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Shining Light on Farm & Food Policy for 20 Years.
Friday, August 16, 2024
The Biden administration is moving toward providing a new round of payments to farmers who have crop insurance and plant cover crops this year, extending a temporary program created last year. A new policy endorsement designed to encourage reduced nitrogen usage also is coming on the market in 2022.
Producers will have additional crop insurance flexibilities at their disposal next year after a handful of changes from the Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency.
California has already surpassed $101 million in USDA crop insurance indemnities due to shortages of irrigation water supplies and the numbers will likely climb much higher.
Farmers across the Midwest, where soils are already saturated, could face more widespread flooding this spring as rivers swell and winter storms continue, forecasters say.
USDA’s Risk Management Agency has issued a clarification of an earlier press release to make clear that farmers will receive a 15% top-up payment on prevented planting indemnities this year if their insurance policies had the Harvest Price Option.
The Agriculture Department will provide larger disaster-aid payments for losses in 2018 than for 2019 and will offer prevent-plant bonus payments of up to 15% for farmers who were unable to seed crops this spring due to the heavy Midwest flooding, according to rules announced Monday.
Prevented planting insurance claims could easily set a record this year despite lower limits on coverage imposed by the Agriculture Department because of concerns that growers were being overpaid in the past.
Agriculture Department officials expect farmers to file more than $1 billion in insurance claims for acreage they were unable to plant due to the succession of storms across the Midwest and Mississippi River valley this spring.