The Posted county price (PCP) is calculated for the so-called

loan commodities Under the 2002 farm bill (P.L. 101-171, Sec. 1201-1205), the following commodities are eligible for marketing assistance loans and are called loan commodities: wheat, corn, grain sorghum, barley oats, upland cotton, extra long staple (ELS) cotton, ...

(except for rice and cotton) for each county by the

Farm Service Agency The Farm Service Agency (FSA) is the United States Department of Agriculture agency that was formed by merging the farm loan portfolio and staff of the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) and the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service ...

. The PCP reflects changes in prices in major

terminal grain market Terminal may refer to: Computing Hardware * Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together * Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line * Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output dev ...

s (of which there are 18 in the country), corrected for the cost of transporting grain from the county to the terminal. It is utilized under the marketing loan repayment provisions and

loan deficiency payment In United States agriculture policy, loan deficiency payments (LDP) are a farm income support program first authorized by the Food Security Act of 1985 (P.L. 99-198) that makes direct payments, equivalent to marketing loan gains, to producers who ag ...

(LDP) provisions of the commodity programs. Rice and cotton use an adjusted world price as the proxy for local market prices.

References

*{{CRS, article = Report for Congress: Agriculture: A Glossary of Terms, Programs, and Laws, 2005 Edition, url = http://ncseonline.org/nle/crsreports/05jun/97-905.pdf, author= Jasper Womach Agricultural economics