ARC vs. PLC Calculator: How to Estimate 2025 Program-Year Payments by County and MYA Price

If you're trying to compare ARC-CO versus PLC for the 2025 program year, you do not need a full farm-management integration stack just to get started. The core comparison is driven by public USDA/FSA program data plus a few farm-specific inputs.

That is why we built a free ARC-CO vs PLC calculator for FieldMCP. It is not a replacement for your advisor or local FSA office. It is a faster way to test scenarios using official county benchmark data and your own yield and price assumptions.

What the Calculator Actually Uses

For the MVP, the calculator focuses on the 2025 program year, which generally means payments issued after October 1, 2026.

The comparison uses:

• Official FSA ARC-CO county benchmark yields and revenues.
• Official FSA ARC-CO benchmark and actual price tables for the 2025 program year.
• Your own assumptions for:
  • county yield
  • market year average (MYA) price
  • PLC yield
  • base acres

Importantly, this workflow does not require John Deere data. ARC-CO and PLC estimates are driven mainly by public program rules and the assumptions you enter.

Inputs You Still Need From the Farm Side

Even though the public data gets you most of the way there, you still need a few farm-specific values:

• Base acres for the covered commodity.
• PLC yield for the farm.
• County yield assumption for the current scenario.
• MYA price assumption for the current scenario.

The county benchmark itself is public. The farm-specific yield and acreage inputs are not.

ARC-CO Versus PLC in Plain English

ARC-CO is a county-revenue comparison. It starts with a county benchmark revenue, then compares that benchmark against actual county revenue under your current assumptions.

PLC is a price-support comparison. It looks at the effective reference price for the crop, compares that against the effective price under your MYA scenario, and then applies your PLC yield and payment-acre factor.

That means the two programs react differently:

• ARC-CO is more sensitive to county yield outcomes and benchmark revenue.
• PLC is more sensitive to price downside and your farm's PLC yield.

This is why a simple side-by-side scenario tool can be useful even before you get into more customized planning.

Why We Focused the MVP on 2025

There are plenty of extension and university tools already online for ARC/PLC comparisons. The opportunity here is not pretending FieldMCP invented the category. The opportunity is building a clean, fast, public-data workflow that fits next to broader ag-data infrastructure.

We intentionally started with the current decision-relevant cycle instead of overreaching across too many years at once. The current calculator is anchored to the latest official 2025 program-year FSA workbooks available in April 2026.

That matters because the details can change. Some USDA/FSA source files are updated on different dates, and the safest implementation is the one that clearly states which official tables it uses.

Try the Calculator

If you want to run your own scenario, use the free ARC-CO vs PLC calculator.

The current MVP is designed to answer a practical question quickly:

Under this county benchmark, this yield assumption, this MYA price assumption, and this farm PLC yield, which program currently looks stronger?

That is a small but useful workflow, and it is a good example of the kind of product-adjacent agricultural data tooling FieldMCP can keep building.