Welcome to The Dirt on Organic Farming, a podcast from OATS, the Organic Agronomy Training Service. This season we are answering all those burning questions we know you have about crop insurance for organic farmers. Yes, we know it's a podcast about crop insurance, but we're going keep these episodes short, lively, and accessible. Heck, you might even enjoy listening. I'm Nate Powell Palm. And I'm Mallory Krieger. And we're the hosts of the Dirt on Organic Farming.
In this episode. What about hail and wind insurance? In these last couple of episodes, we've been talking about tools that are available to organic farmers to help them optimize their crop insurance, and make sure they have the coverage they need. So this episode, we're going to talk about some more tools, which are hail and wind insurance. So does regular crop insurance not cover hail and wind?
So everything we've been talking about until now is multi peril policy, which covers crop losses that can result from a number of different causes. Hail and wind are add-on insurance options from private companies. To fill me in on hail and wind, I called our resident crop insurance expert, Megan Vaith. There are two main categories when it comes to crop insurance, and I would say these two are multi peril and hail.
Hail insurance is different than multi peril because it's an add-on insurance, where you can cover yourself specifically for hail damage. On the multi peril side, which is what most people talk about when they talk about crop insurance, the highest coverage of farmer could purchase is 85%, meaning he still has a 15% deductible on what revenue he was expected to receive for the year.
So hail insurance can be used to fill that gap and give the farmer a little bit of extra coverage, so he doesn't have quite as large of a deductible. I asked Megan about the other differences between multi peril and wind and hail. Hail insurance is very different than multi peril. On the multi peril side, coverage is calculated by taking the farmer's proven yield history times the price to get his expected revenue
for the year. On the hail side, farmers get to choose how many dollars of coverage they want. So there's a multitude of different options to choose from with some having deductibles, some having payouts that start to double or triple after a certain price point. And of course all of those come with different premiums. So it's really beneficial because a farmer has so many different options to
choose from. And along with that, they can also purchase additional wind coverage, on top of it so that they can be covered on both, either a wind or a hail event that can come through and maybe damage their crops. Hail insurance is also completely different from multi peril because it is a private product. And so it is still governed, but it is not under the same structure as multi peril where it is not subsidized, and so the premium can be a little bit higher.
And the premiums are also very different on the hail side where it all goes based on township rather than based on your history or the county yield or anything like that. It's all based on the township. But it is all a private product, so it is not federally subsidized like your multi peril is. Is there anything specifically different for organic farmers when it comes to wind and hail? Good question, and Megan did touch on that.
Oftentimes, I would say that claims are adjusted the same for organic farmers as they are for conventional farmers. The rule of thumb on any sort of hail event is to wait 10 days after the storm for an adjuster to come out so that they can see if the crop is going to bounce back or not. For an organic farmer, those 10 days could be a pretty big deal. And so if the farmer leaves the field just sit for 10 days, it could be easily overtaken by weeds, as we're probably all well aware.
And so I would encourage organic farmers to push back maybe a little bit, and try to get an exception to this 10 day rule, in situations where maybe the farmer needs to get out into the field to prevent things from getting even worse in the long run. Wow, 10 days is a really big deal for organic farmers when you constantly have to be monitoring for weeds. I'm interested to hear what that looks like from a farmer's perspective.
Well, we're in luck, because I called up Amy Bruch to learn how she uses wind and hail. We heard from Amy briefly in the last episode on written agreements, but I asked her to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about her background and her operation. My background, I'm a sixth generation farmer. My family farms are in East central Nebraska.
And I've kind of had a little bit of a boomerang experience, went to school at Iowa State, got my ag engineering degree, worked in industry for a little while. And then my husband and I went to Brazil, we did production ag down in Brazil. I lived there about seven years. So it was really interesting to see the profession that I grew up with, and know and love from a, you know, viewpoint of the southern hemisphere.
And then my husband and I got into ag consulting, so we got to do different projects all across South America, over in Africa, Europe, et cetera. So again, I've just been really blessed to be able to work and see all sides of this profession that I love. My father actually passed away and that brought me back to my home base in east central Nebraska. That's kind of the boomerang effect, I always thought I'd farm with him, and now it's kind of farming for him.
And so I've been doing production ag back in Nebraska for over a decade now, and a short decade into organic production. Right now we're completely organic or transition to organic. Main crops that we grow are a lot of food grade row crops, so white corn, blue corn, yellow corn for chips and tortillas, we do soybeans for tofu, do some wheat, and really try to stay, we do alfalfa as well.
We try to stay in the insurable crops just because there's so much challenges with, you know, organic farming, and me having experience in South America seeing farming without insurance. I love that a first world nation like ourselves has the opportunity to have crop insurance, and really be able to secure and mitigate risks. So I try to stay in those types of crops in our area, and we are a hundred percent irrigated as well, so we can control that variable.
