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Legal action possible against USDA over final county yield totals for ARC program

[/title][fusion_text]Tuesday, February 9th 2016

Law firms and grain marketers are pushing for possible legal action against the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the way USDA came up with the final county yield totals for the Agriculture Risk Coverage program. Complaints have festered since last fall when the Farm Service Agency released the final 2014 payment rates. Payments weren’t as high as projected in some counties around the country, especially in areas with high yields for particular crops. A caveat to the 2014 farm bill is that it requires the Farm Service Agency to calculate yearly county yields for ARC-County payments. Therein lies the problem. At least a couple of law firms and others are holding meetings with farmers in parts of the Plains and Midwest to argue that FSA did not accurately calculate county yields. USDA has paid out roughly $4.4 billion for ARC-County, of which $3.7 billion went to corn farmers. PLC has paid out about $756 million, mainly to long-grain rice and peanut farmers. Farmers in just three states — Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska — account for just under $2.19 billion of that $4.4 billion paid out for ARC-County, a full 49% of the payments. USDA officials have pointed out in the past that ARC-County has 21 covered commodities spread over more than 3,000 counties nationally. In order to do ARC-CO calculations, FSA needed five years of county benchmark yields, as well as the yield for the current year. That translates into six years of yields for each crop in each county, or roughly 100,000 separate crop-county combinations for yields. USDA officials have pointed out in the past that ARC-County has 21 covered commodities spread over more than 3,000 counties nationally. In order to do ARC-CO calculations, FSA needed five years of county benchmark yields, as well as the yield for the current year. That translates into six years of yields for each crop in each county, or roughly 100,000 separate crop-county combinations for yields.

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