ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Enhancing the current farm safety net with a new framework is the goal of the new “Agricultural Disaster Assistance Program,” or ADAP, which is being touted by the National Corn Growers Assoc. (NCGA) as a common-sense, budget-reducing alternative to the federal government’s counter-cyclical ACRE (Average Crop Revenue Election) program.

ADAP came to fruition as a result of a series of recent farm bill listening sessions and surveys gauging corn growers’ confidence and participation in federal crop insurance programs and other risk management tools, according to Anthony Bush, chair of the NCGA’s Public Policy Action Team.

“This is a program that would replace the current ACRE program and is designed to complement crop insurance, not to compete against it,” said Bush, adding one of ADAP’s best features is its simplicity, compared with ACRE.

“Overwhelmingly, in surveys of Illinois corn growers and those from other states, we heard from producers who didn’t enroll in the ACRE program because the formulas were too complicated. We set out to simplify the program, to make it something producers could (use) as a true safety net and that only triggers when a revenue loss is actually experienced on the farm.”

ADAP proponents hope to lobby Congress to include the program in the 2012 farm bill as another risk management tool for producers. As such, there would be no cost for farmers who elect to enroll in the program. ADAP would actually save taxpayers money, Bush indicated.

“Given the budget cuts we are quite certain are coming, we need something proactive (such as ADAP) in front of the Congressional Super Committee before they start slashing things. They need to know there is an alternative out there that is budget-responsible,” said Bush, referring to the 12 legislators charged with reducing the federal budget before the end of the year.

“If this program were to become law, there would not be any direct payments anymore, no ACRE program as we know it and no counter-cyclical program as we know it.”

Bush detailed several of the specifics of the ADAP proposal and described how the program differs from ACRE. According to Bush, the changes include, but are not limited to:

•ADAP uses harvest prices rather than season average prices. Payments would be made in the same year as the loss, as opposed to ACRE’s next-year payment cycle.

•Guarantees and payments would be made based on figures from individual crop reporting districts rather than using state triggers. “This gets us closer to farm-level,” he said, adding a program based on county reports, which was preferred by some farmers, is not feasible because of USDA statistical record-keeping practices.

•The guarantee will be an “Olympic” average of five years of on-farm and crop reporting districts’ farm revenue, rather ACRE’s current format of using five-year-average farm revenue multiplied by a rolling, two-year seasonal average price. “Too complicated,” Bush said of the ACRE formula.

•The guarantee would be 95 percent of the five-year Olympic revenue average. ACRE’s guarantee is currently 90 percent.

•Maximum payments will be capped at 10 percent of the guarantee rather than the 25 percent ACRE allows. “We’ve adjusted for the perceived overlap of crop insurance. ACRE’s 25 percent was perceived to be an overlap that resulted in (some) farmers getting paid twice for a percentage of their crop,” he explained.

•Under ADAP, there would be no “cup and cap” upward-downward limit of 10 percent per year, though Bush warned that Congress could reject this proposed change.

•Payments would be based on 100 percent of planted acres rather than 83 percent.

•Long-term contracts would be eliminated; ADAP would allow producers to elect to opt in or out on a yearly basis.

“I believe we’ve done a pretty good job of addressing what our members indicated they wanted us to do (regarding crop insurance programs),” Bush concluded.

Other states’ corn associations on board with ADAP include the Illinois Corn Growers Assoc. (ICGA), which represents approximately 3,500 producers.

“Illinois corn farmers said they need a simpler program that works with crop insurance instead of competing against it,” said ICGA President Jim Reed, who describes ADAP as a risk management tool for farmers to protect year-to-year variability and multiple-year declines, whereas ordinary crop insurance provides coverage within a single crop year only.

“ADAP is simpler to understand and implement,” offered Paul Taylor, a corn grower from Dekalb County, Ill., who led the ICGA’s Farm Bill Task Force and studied ADAP’s details.