"Times are not good. The USDA's net farm income projection is continuing to go down," reported Doug Yoder, crop agency manager for Country Financial, who spoke to farmers at a crop seminar held recently in Princeton. "My point is this is not the time to go without protection. The revenues are not going to be where you (farmers) are going to be able to break even," he added. "I agree that farmers are going to have to sharpen their pencils and cut costs. This is not the time to cut crop insurance in my opinion. This is your safety net. "We are in bad times. They (crop insurance payments) are designed to kick in during bad times," Yoder told farmers. "You are capped at 10 percent and get it on 85 percent of your base acres." No payments were made through this program during the good times with record markets, but payments kick in during bad times when the markets are down as they are now, stated Yoder. Payments go down when markets go up, and payments go up when markets go down as Congress designed this program in the 2014 Farm Bill. Price Loss Coverage (PLC) paid for the first time in 2015 due to the grain markets being too high in 2014 for farmers to get a payment through the Farm Bill. This year the markets dipped enough that corn was paid 9 cents a bushel on a farmer's established yield on 85 percent of their acreage, he reported. There were no payments for beans because the market was too high for this year's crop to get any payments from FSA. Only two of the 102 counties in Illinois didn't get a payment through Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC-Co.) with 98 percent of Illinois farmers taking ARC-Co., obviously the most popular choice, added Yoder. For beans, 79 counties got a payment from last year's crop,and 91 counties in the state got a payment for wheat. There was a net of $74 an acre in corn after all the cuts were computed, $43 in beans and $32 in wheat for Bureau County farmers. Yoder believes crop insurance has two deductibles for farmers besides the program's maximum coverage of 85 percent, a 15 percent deductible. "In my opinion, you also have a second deductible of APH (actual production history). There are 10 years of crop yields in your database, and that means the records could go back 20 years if you rotate corn and soybeans on a field," he said. "The yields you got 20 years ago aren't as good as you are getting now because of higher yields with better producing varieties. This means a farmer's APH will be impacted by the lower yields they got many years ago." Yield exclusion allows farmers to drop from their APH database when the county average yield for that crop year is at least 50 percent below the 10 previous consecutive crop years' rolling county average. Illinois had the highest number of producers utilize yield exclusion in 2015 in corn and soybeans, the first year this option was available under the current Farm Bill established in 2014 by Congress, he said. Farm level Chapter 11 bankruptcies are up 20 percent in the last two years, showing the hard times that farmers are facing in today's marketplace. Source - http://www.bcrnews.com