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Farm Bureau seeks ‘tweaks’ to ARC

American Farm Bureau is asking for “tweaks” to the Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) program in the next farm bill.

Farm Bureau’s director of market intelligence, John Newton, says they want ARC to be fair and effective for all farmers.

“We’ve seen county-to-county disparities that have occurred and resulted in program payments in one county and no program payments in an adjacent county,” Newton says. “So we need to find a way to make ARC County more equitable across those political boundaries.

“Certainly the use of plug yields in the benchmark formula can really oversample some bad crop years—and then we also think that using RMA data in the yield cascade, over NASS data, provides additional confidence to the way the program is functioning.”

Newton says development of the 2018 farm bill seems to be on schedule and he thinks passage of the bill is possible by the end of the year.

Newton spoke with Brownfield at an Iowa Farm Bureau Economic Summit in Ames, Iowa.

AUDIO: John Newton