Prevented Planting After Buy-Up Elimination: Coverage Level Substitution, Producer Costs, and the Role of Enhanced Premium Subsidies Under the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)

➩ Eliminating prevented planting (PP) buy-up shifts PP risk management from a targeted election to an integrated coverage level decision, reducing producer flexibility. Producers can no longer adjust PP protection independently of broader yield and revenue coverage, linking early-season risk management directly to overall insurance exposure regardless of their specific early-season risk profile.

➩ Coverage level increases can only partially and imperfectly substitute for former PP buy-up, but equivalence is nonlinear and constrained. Modest coverage increases can approximate buy-up protection at moderate coverage levels, but substitution fails at both low and high coverage levels and becomes infeasible as producers approach the 85 percent coverage ceiling.

➩ Observed coverage elections constrain and, for some producers, eliminate their ability to offset buy-up elimination. By 2025, most insured acres were already concentrated at coverage levels of 70 percent or higher, leaving some producers with little to no remaining capacity to replace lost buy-up protection through additional coverage.

➩ Observed producer responses show some limited and incomplete coverage level substitution following the 2018 elimination of the 10 percent prevented planting buy-up. Former buy-up users gradually shift toward higher coverage tiers, but many remain unable to fully restore prior protection, while base-only participants exhibit little change, indicating adjustments where feasible but binding constraints from existing coverage levels and coverage ceilings for a substantial share of producers.

➩ Premium subsidy structure determines whether coverage substitution imposes acceptable costs on producers. Under the 2018 Farm Bill, declining subsidy rates would have implied 24.43 to 41.27 percent premium increases, rendering coverage level substitution largely infeasible. Enhanced subsidies under OBBB reduce, but do not eliminate, these increases. As a result, substitution becomes economically viable for some producers, though producer-paid premiums remain materially higher than pre-elimination levels, indicating that OBBB subsidies are partly absorbed by offsetting the loss of buy-up coverage.

➩ Distributional impacts depend more on subsidy design and initial coverage positions than on prevented planting risk alone. Under OBBB, producers with stable production histories and room to increase coverage can offset buy-up elimination through enhanced subsidies, while those already near coverage limits face binding constraints and limited adjustment options.

Recommended Citation Format: Francis Tsiboe (2026). Prevented Planting After Buy-Up Elimination: Coverage Level Substitution, Producer Costs, and the Role of Enhanced Premium Subsidies Under the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). ARPC White Paper 2026–01. Agricultural Risk Policy Center, North Dakota State University. https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.386196