The ARC farm program failed as a widespread safety net for agriculture in 2017

A couple of weeks ago, a reader from Iowa wrote us, “I stopped into the Farm Service Agency office today…to see if there would be any farm subsidies this year, (as I hadn’t received any yet). They said there would be none for my county and most other counties [in Iowa].  “So, your predictions about ARC [Agricultural Risk Coverage] have come true, a bit more dramatically than I expected.”He then asked, “I wonder what it’s like in other states?”That piqued our interest, so we decided to look up the numbers and share with all of our readers what we found. First, let’s start with Iowa. Farmers in 12 of Iowa’s 99 counties (12 percent) received county ARC payments for corn. With soybeans, the picture is much the same, 11 out of the 99 counties (11 percent). As for wheat, no Iowa counties were listed for ARC payments.Our next step was to look at the other two I’s of the triple I corn belt states, Illinois and Indiana.In Illinois, the picture was not much brighter. For corn, 18 counties (18 percent) received ARC payments, while 19 (19 percent) received soybean payments. In addition, farmers in 37 (36 percent) of the state’s counties received ARC payments for wheat.Moving one state east, the picture for corn remained much the same; 17 Indiana counties (19 percent) received ARC payments. With soybeans, the picture is quite different. Farmers in 35 counties (38 percent of the state’s counties) received ARC payments and a whopping 72 counties (78 percent) qualified for wheat ARC payments.The state with the highest percentage of counties receiving ARC payments for corn was Maine (93.8) followed by South Dakota (67 percent), North Dakota (57 percent), and Kansas (52.4 percent). For soybeans the ranking begins with Ohio (65 percent) followed by South Dakota (59 percent), North Dakota (57 percent), and Michigan (52 percent). Turning to wheat, Idaho (86.4 percent) leads the list of states with the highest percentage of counties receiving ARC payments, with North Dakota (85 percent), South Dakota (80 percent) and South Carolina (80 percent) following close behind.