As I'm sure you can tell, Amy is knowledgeable as both a farmer and a consultant. She really knows the ins and outs of organic farming. So I was curious how she approaches crop insurance for her operation. What I've had to do is kind of a full court press with my crop insurance. I'm in east central Nebraska, and we do have some hail and wind events that come through. So what I like to do is a multi peril policy that really covers kind of
catastrophic events. If if there's a complete wipe out, then that's when the multi peril policy will kick in. But a 30% crop damage failure is really not going to tap into any multi peril event or multi peril policy payout. So what I do for the gap coverage, I'm able to stack on some private policies for those types of events. There's policies that are mainly damage based is what I
have been really investing in. They're expensive, they're not subsidized, but they do allow for me to cover those gaps due to hail and wind. And something important that Amy pointed out is that wind and hail does vary by where you're located. In my area I farm in a few different counties. However, hail insurance rates, and when we look at these private policies, when we're looking at costs per acre, per hundred dollars of coverage that you're getting And I'm a, I can attest to
that. I am in York County, when I farm on the east side of York County, my rates are a little bit lower compared to the west side of York County. So it is a township, it can be a township driven cost. I know in the states that experience lower levels of hail and wind, you might not necessarily see changes per township. But you really have to look at the details when it comes to where your farms are located to see the value and costs.
And I just break it out usually on a spreadsheet and have all of my farms laid out. And then I match up what my agent gives me for kind of the archival history, and information, and the quotes, and just try to always map that out year after year, and see what the changes are. Because there can be really drastic premium increases, and which might end up changing your strategy or your levels of coverage year after year depending on, you know, certain hail and wind events that occurred.
So it sounds like Amy is really looking at all the options and variables when deciding what the best policies are for her. That's right. And she has had a lot of experience with using different types of insurance and filing claims. So I asked her to walk me through what it's like to file a wind and hail claim. You know, the first thing you got to do when you have a weather event and it causes some damage to your field, go out and scout.
I mean there's great satellite imagery applications too that can help you find, you know, within your field. Because hail and wind is an always a straight line problem event. It could be heavier in one area versus another. So first thing I do is when there is an event, simultaneously call my agent, let them know, and then go out to my field. Because even if there is lower damage than you expect, at least you've made the effort to reach out to your agent. You can always you know,
cancel that off. But you know, I've been told that sometimes after wind and hale events, you got to wait 10 days before an adjuster will come out, because they need to see how the crop recovers. And that's true. Sometimes it really does look bad time zero, but you wait a few extra days, and the crops, they are more resilient than you think they're going to be on how they recover.
However, that timeframe of waiting is really problematic for organic farmers, and you really got to drive the process. Because if you're not able to get in your field and take care of your crop, and some of our methods of weed management are really aggressive when we take care of our crops, we're actually, in order to mitigate weeds, we're doing a little bit of damage to our crops.
You need to be very transparent with your agent, and also if you can get in contact with the adjuster, and let them know that I still have to take care of my crop. I'm not going to be absent in my field for 10 days while we wait. That's really critical, because you need to take care of the weeds. Because in 10 days you're going to have a disaster on your hands if you're not able to get after it. So it's very crop specific and dependent.
So each crop, it has a different frame of reference from when you had a weather impact event to when the adjuster needs to get out. So first understand that as well. And then secondly, if you need to have some exceptions there. I would definitely try to keep those communication lines open.
If it's bad enough and you can just leave strips, for example, because it's almost total wipe out, then that's better to leave the strips, and then completely till up the rest of your field, so you can maximize your time and our seasons, and get another crop going. It really is case specific on what the outcome's going to be. But you really need to be involved in that process from day one.
There is so much good advice in there between utilizing satellite imagery, to getting in contact with your adjuster as soon as possible, to leaving strips if you can't leave the whole field for 10 days. And then of course, the importance of open lines of communication with And something Amy was adamant about is that organic farmers need to be well-versed in these policies or have an agent that can support them, because crop insurance is more complicated for organic farmers.
I have a good team that I talk to, but yeah, this has been really interesting learning because, you know, you just don't get into the details when you're a conventional farmer with the policies. Because when the policy matches your output, you know, you don't necessarily have questions. Because you know what you're going to expect with the payouts, when there's this delta between where the triggers are for your multi-peril and
then your output. You know, that I'm just looking to, to fill the gap here, and at least you know, a benefit to being in a hail and wind zone is that there are these private policies that you can stack in there. It's really interesting. You know, it's really important for organic producers to be well versed in the ins and outs of their area and these insurance policies. Because I think doing a little bit more studying can make the difference on having better coverage or not for your area.
This has been the dirt on organic Farming, a podcast by the Organic Agronomy Training Service. OATS provides training to agronomists, advisors, and crop consultants, so that farmers will have better access to reliable, science-based advice for their unique farm operation. Special thanks in this episode goes to Megan Vaith and Amy Bruch. This episode was produced by Michaela Elias. For more information, go to www.organicagronomy.org.
OATS is a programmatically independent consortium that is fiscally sponsored by the Organic Trade Association. OATS is supported in part with funding from OTAs membership companies. Season two of the Dirt on Organic Farming is made possible by a funding partnership with USDA Risk Management Agency under award number RMA22CPT0012393. I'm Mallory Krieger. And I'm Nate Powell Palm. Till next time, thanks for listening.