All About the "Base" HD

Since its inception, the 2014 Farm Bill has kept base acres on the lips of most FSA Service Centers. Glacier County, MT is no exception. Our time spent on the ARC/PLC programs revealed to us that it really is all about the base (acres). All About Base Acres: Base Acres are a farm’s crop-specific acreage of wheat, feed grains, rice, oilseeds, pulse crops, or peanuts eligible for use in FSA programs. Base Acres do not necessarily reflect current plantings or operations. They represent what was history planted on a farm. Example: Say Joe Farmer planted wheat in 1985 – he had wheat base acres. Today, let’s say Jane Rancher now owns the farm, she will still have those wheat base acres because that is what her payment under the previous and current Farm Bill programs have been based on – whether she plants wheat or not and even if she plants a totally different crop. During the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) sign-up, base acres and yields were able to be retained or reallocated/updated to reflect a farm’s operation in recent years. Those base acres were then elected into the ARC-County, ARC-Individual, and/or PLC programs by the producer. For more information visit: http://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/arcplc_program/index Music: Guts and Bourbon by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 Lyrics: Glacier County, MT FSA Staff