The time is now.

Farmers are starting to think through their farm program decisions and one of those decisions will be the Yield Exclusion (YE) option which allows specific years to be dropped from the calculation of guarantee yields for crop insurance.

The Risk Management Agency produced a factsheet on YE released in December and available here.

You must choose the Actual Production History Yield Exclusion Option by the sales closing date for your insurance policy. You choose the option by insurance policy, for a crop in a county. The option is continuous until you request that the coverage end. When you choose the option it will automatically exclude all eligible crop years from your actual production history database, unless you specifically opt out of the exclusion for a specific crop year.

According to Gary Schnitkey, University of Illinois, most farmers should take YE when it is available and raises the guarantee yield, as long as it does not impact their trend adjustment eligibility. 

Take eight minutes to watch the following and better understand this option:

For more information on this and other farm program decisions, visit FarmDoc Daily.  Read the full article from Gary Schnitkey on YE here.