Federal crop insurance and barley
Farm and Ranch December 21, 2010 The new combo insurance policy gives barley growers essentially the same options as wheat growers. Dave Paul of the regional office of the Risk Management Agency of the USDA says the big difference being price discovery as there is no U.S. futures contract for barley. Paul: “We are correlating a factor off of Chicago corn to establish a price for barley. In fact we are working with the National Barley Growers and others on refining that factor. They would like us to do a little more work on that factor, but right now we are comparing NASS barley to Chicago corn, Ag Statistics barley numbers to Chicago corn, to come up with a factor to establish a price for barley on upside-downside price protection. The barley growers are happy with the product. They would just like us to look a little closer at that factor and we are doing that right now.” Paul says there is new specialty barley coverage covering several different types of barley such as waxy, waxy hull less, malting and feed barley. Paul: “If a producer is contracting for some of these specialty barleys now they can get insurance on the yield side based off of their contract price versus the price election we establish. And that was something that the barley growers came to the agency and asked if we could develop a program for that and now we have that filed in every barley county in the Pacific Northwest.” Paul says RMA is trying to keep barley competitive with wheat. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.
