Combo crop insurance coming for 2011 crops
Farm and Ranch April 21, 2010 USDA’s Risk Management Agency has published the rule on its combination or combo plan that integrates several crop insurance plans into a single policy. Risk Management Agency Administrator Bill Murphy explains the combining of five revenue based crop insurance products into one that will used for insurance coverage starting with the 2011 crop year. Murphy: “Right now for the coarse grains, the small grains, most producers have the APH option. Some crops have up to three, four revenue products they can choose from. From year to year they move from one to the other looking at the costs the producer pays. As a matter of fact some of the land grant university economists put out newsletters to growers suggesting what plan they should take from year-to-year. This results in multiple filings we have to do for each of these different products. So it has been simplification. The APH program will remain. We will have one revenue product. So we will go from the RA Revenue Assurance, CRC Crop Revenue Coverage, IP Income Protection and then the Index Income Protection and they will be rolled basically into one revenue product. We have been working over the past through years to get the rating as close as possible and we could at certain levels, 65% level coverage we could, but as you got away from that you‘d see some deviation. So we will go to one product and I think it will be easier for the producers also.” Training on the combo plan for crop insurance agents begins next month. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net. ?
