7 U.S.C. § 7912 — Establishment of payment yield

(a) Establishment and purpose. The Secretary^* must set a payment yield^* for each farm, for each covered commodity^*, following the rules below. This yield is used to calculate direct payments and counter-cyclical payments.

(b) Use of farm program payment yield. Unless this section says otherwise, a farm's payment yield for its 2002 through 2007 crops is simply its 1995 program payment yield, adjusted by the Secretary for any extra yield payments that were made for that 1995 crop.

(c) Farms without farm program payment yield. If a farm has no such yield for a covered commodity (other than soybeans or other oilseeds), the Secretary must set an appropriate yield, looking at the yields of similar farms under (b) — but only as those yields stood before any update under (e).

(d) Payment yields for oilseeds. For soybeans and each other oilseed^*: first, the Secretary averages the farm's yield per planted acre across 1998 through 2001, skipping any year nothing was planted. If a year's yield came in under 75 percent of the county's yield, the Secretary uses 75 percent of the county yield for that year instead. Then the Secretary multiplies that average by a ratio: the national average yield for that oilseed in 1981–1985, divided by the national average yield for that oilseed in 1998–2001. The result is the farm's oilseed payment yield.

(e) Opportunity to partially update yields used to determine counter-cyclical payments. If a farm owner chose the acreage-average method (Method A) under section 7911(a)(1)(A), that owner also gets a one-time choice to partly update the yield used only for counter-cyclical payments — not direct payments. This election is made at the same time and in the same way as the section 7911 election. The owner picks one of two update methods, applied to every covered commodity on the farm (not a mix of both):

Method 1: Start with the farm's direct-payment yield. Add 70 percent of the difference between (i) the farm's 1998–2001 average yield per planted acre for that commodity (skipping any zero-planting year) and (ii) that same direct-payment yield. The sum is the updated counter-cyclical yield.

Method 2: Take 93.5 percent of the farm's 1998–2001 average yield per planted acre for that commodity (again skipping zero-planting years).

For either method, if a year's yield was under 75 percent of the county yield, the Secretary substitutes 75 percent of the county yield for that year before averaging.