With the new updates and acreage additions to the ARC and PLC programs, some livestock producers may wonder what this means for them. Southeast AgNet sat down with Undersecretary Richard Fordyce to hear more.
“There’s a lot actually going on with ARC and PLC right now. We’re going to actually be issuing payments for the 2025 crop. We’ll do that in October at some point, but we have some new sign-up date for ARC and PLC for the 2026 crop, which seems a little weird because we are harvesting the 2026 crop right now, and farmers are just now being asked to make their elections and enroll. Also, the sign-up for the 2027 crop, they’ll even run over one another, sign-ups for both 2026 and 2027,” said Fordyce.
“So, quite a bit going on with ARC and PLC. The timing, the cadence of sign-up is probably not traditional, at least for 2026, but we had to do that because of another reason, was the 30 million additional base acres that were added this summer, and we really needed to get those base acres allocated before we could do a 2026 sign-up. That way, farmers would know how many acres of which crop would be eligible for which program,” Fordyce added.
Fordyce also said, “ARC and PLC are the primary safety net programs for Title I crops, nothing directly related to livestock producers, but certainly the ability to have a safety net for Title I crop producers would be good news for livestock producers as well because we’re supporting that crop production. A lot of corn acres, a lot of soybean acres that ultimately end up in livestock rations, and certainly there’s other crops as well, but I think that a healthy safety net certainly not only supports that crop farmer that’s receiving the benefit but certainly supports other segments of agriculture as well.”
Audio Reporting by Elizabeth Sanders for Southeast AgNet.