I’ve really enjoyed working with producers and landlords on looking at farm bill decisions for individual operations.  A quick caution again regarding supplemental coverage option (SCO), you can only take price loss coverage (PLC) into account not PLC+SCO if you haven’t plugged the information into the Texas A&M farm bill tool correctly (meaning 10 years of yield data and all production information broken into crop insurance units for each FSA farm number).  You can always discuss SCO with your crop insurance agent but the tool itself won’t provide correct output without inputting numbers correctly.  You can simply remove SCO from the tool information by not selecting a crop insurance option on the first home screen of each farm unit you input into the Texas A&M tool.  I have screen shots with additional information in this blog post.

I’m willing to work individually with those interested in looking at the Texas A&M tool for your decisions.  Please call (402) 762-3644 to set up an appointment.  You will need to bring the following with you:

1. Your CC yields from FSA (the ones sent in July/August tend to have all your CC yields for all your current base acres). You could also request your FSA 156-EZ form for this information.  Or better yet, ask for FSA’s eraser sheet for each of your farms.
2. Your base acres and potential base reallocation information FSA sent you.
3. Yield production history from 2008-2012 by crop.  If you were in the ACRE program during the last farm bill, please also ask them for the screenshot of all your yield production history.  Since you had to prove yields with that program, your production information is already in their system.  If you weren’t in ACRE, you will need to fill out the price loss coverage form FSA sent you.  You can obtain this information from your crop insurance records or from scale tickets by farm if you don’t have crop insurance information.  You will not have to prove yields at the time of signing up, but please keep your records as you will need to prove how you obtained this information in the event you are spot-checked.  Here’s more information regarding yields.

When determining your yield history from 2008-2012, for combined counties, FSA is looking for a total combined production (not a weighted production based on irrigated vs. dryland acres).  If you have crop insurance information, add up the total production in bushels for irrigated and dryland by crop (ex. Corn) for each FSA farm number and total the acres of each production entry.  Then divide production by total acres to determine your yield.  It’s important you use RMA production data, not APH yield as the APH yield may incorporate other modifications to actual production.

For split counties, I’ve been recommending to keep dryland and irrigated production split on the top part of the FSA PLC form and then the combined yields at the bottom part of the form.  This allows you to have the split yield information for the Farm Bill Decision Tool and also the combined yield data that FSA needs.  Add up dryland production by FSA farm number and irrigated production by that farm number.  When inputting data from a split county into the Texas A&M decision aid, you will need to allocate base acres on a percentage of the irrigated vs. dryland acres.  For example, if 50% of the land in one FSA farm number is irrigated and you have 200 acres, then 100 acres would be used for the base acres in the decision tool for irrigated yields and 100 acres would be used in the tool for dryland yields.  Your CC yield will remain the same for both irrigated and dryland by crop.