Make the Higher-Of Permanent

A CCGA advocacy position · October 9, 2026

For the 2025 crop year, producers receive the higher of their ARC-CO or PLC payment regardless of which one they elected. It is the single most sensible thing to happen to the commodity title in years, and it expires after one season. CCGA is working to make it permanent.

What the Provision Does

Under the reconciliation law, the 2025 payment is calculated both ways — ARC-County and Price Loss Coverage — and the producer receives whichever is larger, without having made a new election. No forms, no guessing, no penalty for having chosen the wrong tool.

It applies to 2025 and only to 2025. For the 2026 crop year, which is the election closing December 11, growers are back to choosing one or the other.

Why the Choice Is Unfair in the First Place

ARC and PLC protect against different things. PLC answers a price collapse. ARC-CO answers a revenue collapse in your county, which can come from price or from yield. They are not two flavours of the same product; they are two different insurance policies against two different bad years.

And the election is made before the year happens. Before planting, before the weather, before the market does whatever it is going to do. A producer picks the tool they think fits a season nobody has seen yet.

Guess right and you are covered. Guess wrong and you are not. That outcome has nothing to do with how well the farm was managed, how the crop was marketed, or anything else inside a producer’s control. It is a coin flip taken in February that pays out in October.

Why This Cuts Deeper in Colorado

The gap between the two programs is wider on our ground than it is in the Corn Belt, and the reason is dryland.

A Corn Belt operation with reliable rainfall sees yields that move within a fairly narrow band. For them, price is the dominant variable, and the ARC-versus-PLC question is closer to a toss-up with modest consequences either way.

Colorado dryland corn does not work like that. Our yields swing hard, and they swing on weather we do not control. That means we get years where the county revenue trigger fires and price alone never would, and other years where price craters while county yield holds up. The two programs diverge much further here — so the penalty for electing the wrong one is correspondingly larger.

The producers most exposed to the guess are the ones with the least predictable ground. That is backwards.

What We Are Asking For

The ask
Extend the higher-of provision through the life of the farm bill, so producers receive the better of ARC-CO or PLC every year rather than for one.
Why it is reasonable
It is not a new program and it does not raise a reference price. It removes a penalty for guessing about the weather. The programs, the formulas and the payment limits all stay exactly as Congress already wrote them.
Where it has to happen
In the farm bill. The House passed its version in April; the Senate Agriculture Committee reported the Agricultural Act of 2026 on September 16. The two have to be reconciled in conference, and that is the moment this language either goes in or does not.

Why Now

Conference is where a provision like this gets added or quietly dropped, and it is weeks away rather than months. Chairman Boozman has said publicly that the next several weeks decide whether there is a farm bill this year at all. Language that is not being asked for during that window does not appear in the bill that comes out of it.

CCGA is making this case through our SWCA affiliation, which is how a state with under two percent of the nation’s corn acres gets heard in a room sized by acres and votes. It is the same route that moved Colorado’s T-yields and won the excessive heat argument.

What You Can Do

Call your delegation and ask for one specific thing: make the higher-of ARC-CO or PLC provision permanent in the farm bill. Name it that way. Staff recognise a specific ask and can act on it; a general request to help farmers goes in a pile.

If it helps, say what it is worth on your own operation — the years you elected one and watched the other pay. That is the argument nobody in Washington can make for you.

Who has gone to bat for Colorado corn →
The December 11 election, and how the two programs differ →

This is issue advocacy on pending legislation. Program descriptions are USDA’s. CCGA administers no USDA program, and nothing here is a determination of your eligibility or your payment.