Editor’s Desk: Why farmers need an insurance adjustment
With all the media attention on food and farming, government programs like crop insurance tend to get short shrift, probably because the word “insurance” elicits a yawn. But in a time of falling commodity prices, the government crop-insurance program will pay out $9 billion to farmers this year, up from $3 billion in 2015. It exerts such a profound influence on farmers that it’s not an overstatement to say they are affected as much by insurance as the weather.
Kristin Ohlson makes that clear in FERN’s latest story, “This Kansas farmer fought a government program to keep his farm sustainable,” produced with Ensia. Putting a human face on crop insurance, she profiles Gail Fuller, who plants cover crops and incorporates livestock into his corn and soybean farm.
Fuller ran into a problem when he sought an insurance claim, because his adjuster didn’t like the way remnants of the cover crops grew between his drought-stricken and failing cash crop. Sure enough, the insurance company “withheld a six-figure payout and canceled coverage on some of his fields.”
The recipient of numerous farming awards, Fuller is a leading practitioner of what is often called regenerative agriculture, or agroecology. “The denial of Fuller’s claim and loss of insurance was seen not just as a personal blow, but as a signal that Earth-friendly farm practices can come with unaffordable price tags, potentially discouraging their adoption,” Ohlson writes. It’s not surprising that cover crops are planted on only 2.6 percent of the nation’s croplands, according the latest U.S. ag census. “Certainly, anxiety over problems with crop insurance is one of the factors holding farmers back,” Ohlson writes.
Obviously, if farmers are going to pursue innovative practices – which help nurture soil and food production – they must be offered the same incentives and protection afforded other farmers. As the story makes clear, that’s only starting to happen. We hope this story will shed more light on the issue which for too long has been viewed as an arcane financial subject.
We also want to let you know that Maryn McKenna, the author of Superbug and Beating Back the Devil, is now writing regularly on antibiotics for FERN’s Ag Insider. Her new book on antibiotics in agriculture will be published by National Geographic Books/Penguin Random House in 2017, and here is her latest piece for AI.
We hope you enjoy this type of in-depth reporting and storytelling – the same we brought together in our recently published anthology The Dirt. Copies are still available with a $100 donation, which helps support the reporting that undergirds stories such as Ohlson’s … and that informs decisions in democratic nation.