On February 2nd at 5pm, a free Farm Bill meeting will be held at the Guthrie County Iowa State University Extension and Outreach.

This meeting won’t be going over the Farm Bill currently making its way through the legislature, but the one that is already in effect. Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Farm Management Specialist Alexis Stevens tells Raccoon Valley Radio that the meeting will be used to help farmers decide which crop program they would like to use for this year.

“We’re going to talk about the decisions that we need to make, the elections we need to make with the FSA office, whether we want to choose ARC (Agricultural Risk Coverage) or PLC (Price Loss Coverage). And this is the same decision that we’ve been making since the 2018 Farm Bill. So it’s something that’s very familiar to our farmers. They’ve been doing this for a few years now. And so we may even decide that we’re going to stay with the same choice that we made last year. And that’s fine, but they still need to get into contact with the FSA office and make that election.”

Stevens states that the Agricultural Risk Coverage program provides revenue loss payments to eligible producers based on a combination of crop yield and price, while the Price Loss Coverage program provides price loss coverage when the effective price is lower than the effective reference price, and doesn’t cover revenue losses.