive.”
Farm Bill Workshops around the state of Indiana in January will be held in Wabash (Tuesday, 1/6), Batesville (Thursday, 1/8), West Lafayette (Friday, 1/9) and Ft. Wayne (Thursday, 1/15). Each workshop will run from 1 to 4 p.m. (EST). Prior to each workshop, Indiana Farm Bureau will host a state policy luncheon that will begin at 11:30 a.m. (EST). The workshops are jointly sponsored by the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture, Indiana Farm Service Agency, Indiana Farm Bureau, Indiana Soybean Alliance, Indiana Corn Marketing Council and Indiana State Department of Agriculture. The workshop and luncheon are both free, but you’re asked to register for them online. Click this link for a recorded Purdue farm bill webinar.