Sponsors (2)
The bill updates base acres to match recent planting history and simplifies USDA administration—making payments more accurate for many—while creating losers among producers who changed crops earlier and imposing additional USDA/taxpayer administrative costs.
Farmers (all covered commodity producers): base acres will be updated to reflect 2020–2024 planting history for the 2025 crop year, aligning subsidy payments with recent cropping patterns and making payments more accurate for those who changed what they plant.
Farmers and state administrators: the bill removes voluntary-election complexity and special generic-base-acre rules, creating a uniform, easier-to-administer method for USDA to compute base acres.
Owners of fields that switched between covered commodities: they can choose which commodity counts for a given year, avoiding double-counting and preserving expected shares of program payments for those with rotating or switched crops.
Some farmers (those who stopped planting certain crops during 2020–2024): mandatory recalculation of base acres could reduce their historic payment shares and lower subsidy payments compared with prior rules.
Farmers who relied on prior voluntary elections or generic-base-acre protections: they lose choice and those protections, which can create winners and losers across producers and reduce producer flexibility.
Taxpayers and USDA: implementing a nationwide mandatory base-acre update and adjusting program rules will create additional administrative costs for USDA that are ultimately borne by taxpayers.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Makes a one-time mandatory update of base acres for 2025 using a 2020–2024 planting-plus-prevented-planting average and removes voluntary reallocation options.
Official title: To amend the Agricultural Act of 2014 to require a one-time update of base acres for covered commodities to ensure base acres reflect recent planting history, and for other purposes.
Introduced September 23, 2025 by Dustin Johnson · Last progress September 23, 2025
Requires a one-time mandatory update of "base acres" used in federal farm program calculations for the 2025 crop year. The update ties base acres to a five-year (2020–2024) planting-plus-prevented-planting average, removes prior voluntary election and reallocation options (including separate treatment of "generic" base acres), and adjusts related statutory cross-references.