Should You Update Base Acres, Yields?

Online Spreadsheets Can Help Decide

Individual decisions for updating base acres and yields by FSA farm number could easily make a difference of $5 to $25 per acre in government price support on each tillable acre, each year for the next 6 years, points out Steven Johnson, Iowa State University field ag economist.

He says there are some general rules of thumb for updating base acre and yield decisions:

1. If you already have a high percentage of corn base acres (60% or greater of tillable), it probably pays to keep it.

2. If you don’t update corn acres, consider shifting oat base acres to soybeans, but keep your wheat base acres.

3. If new corn yields (average yields from ’98 though ’01) are significantly higher (28% or greater), then it may pay to update both corn acres and yields.

If you don’t update corn acres, then you must keep the old yield associated with those acres, Johnson says.  You’ll likely want to update your soybean base acres and yields, he says, since soybeans will now be a commodity crop and eligible for both direct payments and potentially the new counter-cyclical payment.

A number of sources on the Internet offer spreadsheets and online calculators to help producers decide whether to update their base acres and yields, including the ISU Extension web site www.extension. iastate.edu/feci/FSRIA/homepage.html. There, producers can plug in their base acres and yields for corn and soybean production from 1998 through 2001 into an Excel spreadsheet, then play “what-if” questions whether to keep or update base acres.

Other sources:

www.afpc.tamu.edu/models/bya -- Base and Yield Update Option Analyzer, developed by the Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University.

www.fapri.missouri.edu -- Base and Yield Update Tool, developed by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, University of Missouri.

http://farmbill.unl.edu -- Pencil worksheets and computer spreadsheets from the University of Nebraska.  Case studies are provided to illustrate how different situations may suggest different actions.

www.ncga.com -- Farm Bill Guide and Calculator, developed by the National Corn Growers Association in cooperation with the Center for Agriculture & Rural Development. Producers can input their county loan rates to get the big picture on their payments for a number of program crops.

www.extension.umn.edu/farmbill -- Spreadsheet to help make base acre and yield decisions, from the University of Minnesota.