Unpriced Corn Inventories Higher Than Other Commodities After 2019 Harvest, Study of Pandemic-Related Situation Shows

Among the disruptions from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020 were reduced demand for food because of lockdowns, interruptions in meat supply chains after plant closures, and breaks in normal shipping patterns. Those events led to sharp declines in agricultural commodity prices. To help U.S. farmers mitigate the effects of lower commodity prices, Congress created the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program. The program’s first round (CFAP 1) made direct payments to producers who held unpriced inventories of their commodities and faced price declines of 5 percent or more between the weeks of January 13 and April 6, 2020. The payments were based on a commodity-specific per-unit rate multiplied by 50 percent of the farm’s 2019 production or its unpriced inventory as of January 15, 2020 (whichever was lower). To understand how much unpriced inventory producers held during this period, researchers with USDA, Economic Research Service examined producer responses from the 2019 Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS).