Brent Gloy and David Widmar write a blog called Agricultural Economic Insights and last week they did a post recapping the estimated value of ARC-CO versus PLC for 2014-2018 corn, soybeans and wheat.
In the post, they provided a map showing the values for each county in the US. As expected most corn counties saw ARC being much higher than PLC payments. About the only area in the US where PLC would pay more than ARC was Southern Iowa, Missouri and Eastern Kansas. Higher yields occurred during this time period which decreased any ARC payment.
There never was a PLC payment for soybeans, so ARC either paid more during this period or there was no payment made.
Wheat ended up tilting toward PLC for most of the country. In almost all cases, PLC paid more than ARC, however, in many parts of the country such as the Pacific Northwest, large ARC payments were made in the first two years and the overall advantage to PLC was fairly minor. However, in many counties, PLC ended up paying over $150 during 2014-2018.
We ran some wheat numbers for Walla Walla County and for 2019, PLC should make a $30-$80 payment per acre for PLC (depending on your payment yields), whereas, ARC-CO is underwater by close to $40. As we get better yield data from across the US for all of the crops, we can update our estimates, but certainly for wheat, we would be leaning toward PLC for 2019 and 2020.
