APH (Actual Production History), Explained

What APH is

Actual Production History (APH) is the yield database behind your crop insurance. For each insured unit, your approved APH yield is essentially an average of your actual yields over a rolling window of past years — typically the most recent 4 to 10 crop years you can document.

That average becomes the production side of your insurance guarantee. On a revenue policy:

Revenue guarantee = APH yield × coverage level × projected price

Which means every bushel in your APH is leverage. A stronger APH raises the revenue floor you can insure — and the revenue floor is what lets you forward-sell new-crop bushels with confidence.

What moves your APH

• Actual yields, unit by unit. Good records — scale tickets, bin measurements, monitor data with calibration — are what your yields settle on at claim time and what feeds next year's average.
• Bad years drag for a decade. One disaster year sits in the average until it rolls off. Provisions like yield exclusion (in years/counties where it's authorized) and yield adjustment (substituting a percentage of the county T-yield for a catastrophic year) exist to soften that — ask your agent what applies to your county and year.
• New ground without history starts from county transitional yields (T-yields), usually below what the ground can do — another reason records follow the land.

Why it belongs in your marketing plan

Your APH sets the bushels you can defend. Selling new crop ahead of harvest is far more comfortable when the bushels you've committed sit inside the guarantee your APH supports. It's the bridge between the insurance decision in February and the marketing decisions all year: know the number, know what percentage of it you've already priced.

Program details (eligible years, exclusions, T-yield percentages) are set by USDA's Risk Management Agency and change; confirm specifics with your crop insurance agent.