Farm Firsts – The First Year, 2012: What you NEED to know about Crop Insurance

We knew NOTHING.

I mean, yeah, he knew how to plant the crops and grow them. Fertilize, spray, etc. He had been doing it for 10+ years working as a farm hand for a local farmer AND he had just graduated college in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Plant Science.

So he knew how to FARM.

We didn’t know anything else.

Crop insurance?

We knew about it but didn’t know where to get it from.

We didn’t know there was a cutoff date to purchase it each planting season.

No big deal, we said. We will get it next year.

Guess what – we found out just how invaluable crop insurance is that year.

Here in southeast Missouri we had a DROUGHT that year.

We are lucky we only had around 30 acres that we planted that year.

It could have easily been devastating, even more so than what it was.

So, we made enough money off of our corn and beans to pay for our tractor payment and maybe a little on our operating loan. Mainly the beans because our corn was only like 5 bu/acre and if you know dry land farming – 110 bu/acre is still on the ‘low’ side 😱😭 … That was a little sickening.

Crops are affected so significantly by the weather and honesty, it seems that if it is a good year for beans it’s not such a great year for the corn crop. And vice-versa. Droughts and floods all affect them and on our ground we have those stresses (one way or the other) every year it seems.

We were THANKFUL that the bank allowed us to term the loan out over the next few years (3, I think).

We started out 2013 with larger payments but we also gained exponentially in acres – went from 30 to 225. 😳

March 15th.

That’s the date you NEED to know for the Multi-Peril Crop Insurance.

That’s the deadline. Don’t miss it.

I now have a reminder set for every year by March 1st to make sure we have it in place.

THANKFULLY we don’t really have to worry much and its taken care of by then because we have a WONDERFUL crop insurance agent.

BUT I still ask my husband – all I say is ‘crop insurance’ and he tells me ‘done’ or ‘already taken care of’ and we go about our business now.

Tell me, do you have any learning that you have done when it came to farming?

This was one of our biggest learning moments that we feel could be a VERY easy thing to not ‘get on the bandwagon’ with and to easy to miss the deadline, especially as a new farmer.

It’s not cheap but not having it can cost A LOT of money, too.

Hard lesson learned.

I hear farmers wanting to remove crop insurance from the farm bill because it is unnecessary. It may be for YOU, farmer that has irrigated ground or no where neara water source that requires you to worry if it is going to flood your crops, but know that other farmers (like my husband and I) rely on crop insurance for us to be able to keep farming the next year when there are droughts or floods. Crop insurance can also provide coverage when you have feral hogs, deer, or other nuisance ‘critters’ damage your crops.

We NEED to keep the crop insurance in the farm bill. We NEED to provide it to farmers.

What is a lesson that you learned from experience – or as it may be said, the school of hard knocks? Or what do you think about the removal of crop insurance from the farm bill?