MSU ARC/PLC Calculator: How to maximize your ARC-IC payment part 8

February 12, 2021

Florencia Colella

If you have several farms, some with bad yields or with prevented plant, and some with more average or even higher yields, you may be better off signing them all up for ARC-IC. This is because all the farms you sign up for ARC-IC are lumped together and therefore the ones with lower or zero yields offset the more average or higher yielding farms.

Watch this video to learn how you can calculate different combinations of the farm bill programs for your various farms, in order to maximize your payments.

Please note: You don’t need to copy base acres and PLC yields, and historical planted acres and yields, manually as shown in this video. There is a button called "Import data from multiple ARC-IC farms" that you will be able to push and get all the necessary information to flow into the first page.

See below how exactly to enter information in the "Multiple Farms 2019 Low Yields" tab:

If you got zero acres planted of any crop, independently from which crops you have base for (100% prevent plant), enter 0 in your yield, and the number of acres certified as prevented planting. In order to be able to do this you must not have planted any corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, barley, grain sorghum, rice, peanuts, sunflower, rapeseed, canola, safflower, flaxseed, mustard seed, crambe, sesame seed, lentils, dry peas, or small or large chickpeas. You may have planted other crops such as alfalfa or dry beans.
If you were able to get any amount of any of the above crops in, then:
1. For the crops that you planted, enter the number of acres actually planted and their corresponding yield for each crop, even if a part of your acres were reported as prevented plant for that crop.
2. For the crops that you could not plant at all, and you had certified as prevented plant, enter zero acres and zero yield.
3. If you did not report that you had planted that crop to begin with (and therefore you did not report as prevented plant either), then leave the space empty (do not enter zero.)

MSU Extension Farm Management