Bruce Babcock, Director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, and his colleagues at Iowa State University have developed a calculator to determine ACRE payments. This calculator will allow corn, soybean, and wheat farmers for all states to try to find a combination of 2008 and 2009 season average prices whereby the traditional farm programs generate more payments than ACRE. According to Babcock: “The only scenario we could find is when 2008 prices are high and then 2009 prices are equal to or greater than the average price over 2007 and 2008. Otherwise ACRE dominates. In addition, a farmer should find that ACRE dominates even in this situation because the value of the 2010 ACRE put option is much greater than 20% of direct payments.”
The calculators are offered as spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel. You must have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer to open and use these calculators. In addition, if you are using a dial-up connection to the Internet, you may find the downloading process a bit slow because of the size of the files.
The calculators are available at: http://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_risk_tools/acre/
Carl Zulauf notes that the above calculator makes the calculation only for 2009, but that anyone who signs up for ACRE in 2009 is making a commitment for all eligible crop through the 2012 crop years. There will be other calculators for producers to use that will be available in the near future, and they will be posted on Ohio Ag Manager.