09/03/08 RMA updates T-yields

Farm and Ranch September 3, 2008 Wheat transitional-yields, or T-yields, are used in the federal crop insurance program. Those yields are periodically updated and Dave Paul of the Spokane regional Office of USDA's Risk Management Agency, says the T-yields have been updated in every county for the 2009 crop year. Paul: "Transitional-yields are becoming more and more important. They are essentially a county average yield. They are used to substitute a yield if a producer has less than four years of actual production history on any insurable insurance unit on their crop. When producers have significant losses they have the option to replace a low yield in their data base with 60% of that transitional yield for that year with the low yield to kind of hold their coverage up. And then there is actually a yield limitation provision where depending upon the number of years of records a producer has for a particular crop on their farm, we are going to put floor on their coverage that is based on a percentage of that T-yield." If a producer has at least five years of wheat records they can establish a floor based on 80 percent of the transitional-yield. Paul says in Walla Walla county Washington the county was segregated into thirds to establish T-yields for each area in a diverse county. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.