(Milford)– Dickinson county corn farmers say they were severely underpaid through the Agricultural Risk Coverage, or ARC program for the 2024 crop year, and want something done to make it right. KUOO news visited with Scott Titterington who farms near Milford…
“When we got our payments for the farm program, the ARC county payments specifically, we noticed that the payments weren’t quite what they were projected earlier in the summer, and it took a little digging, made more complicated by the government shutdown. So what it amounts to is we feel the calculations were computed wrongly using not correct information for our county and it results in the ARC county corn being $60 an acre less than what it should have been.”
Data shows a little more than 98,000 acres in Dickinson county were enrolled in the ARC program from 2024 with a reported Risk Management Agency average corn yield of 152.9 bushels per acre. Based on that, farmers say the maximum expected payment should be about $97 per acre, meaning Dickinson county should have received $9.5 million. Instead, Dickinson county farmers received only about $30 per acre, or roughly $2.9 million county-wide, creating a potential shortfall of more than $6 million. Titterington says it appears the error was made on the federal level of the Farm Service Agency…
“It seems like there’s a giant spreadsheet that has some issues and doesn’t have the correct data for Dickinson county and with the problems we had in ’24 with flooding and rain, followed by drought, we had incredibly poor yields in Dickinson county and it seems like they’re wanting to make the payment based on an average of a couple of surrounding counties which really doesn’t do justice to the yield that we had in Dickinson county.”
Titterington says they’ll be holding a meeting after the first of the year to increase awareness over the issue. He’s encouraging Dickinson County farmers, ag lenders and crop insurance agents to attend the session…
“The January 6th meeting is just really to help educate other farmers in the county because I think there are a lot of questions out there. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of answers but I think we need the help of the community to generate awareness to the people in Washington, D.C. to try to make a difference.”
The January 6th meeting will be held at 10:00 am at the Dickinson County Expo Building in Spirit Lake. In the event of inclement weather it will be held January 7th at the same time and place.
A notice of the meeting says they hope to have local, state and federal policymakers on hand for the session.
