Updates on the status of integration of external data for the 2025 crop year will be announced in this section as these integrations occur.
Update 1/8/20242024 Benchmark prices, yields, and revenue as well as effective reference prices have been released by the USDA. This information has now been imported into IFBT. Roughly half of the expected university budgets have been published. All of these have been processed and integrated into the application.
To produce accurate estimates for 33 U.S. states, the Integrated Farm Budget Tool relies on several outside data sources
Before we can compute estimates of crop insurance premiums and indemnities for 2025 crop year spring-planted crops, we need the actuarial data from the USDA Risk Management Agency, released in late November, 2024. With this, we can compute premium and indemnity estimates using price volatility factors from 2024 and an estimate of the final projected price as placeholders for the price volatility factors and projected price values which are released by the RMA at the end of each price discovery period. There are different price discovery periods for different states and counties, with the earliest period beginning December 15, 2024 and ending January 15, 2025.
During the projected price discovery period, the projected price is estimated as a simple average of the relevant future prices for that period. Before the projected price discovery period, the projected price is estimated simply by the current futures price.
To compute ARC-CO and PLC Title estimates for 2025, we need the 2025 Effective Reference Price, National Loan Rate, and the table of Benchmark Revenue Values, released by the USDA in early January, 2025. We will use 2024 values as placeholders for these for the period from January 1, 2025 to the date of the USDA release. The only other external data set required to compute title is the MYA price for each crop. Our application generates estimates of this price using a combination of futures prices and WASDE Projected Average Farm Prices. The WASDE reports for the 2025 crop year will be released monthly beginning around May 10, 2025.
We begin to collect future prices corresponding to 2025 crops around December 1, 2024. This makes it possible to compute RMA projected price estimates for spring-planted crops in counties where the discovery period begins in mid December.
We gather budget cost and yield information from various respected public sources and process them into a consistent format. 2025 University budget data releases began in November, 2024, with more releases occurring at various times through March, 2025. As budgets are collected and processed, they will be imported into the application to be available for users.
In order to provide users with a 'complete' set of budgets on January 1, 2025, we are releasing some 2025 budgets obtained by applying formulaic adjustments to the corresponding 2024 budgets. We recommend selecting budgets for your crops right away so you can generate a Detailed budget and Sensitivity tables, then switching them out later as University-published budgets become available. Users who have budgets for which a new version has become available will be notified by email.
In general, it's not a bad idea to create your farm year as early as January 1, even if the discovery period for your county's spring-planted crops doesn't begin until mid-February. This way, you'll be able to get practice working with the tool before the stressfull decision period begins. As the various 2025 data sources are integrated, your budget and sensitivity analyses for 2025 will become more accurate.