Sponsors (2)
The bill modernizes and simplifies how base acres are calculated—aligning subsidies with recent planting patterns and reducing program complexity—but does so mandatorily, creating payment losers among some farmers, removing prior choices, and imposing administrative costs.
Farmers nationwide: base acres will be recalculated to reflect 2020–2024 planting history for the 2025 crop year, aligning program payments with recent cropping patterns and making payments more current.
Owners of fields that switched between covered commodities: may elect which commodity counts for a given year to avoid double-counting and preserve expected payment shares when acreage moved between crops.
Farmers and administering agencies: removes voluntary-election complexity and special generic-base-acre rules, creating a uniform, simpler, and more administrable method for USDA to compute base acres.
Some farmers: the mandatory recalculation could reduce historic payment shares for operations that stopped planting certain crops during 2020–2024, lowering their subsidy payments.
Producers who relied on prior voluntary elections or generic-base-acre protections: lose choice and protections, creating winners and losers across producers.
Taxpayers and USDA: the department and taxpayers will incur administrative costs to perform the nationwide mandatory base-acre update and to revise program rules and references.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires a one-time mandatory update of farm base acres for 2025 using a 2020–2024 planting-plus-prevented-planting average and removes voluntary and "generic base acres" rules.
Introduced September 23, 2025 by Dustin Johnson · Last progress September 23, 2025
Makes the current voluntary system for assigning farm "base acres" mandatory by ordering a one-time update for the 2025 crop year and revises related statutory definitions and cross-references. The update requires the Secretary of Agriculture to calculate base acres using a five-year (2020–2024) planting-plus-prevented-planting average (counting years with zero planted acreage) and replaces prior voluntary election and "generic base acres" rules with a mandatory reallocation process and updated attribution rules where acreage was planted to more than one covered commodity.