At Alliance, Crop Insurance is our business! We use the crop insurance program to backstop all of our farm risk management strategies.
Crop insurance is intended to assist the American farmer in managing farm risk. The current day farmer faces risk factors from a variety of different avenues, including adverse environmental conditions, volatile world markets, and increasing production costs.
Crop insurance policies can vary by state, crop, and type. Take a look at the risk calculator below or click on individual policy types to learn more.
Federal Policies
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers the American farmer federally subsidized risk management to support stability of agriculture in the United States. Policies can simply protect yield or go a step further and protect yield and price losses. At Alliance, we help producers choose the best policy for their operation.
Revenue Protection (RP)
Revenue protection does exactly as the name implies – it protects the farm operation from losses due to yield, markets, or the combination of the two. The RP policy provides a financial floor under your business and that’s exactly what we need in agriculture as we don’t ever know where the losses are coming from. Losses can come from low yields but more commonly they are coming from volatile world markets.
Yield Protection (YP)
Yield protection only protects the loss of yield due to naturally occurring perils. These policies are very useful when the crop is marketed through open ended contracts.
Catastrophic YP (CAT)
CAT is the most basic crop insurance policy. It insures the producer at 50% yield and pays at only 55% of the projected price. The producer only pays an administrative fee of $300 per crop, per county.
Group Risk Income Protection (GRIP)
GRIP is not as common as RP or YP, especially in the south. This policy uses county yield indexes, rather than the individual producer’s yields. GRIP is a great policy when the operation has consistently trended along with the county yields and doesn’t have any isolated risk.
Private Policies
Privately held and administered policies include hail and fire, additional replant protection, and weather insurance. These policies are used to add additional protection to your operation where the federal policy may fall short.
Hail Insurance
Your primary insurance policy insures you against yield losses due to hail, but many times a hail storm may cause isolated damage that’s not large enough to trigger a claim. Your private hail policy will pay on small acres damaged at the purchased rate per acre.
Replant Insurance
With today’s input costs escalating, the cost of replant far exceeds the payment from your base insurance policy. The private replant offering can fill that gap for only a few dollars per acre.
Weather Insurance
A new avenue of protection is weather insurance. This product is very flexible and can be configured to almost any need you might have. A good example would be high temperatures during corn pollination. We can insure $100/acre for a 10 day period when we don’t need temperatures to be above normal.