Prevented Planting Buy-Up Elimination and What the Evidence Indicates about Adoption, Actuarial Performance, and Pre-Planting Risk Management Options for Farmers

This white paper synthesizes a series of Agricultural Risk Policy Center (ARPC) analyses on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Risk Management Agency’s Expanding Access to Risk Protection (EARP) rule, finalized in November 2025, which eliminates the remaining 5% prevented planting (PP) buy-up option beginning with the 2027 crop year. Using policy and claim-level evidence from 2011–2024 for major commodities, the results show no indication that PP buy-up coverage compromised actuarial performance: loss ratios for the buy-up component and base-only coverage are similar and below unity, implying premiums were broadly sufficient to cover indemnities. The analysis also documents that buy-up-related indemnities are geographically concentrated, with the largest at-risk amounts in corn and soybeans in the Upper Midwest and rice in Arkansas and California. Eliminating the buy-up generates meaningful uncompensated losses for indemnified producers, approximately $18–26 per corn acre and $14–21 per soybean acre absent ad-hoc relief, with recent disaster programs providing only partial and uncertain offsets. Finally, we show that replacing lost PP protection through higher overall coverage is costly and often infeasible near the 85% coverage ceiling, reducing producer flexibility and increasing exposure to planting-season risk. The structure and wording closely follow the logic and framing of the original ARPC analyses; to improve readability, underlying analyses are not cited repeatedly, and the paper should be interpreted as a synthesis of existing ARPC research rather than a standalone original empirical study.