By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER

Ohio Correspondent

DELAWARE, Ohio — The Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Assoc. (OCWGA) announced support for the efforts of Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to, as it said, improve the lives of American farmers.

“The proposal from Senators Thune and Brown are fixes to the Title 1 Safety Net Programs,” said John Torres, director of OCWGA Government & Industry Affairs.

”Most farmers are familiar with the two major programs – there being the Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC), which has two separate components, ARC county and ARC individual, and the Price Loss Coverage (PLC) program.”

ARC and PLC are both farm bill commodity crop safety net programs. The ARC Improvement and Innovation Act would improve the current program by modifying the payment calculation and other parts of it to improve its safety-net potential, Thune and Brown jointly stated.

Currently, they said no similar legislative proposals to improve ARC have been introduced during the 115th Congress. These changes to the ARC county and ARC individual programs would make the payment triggers more responsive to when farmers need those payments, Torres said.

The bill would change the coverage level from 86 to 90 percent. Under the current farm bill, a farmer has to incur a loss of 14 percent for a payment to trigger. Under the new proposal a loss of 10 percent would trigger a payment; a farmer would save 6 percent.

Also, if a farmer currently farms in two counties, they had to choose an administering county to determine the numbers, Torres said. If this proposal goes through, that will no longer be the case.

“The farmer can split the county,” he explained. “So if I have a field in one county, I can make sure that everything is assigned to the actual physical county that it is in and not have to put it in a different county where I had to register it, where there could have been variances in yields and also different data from one county to the next. So that is a plus.”

Another change is the average price for 10 preceding crop years would replace the reference price as a floor for benchmark prices, Torres said. That is similar to the PLC program. The goal is for the reference price to be more closely tied to market conditions.

“Ohio farmers need effective risk management tools, particularly when facing several years of low commodity prices. It’s time we update the ARC program so that it better protects against both price and yield disasters,” said Brown.

“The improvements in this bill will better protect Ohio soybean and corn growers from risks outside their control. This bipartisan bill builds on the reforms of the 2014 farm bill and is good for farmers and good for taxpayers.”

THE ARC IMPROVEMENT and Innovation Act would improve the current program by modifying the payment calculation and other parts of the program to improve its safety-net potential.