Farming can be a risky business. Dealing with unpredictable weather, pesky insects, disease, and other potential hazards is a constant battle for farmers each year. To combat the many environmental threats crops face, an insurance program was developed specifically to protect farmers from losing their crops due to forces outside their control. To give you a better understanding of the crop insurance landscape, let’s look at some crop insurance basics:

What is Crop Insurance?

Crop insurance began in the 1930’s with the federal government’s establishment of the Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP), a program designed to protect farmers in the event of crop loss. A 1980 revamp of the FCIP saw the federal government partnering with private insurance companies to provide comprehensive crop insurance to farmers. These private insurers are now the sole provider of crop insurance policies, which have grown in popularity with the introduction of increasingly attractive subsidies over the years.

Types of Crop Insurance

• Crop-Hail – Hail is not kind to crops. In just a few minutes, it can do major damage to your crops, and have a serious impact on your yield and profitability. Crop-Hail Insurance provides farmers with protection against crop loss due to hail and other specific crop dangers, offering farmers security in knowing they won’t lose a portion of their yield as a result of natural and unpreventable circumstances. Not part of the FCIP, crop-hail insurance is only offered by private insurers and has become a staple in the modern farm insurance portfolio.

• Multi-Peril Crop Insurance (MPCI) – For broad-scale protection against potential crop dangers, most farmers opt for Multi-Peril Crop Insurance, or MPCI. A more comprehensive type of crop insurance, MPCI covers a wide range of the natural reasons for crop loss such as a drought or freeze. This type of insurance is regulated by the US Department of Agriculture as part of the FCIP. In addition to providing oversight, the government offers subsidies to farmers to offset the costs of insurance premiums.

Crop Insurance Reporting

Part of taking on a crop insurance policy involves communicating your field data to the insurance company, a process accomplished through reporting. Farmers are required to provide an annual report outlining the acreage planted and yield produced over the previous year to ensure they meet the stipulations in their policy.

While it’s important for farmers to have protection from crop loss, crop insurance reporting can be a time-consuming and tedious process. Sifting through records and manually filling out forms takes time that could be better spent in other areas. In this age of automated technology, there’s a solution. Precision Agriculture software takes the data collected by your GPS display and easily translates it into a variety of acreage and production reports. Rather than reporting by hand, this software does all of the heavy lifting for you. With Precision Farming software, you can create reports that comply with reporting requirements, simplifying the process and allowing you to focus on other priorities.

Crop insurance is a necessary part of most farming operations. With two main types of coverage and a wide range of specific policies, crop insurance keeps your farm protected from all kinds of environmental dangers. Armed with these crop insurance basics, you’re now ready to choose the right crop insurance policy for your farm!

About Precision Ag Services

Precision Ag Services combines more than 30 years of agronomic experience with the latest GPS technologies to help farmers in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio maximize their crop yield. An authorized dealer of Ag Leader products, Precision Ag Services can help you get started with the tools you need to make crop insurance reporting simple! To learn more about our products and services, contact our team online or give us a call at (419) 490-8129 today!