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McLeod County, MN | Could you please tell me who I could speak with regarding APH yields for individual farms?? Who makes the rules??
I have been thinking about the way APH is calculated and I tend to think it is quite outdated. Instead of using 10 years of production history I have been thinking of a different way for yields to be calculated. It would be nice if we would do away with yield trending, and try to simplify this a little more, and also not crucify a producer for having ONE bad year.
I would venture to say that nearly 100% of producers expect to producer a better crop today than they could 7-10 year ago. Then why do we still use yield data from that far back to determine APH? Instead, we should be looking at APH through a much shorter time frame. A more accurate way to gauge a farms production would be to look at the last 5 years of yield history, throw out the highest and lowest yields, and use the average of the remaining 3 years for APH. If this strategy is good enough for the Farm Bill and calculating ARC and PLC why isnt it good enough for us??
Again, some of my fellow producers and I have years that we would just like to forget about. For some that was last year, for some it was 2012. We should not have to drag around those dismal yields for ten years when they are not a true measure of what a farm will do on an average year.
Please feel free to forward this to anyone that will listen. | |
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Letter to my crop ins agent
