Fall planted spring wheat and crop insurance

Farm and Ranch December 16, 2010 There are a few farmers along the Columbia-Snake River system who are planting dark northern spring wheat in the fall and say they are getting higher yields and sometimes higher protein than if they sowed in the spring. An earlier harvest also allows them to sell on an old crop market, which may have higher prices than new crop.

Of course spring wheat is not bred to survive severe winters and that is one risk these growers take because as Dave Paul of the Risk Management Agency explains, fall planted spring wheat is still only insured as spring wheat.

Paul: “Which means if that DNS makes it through the winter undamaged then insurance would attach. The point at which the company would make that decision would be the spring final planting. If the fall planted DNS has no damage by the spring final planting date then insurance would commence on that as a spring wheat crop. Essentially the producer doesn’t have any winter coverage on a fall planted dark northern spring wheat under our insurance policy.”

Paul says RMA is following this development and may work for insurance changes down the road.

Paul: “If this trend is going to continue and we are going to be planting a lot of this fall planted dark northern spring wheat, maybe there are some things we can do with our insurance policy to have the coverage attach quicker, but right now it really is just a spring wheat.”

Most of the fall planted dark northern spring wheat is on irrigated ground but not all is.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.