The last couple of weeks have provided hay producers with the best harvest weather of the season.

After a disappointing summer hay season, hay producers are taking advantage of the exceptional weather to finish up the hay.

Harvest is also under way for corn silage and soybeans; while planting barley nears completion and wheat planting begins and will continue until early November.

Corn silage harvest, which is about three weeks later than normal, continues at a very fast pace where producers want to fill and seal the silo to preserve optimum feed quality.

Some producers hire custom harvesters which really cut, chop, haul and fill fast. Corn silage yields appear better than average this year, with the exception being wet fields.

This fall will be a busy time for most farmers hoping to complete the harvest safely and in a timely manner.

Farm Bill update

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack recently announced the following information. We will provide more as it becomes available.

“The 2014 Farm Bill represented some of the largest farm policy reforms in decades. One of the Farm Bill’s most significant reforms is finally taking effect,” said Vilsack.

“Farming is one of the riskiest businesses in the world. These new programs help ensure that risk can be effectively managed so that families don’t lose farms that have been passed down through generations because of events beyond their control. But unlike the old direct payment program, which paid farmers in good years and bad, these new initiatives are based on market forces and include county — and individual — coverage options. These reforms provide a much more rational approach to helping farmers manage risk,” Vilsack said.

The new programs, Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC), are cornerstones of the commodity farm safety net programs in the 2014 Farm Bill, legislation that ended direct payments.

Both programs offer farmers protection when market forces cause substantial drops in crop prices and/or revenues. Producers will have through early spring of 2015 to select which program works best for their businesses.

To help farmers choose between ARC and PLC, USDA helped create online tools that allow farmers to enter information about their operation and see projections about what each program will mean for them under possible future scenarios.

The new tools are now available at www.fsa.usda.gov/arc-plc. USDA provided $3 million to the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri and the Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M (co-leads for the National Association of Agricultural and Food Policy), along with the University of Illinois (lead for the National Coalition for Producer Education) to develop the new programs.

The next step in USDA’s safety net implementation is scheduled for this winter when all producers on a farm begin making their election, which will remain in effect for 2014-18 crop years between the options offered by ARC and PLC.

Luke Fritz is executive director of the Butler County Farm Service Agency.