ARC-CO and PLC Payments: Improving Farmers’ Decision Making

[Viable Food News Desk]

Publisher: farmdoc daily
Published: August 5, 2026
Source: Read at farmdoc daily
Category: Food Access

Crop farmers must choose a commodity program for the 2026 crop year. Farmers' choices for the 2021-2024 crop years produced $3.2 billion in ARC-CO and PLC payments, which was $1.6 billion, or 33%, below the potential maximum. A simple decision guide would have raised payments to $4.5 billion in the article's analysis. The guide correctly predicted the higher-paying program for 89% of 36 crop-year observations, and the analysis found it would have captured around 93% of potential payments compared with 67% actually paid.

This post summarizes and links to the original source. It does not reproduce the full article.