2011 Crop Insurance Highlights

Published: March 8, 2011

The 2011 crop insurance year finds many farm-level crop insurance programs merging into what is called the "Common Crop Insurance Policy" or COMBO. COMBO is meant to simplify crop insurance choices. It has three plans that offer coverage previously contained in the Actual Production History (APH), Crop Revenue Coverage (CRC) and Revenue Assurance (RA) products. The table below indicates the changes.

Yield Protection pays indemnities when yield falls below a yield guarantee. Revenue Protection (with and without Harvest Price Exclusion) pays indemnities when revenue falls below a revenue guarantee. The guarantee can increase if the harvest price is above the projected price when Revenue Protection is purchased. The guarantee does not increase if the harvest price is above the projected price when Revenue Protection with Harvest Price Exclusion is purchased.

Under the Common Crop Insurance policy all projected prices are determined by commodity exchanges. This year's price protections are can be found in Table 2.

Other changes in crop insurance that might be of interest include the following.

• Organic crops now have a higher price protection than conventional crops.
• In 2010, several counties in Missouri lost Group Risk Plans and Group Risk Income Plans. For those counties that still have Group Risk Income Plans there is a lot of discussion of the very high premiums being charged.
• The final planting date for corn in some southwestern MO counties (Barton, Lawrence, Jasper, McDonald, Christian, Newton, Dade, Barry, Greene) has changed from May 10 to May 15.
• Rice: The final planting date for rice has been moved from May 31 to May 25 and the end of the late planting date has been shortened to 15 days after the final planting date.
• Cottonseed: There is a new cottonseed endorsement. Previously, cotton farmers insured lint alone but now they can insure both lint and seed yield.