For the first time since the 2005 crop year, the farm bill’s commodity programs could make significant payments due to low prices and revenue for corn, soybeans and wheat, according to a farm policy expert with Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.
While these payments are not a given, if they materialize they could help farmers transition through this period of low crop prices and revenues by the standards of the past eight years, said Carl Zulauf, an agricultural economics professor and farm policy expert at the college.
“The potential for payments underscores the importance of the 2014 farm bill crop-program decisions,” Zulauf said.
Zulauf recently launched a website to help farmers make decisions about the farm bill’s crop program options. The website offers a number of tools - including policy briefs, links to calculators and video presentations - covering all three crop-program options available through the bill.
The website focuses on the questions producers must consider when making their decisions and offers users a broad perspective based on Zulauf’s decades of farm policy research. The tools available on the website can be used in collaboration with existing resources, such as farm bill calculators, to help put the information into perspective, he said.
In his work at Ohio State, Zulauf specializes in commercial agricultural policy as well as commodity futures and options markets research. He spent most of 1985 on assignment with U.S. Sen. John Glenn’s staff during the writing of the 1985 farm bill.
Zulauf has also testified before Congress on farm policy and wrote a paper that laid out many of the principles that helped guide the development of the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) farm program enacted in the 2008 farm bill and the Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) program that is part of the 2014 farm bill.
Enrollment deadlines for the new farm bill are:
* Program-yield update - Feb. 27, 2015.
* Base-acre allocation - Feb. 27, 2015.
* Program choice - Mar. 31, 2015.
Zulauf recently filmed three presentations for the website outlining the yield update, base-acre allocation and program choice options.
The Crop Program Decisions website can be accessed at go.osu.edu/crop_decisions.
During December 2014 and January 2015, Zulauf will conduct presentations on the farm bill's crop program options during Ohio State’s Agricultural Policy and Outlook Conference Series, which will be held in more than a dozen locations across the state. For more information on these in-person briefings, visit go.osu.edu/ag_outlook.
Source:purdue.edu