The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service will conduct a second round of seed cotton program sign-up workshops in the coming weeks to familiarize producers with the changes brought about through the recently reinstated government program, an agency economist said.

Bill Thompson of San Angelo said the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 brought cotton back into the U.S. Department of Agriculture farm program, so upland cotton producers can participate in either of two programs: Price Loss Coverage, or PLC, or Agricultural Risk Coverage, or ARC.

“The goal of these workshops is to educate producers on the three tasks needed to enroll each Farm Service Agency-registered farm into one of the programs,” Thompson said. “The three steps they’ll need to take are to update program yields, allocate generic base acres and select one of the two safety net programs, ARC or PLC, in which to participate.”

All the meetings are free and share the same agenda.

Meeting information, including AgriLife Extension agent contact information for the meetings currently scheduled, include:

“Cotton was intentionally excluded from most of the new provisions of the 2014 farm bill out of concerns brought on by a World Trade Organization lawsuit filed against the U.S. and its cotton policy,” Thompson said. “That’s all changed now, so AgriLife Extension has planned these and similar meetings across the state to inform producers of those changes and what they need to be doing right now to address them.”