In United States agricultural policy, the triple base plan, also called the flexible base plan, is a proposal under which farmers who raise program crops would receive program payments only on a certain percentage of their

permitted acreage In United States agricultural policy, permitted acreage refers to the acreage on which a farm program participant was permitted to grow a program crop after satisfying acreage reduction requirements. For example, when a 10% acreage reduction program ...

. A producer participating in a federal

price support In economics, a price support may be either a subsidy, a production quota, or a price control, each with the intended effect of keeping the market price of a good higher than the competitive equilibrium level. In the case of a price control, a pr ...

program actually would have three categories of base acres for program purposes: :1) permitted acres on which

deficiency payments In the United States, deficiency payments are direct government payments made to farmers who participated in annual commodity programs for wheat, feed grains, rice, or cotton, prior to 1996. *The crop-specific deficiency payment rate was based on th ...

would be made; :2) permitted acres on which no federal payments would be made, but could be planted to other crops, either specified or unspecified; :3) idled acres (those required to be set aside under acreage reduction rules) where no crops other than those for conservation could be planted. Triple base is another name for what came to be known as

normal flex acres In United States agricultural law, Normal flex acreage was a provision of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 requiring a mandatory 15% reduction in payment acreage. Under this provision, producers were ineligible to receive deficiency pa ...

. Production flexibility contracts under the

1996 farm bill The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-127), known informally as the Freedom to Farm Act, the FAIR Act, or the 1996 U.S. Farm Bill, was the omnibus 1996 farm bill that, among other provisions, revises and simplifies d ...

(P.L. 104-127) and the

Direct and Counter-cyclical Program The Direct and Counter-cyclical Payment Program (DCP) of the USDA provides payments to eligible producers on farms enrolled for the 2002 through 2007 crop years. There are two types of DCP payments – direct payments and counter-cyclical payments. ...

(DCP) agreements under the

2002 farm bill The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, also known as the 2002 Farm Bill, includes ten titles, addressing a great variety of issues related to agriculture, ecology, energy, trade, and nutrition. This act has been superseded by the 2007 ...

(P.L. 101-171, Sec. 1101-1108) eliminated the linkage between direct payments and actual plantings.

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 United States Department of Agriculture