Farmers are in line for a “top-up” payment of up to 15 percent if they received a prevented-planting indemnity from crop insurers this year due to flooding or excessive rainfall, said the USDA on Thursday. Payments will begin flowing in mid-October and no signup is needed.
Funding for the payments comes from $3 billion in agricultural disaster aid approved by Congress this summer. Agriculture Undersecretary Bill Northey told lawmakers a week ago that most of the relief money would go to the hurricane-hit U.S. Southeast. A USDA spokesman was not immediately available to say how much would be spent on prevented planting. The rainiest spring in a quarter-century kept farmers from seeding an estimated 19.6 million acres, the most since the USDA began reporting on prevented planting in 2007.
Growers who bought Yield Protection and Revenue Protection with Harvest Price Exclusion crop insurance policies will receive a 10 percent payment, said the USDA. Producers with Revenue Protection policies — the most popular type of crop insurance — will get a 15 percent “top-up.”
“After the initial payment, additional payments will be made in the middle of each month as more prevented-planting claims are processed,” said the USDA.
The “top-up” payments are separate from the Wildfires and Hurricane Indemnity Program Plus announced by the USDA at the start of this month, although both draw from the $3 billion disaster appropriation. Under WHIP+, producers are eligible for up to $500,000 apiece for losses to wildfires, hurricanes, volcanoes, and other natural disasters in 2018 and floods this year.