Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced October 7 that the Farm Service Agency’s Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs will generate approximately $13.8 billion in gross payments to eligible agricultural producers for the 2025 crop year, the largest annual payout by far since the programs were established in the 2014 Farm Bill. No previous crop year since 2015 has generated payments approaching that level, USDA said.
The figure is gross: USDA notes it does not account for payment-limitation reductions or the 5.7 percent sequestration rate required by statute that applies to all ARC and PLC payments. The Working Families Tax Cuts Act, signed July 4, strengthens ARC and PLC beginning with the 2025 crop year, including higher statutory reference prices and improved effective-reference-price calculations; for the 2025 crop year only, producers automatically receive the higher payment rate of either ARC or PLC regardless of their program election.
The payout lands two days before the October WASDE and Crop Production reports, and it frames the farm-economy backdrop: the safety net triggered at record scale because 2025 crop revenue and prices fell well short of the reference levels. The support provides operating-cost liquidity heading into the next crop year, though it is a backward-looking transfer that does not change the supply-and-demand balances WASDE will report at noon today.