Farm Bill Programs Offer Limited Support for 2024 Production Year

Jul 09, 2025

By Jonathan LaPorte

New data has emerged from the USDA on payment rates for both Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC-CO) programs. Estimated payments for corn, soybeans and wheat for 2024 are available, although market-year-average (MYA) pricing for corn and soybeans won’t be finalized until September. For Michigan field crop growers, there is no support expected from PLC and limited aid provided by ARC-CO. Depending on the crop, levels of support will vary in the ARC-CO program.

The lack of substantial support highlights why a number of reforms were included in recent legislation for both programs. But in order to better understand program adjustments, it’s important to recognize what factors influence payment rates.

Price Loss Coverage (PLC)

PLC payments are based on a market year average price (MYA). The market year begins at harvest and continues until the next harvest. For 2024 corn and soybean production, those months include September 2024 through August 2025, while wheat runs from June 2024 through May 2025. To trigger a payment, the market year average price must fall below a statutory reference price. The difference becomes PLC’s payment rate.

Source : msu.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids