Hello, my name is Aleks Shaefer. I am an assistant professor in Agriculture and Food Policy at Michigan State University. And today we're going to walk through a series of topics to help you make your decisions under the 2018 Farm Bill. And so, who is it that needs to be making these decisions? So, if you've got a specific farm number or group of farm numbers that are, have base acres, historical base acres in one of the commodities that you're seeing on the screen, you are entitled to some benefits under the 2018 Farm Bill. We will discuss today what those benefits are, how they work, and help you make the choices of which program to elect. Focusing specifically on these first three, corn, wheat, and soybeans. But the information that we talk through is equally applicable to all of these other covered commodities. And so, what are the decisions you've got to make? There are two. The first decision is, should I update my yields for the purposes of the Price Loss Coverage program? So, this is a one-time opportunity to update your yields for the purposes of your PLC payments. The second decision you've got to make is for the 2019-2020 crop season, which programs do I want to elect? So, you could choose the Price Loss Coverage decision, which is PLC. Alternatively, you could choose the ARC-County or the ARC-Individual programs. So, that choice will be made for the 2019-2020 years. After 2020, you will have the opportunity to change your election across all of your farms. And then for 2021, 2022, and 2023, you'll be able to change those elections on an annual basis. When do you have to make those elections by? So, the deadline to make that second decision, ARC vs PLC, is March 15th, 2020. This is an important deadline because if you miss the March 15th deadline, you will not be enrolled in any of the programs for 2019. And for 2020, you will automatically be enrolled in the program that you chose under the 2014 Farm Bill. We'll show just in a second that for several commodities, probably the program that you chose in the 2014 Farm Bill will be the wrong program for the updated market environment. So, MSU has prepared a tool to help you make this decision, relying on information for your specific farm and in your specific county. I think Florencia has prepared some slides to help you with that on the same website location, but you can also go to the link you'll see here on the screen, that will give you access to this calculator tool that Michigan State has created. So, you can run that information for your specific farm. Don't forget to make your elections by March 15th. What do I need to do to make my Elections? First, you need to get information on your historical yields for 2013 through 2017. You need to plug those into the calculator to determine whether it makes sense for you to do the PLC yield update, you need to talk to your buddies to figure out what the, what your best estimate is going to be for average yields on a commodity by commodity basis for 2019. That will help you know whether PLC vs ARC is the best program for the 2019-2020 election. After you've got your historical yield data and you have a pretty good idea of what you think the 2019 yields are going to be, you can run that MSU calculator, testing different variations of the county yields and what you think market year average prices are going to be. You can, based on that information, decide which payment program is right for you, the PLC program, ARC-County, or ARC-IC I guess the third here is sign up as fast as you can because if you don't get signed up by March 15th, you're in trouble. Okay, so as I said on a previous slide, it's important to do this information for your specific county and for your specific farm. The decisions are going to vary across counties, across farms, but there are some general tendencies we know just based on the market environment and the type of crop year we've had in 2019 which will help you decide kind of as a general rule of thumb. If you experience for a given farm number, 100% prevent plant or you had, you weren't 100% prevent plant, but you had catastrophically low yields. So, yields that were down 30 to 40%, but you are based in a county that had pretty good or, or generally average yields for a given commodity, you might want to consider the ARC-IC plan. If you are not in one of those two scenarios, 100% prevent planet, 100% prevent plants, or catastrophic yields, you, ARC-IC probably won't be the program for you. So, you'll be in the PLC vs ARC-County world. For wheat, the prices are so low right now that we can be pretty confident that PLC is the right program option for you. For soybeans, the prices are just not very near the statutory reference prices, which we'll talk about what that means in a later video. Which suggests that because we've had some, some pretty, a pretty rough year in terms of yields, Arc-County is probably going to be the right program for you. For corn, it's much less of a certain decision. It's really going to depend on your county, on your individual farm. So, in general, it looks like maybe PLC is going to be the right program, but for other counties, ARC-County might be the way to go. And so, Roger Betts, who's a well-known extension educator at Michigan State University, said, potentially you could do a split decision where, for your farm numbers that have a high PLC yield, you might want to consider PLC. For farm numbers that have a low PLC yield, you might want to go to ARC-County. So, in the next presentation, we will work through that first of the two choices you have to make is, which is, should I update my PLC yields?