Supporting Crop Insurance Education

Supporting Crop Insurance Education. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack announced yesterday that USDA’s Risk Management Agency will support crop insurance education and outreach in 47 states to ensure that small and underserved producers get the information they need to effectively manage their risk and remain productive. Jo Lynne Seufer, Risk Management Specialist with USDA/Risk Management Agency talks about the awards in the northwest.

SEUFER: We’re really excited out here in the Pacific Northwest, the Risk Management Agency just announced along with the Secretary of Agriculture that we are awarding about $652-thousand dollars here in the Pacific Northwest of Idaho, Oregon and Washington that will help groups educate and insure that producers will have the education available so they can effectively manage their risk and remain productive.

Nationally the total awards were about $13.6 million dollars.

SEYFER: RMA Spokane regional office is going to oversee 10 of those awardee partnerships. Several of them are just exactly the type of education that we’ve been asking for, and we being the producers have been asking RMA for. As a breakdown of a few of those we’ve got the Northwest Center for Alternative Pesticides out of Idaho and they’re going to talk to a lot of their organic farmers about our whole farm crop insurance policy. And we got Washington State University awarded 3 times and they’re going to reach out to several different entities throughout Washington State particularly our Hispanic and our Mong producers.

Seufer talks about the application process.

SEUFER: We announce the Federal Register once a year and solicit proposals from any non-profit, universities and commodity group organizations, sharing with us what they would like to do in promoting strategies to reduce risk on the farm and then a national panel reviews all the applications received and they are scored and awarded on and the highest to the lowest as much money that is available is awarded

10 groups here in the northwest have been awarded portions of the $652-thousand dollars. Seufer says that RMA is very involved in these projects and makes the groups accountable for the funds.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.