Agricultural News
Oklahoma State Offers Tools to Help With Decisions About ACRE and SURE
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:44:00 CDT
Oklahoma State University has a set of Decision Tools to help with considering the ACRE program by producers here in Oklahoma. Back in May at the El Reno Wheat Field Day, we talked with Jody Campiche of the OSU staff about the software they have developed and you can click on the Listen Bar below to hear some of our conversation with her. (pictured to the right is OSU's Jody Campiche)
Meanwhile, Oklahoma State University Ag Economics Professor Dr. Michael Dicks has written to us this week about the ACRE program as signup for this alternative farm program is now underway and will continue until mid August. Here are Dr. Dicks' comments:
"ACRE/SURE is the most complicated commodity program ever and one that is still not entirely understood. I have been analyzing the program on various farm situations for more than a year and continue to learn about the programs and their interactions with crop insurance. While each program is fairly simple for a specific crop in a specific field, the combination of fields, farms and programs quickly yields an extremely complicated decision matrix. There are many “helpful” tools on the internet from various agencies and universities but few can provide the detailed analysis of the interaction of ACRE, SURE and crop insurance across fields and farms over several years.
"Originally the ACRE program did not appear to provide any real net benefits to producers, but because of the sharp decline in price over the last year (and thus sharp decline in revenue) the program may be a best option for some producers. However, each producer will have to determine that as there is no general yardstick with which to guide all producers.
"We have been telling producers over the last six months to wait as long as they could to switch to ACRE so that they will have the best estimates of prices used in the calculation of benefits. In addition, most only begun to understand the program just shortly before they had to get into the field to harvest grain, cut hay and plant summer crops. We have expected that most sign-up will occur in the first two weeks of August as the deadline is August 14th. Thus, it is premature to evaluate the sign-up.
"The program is complicated and many will simply not sign-up this year because of the complexity. Unfortunately they may miss their best opportunity for switching into ACRE if they don’t make the switch this year. Because of the way yields and prices are calculated as moving averages, a drop in either or both in any given year (like this year) reduces the likelihood of receiving an ACRE payment in the following years.
"We have developed three Fact Sheets and the ACRE/SURE software to assist producers with the decisions. In addition, county educators have been trained to assist producers. We strongly encourage all producers to use the software to determine if ACRE is the best program for their operation.
"The software is available at the county extension office or on the OSU website. Click here to jump to the page where you can get more information on the Decision Tools OSU has developed.
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