USDA Program Enrollment Deadline Nears for Farmers

Mar 28, 2025
By Farms.com

Farmers must Sign Up for ARC or PLC by April 15 for 2025 Crops

Agricultural producers across the U.S. are reminded to enroll in USDA’s Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) or Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs by April 15, 2025, for the 2025 crop year. These programs provide financial protection for farmers facing significant drops in crop prices or farm income.

As of now, Oklahoma has enrolled 51.6% of expected contracts, with 24,443 completed out of 47,361. Participation is crucial for securing coverage. “Agriculture Risk Coverage or Price Loss Coverage programs provide excellent risk protection, for market declines, at no cost to the producer,” said Jaramie Karcher, Deputy State Director for FSA in Oklahoma.

Farmers can choose ARC-County or PLC for crop-specific protection or ARC-Individual for full-farm coverage. Although changing elections is optional for 2025, signing a contract is mandatory each year unless a multi-year contract is already active.

If elections are not updated, the 2024 election will carry over. However, failure to enroll and sign contracts by April 15 will mean no coverage or payment in 2025. Enrollment is open to base acre holders of crops like corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton, lentils, oats, and more.

Farmers should also consider crop insurance impacts. Those who elect PLC may opt for Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO), while ARC participants are ineligible for SCO. Enhanced Coverage Option (ECO) remains available for both.

While visiting FSA offices, farmers can apply for the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program (ECAP), which opened on March 19. ECAP offers up to $10 billion in relief for 2024 crops. The deadline for ECAP applications is August 15, 2025.

For more information, farmers can visit fsa.usda.gov or their local USDA service centre.

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