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 to 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 is the dreaded T yield? Now this is going to be a pretty short episode. Later on we're going to talk about crop insurance advocacy. And so to transition into that discussion, we're going to address a topic that came up a lot in these conversations, a topic that crop insurance advocates are working hard to address. We are talking about transitional yields, otherwise known as T yields.
Yes. This is something that has come up in pretty much every conversation with the farmers that we have spoken to as a main frustration when it comes to getting crop insurance. Now, Nate, I'd love to know, have you had any personal experience with T yields? You know, Mallory, I may not look it, but it has been a minute since I went organic. That being said, you're spot on, T yields are a point of conversation and concern for farmers all across the country.
And so this time I thought we would start off with hearing from farmer Brian Carlson about his experience with T yields, and what the issues were for him. Then we're going to bring back Amy Bruch, who will explain a little bit more about the difficulties with T yields for organic farmers. I'm Brian Carlson. I'm from Central Illinois. Live in the town of Leroy. We've been farming organically for eight years now. We started in 2015. We're currently a parallel operation.
We're almost half organic, half conventional crops. So we handle both and we're adding more organics, we're not adding any more conventional to our operations. So that's the direction we're focusing on now. Brian has recently started farming and he wanted to make sure he had crop insurance from the get go. The crop insurance is actually a big part of, it's a big safety net for our banker, is what it is. When I started farming in 2006, it was a brand new startup operation.
I mean, I didn't add into a family. We started from scratch. So we started from a heavily leveraged one-to-one debt to asset ratio, you know. And for the bank's point of view, the crop insurance is a big key to what we do. Because they have to take our, you know, our, every year we do a balance sheet and then a cash flow, and crop insurance was a key for us to get some of those beginning operating
notes that we needed. You know, because they have to have a guarantee that they're going to get their money back. So it has been a big part of our operation through the years. That's something that also came up in the last episode with Brent. While crop insurance helps farmers protect themselves from severe losses, it can also be essential for getting loans and being seen as trustworthy to banks. You betcha.
And so Brian was really adamant about getting crop insurance right off the bat, but then he was confronted with T yields. There's one complaint that I have is the transition year. The transition year is such a small window, it's And they make you go from, on our conventional side, what was a pretty good average yield, and then when you go to transition, you're bumped right down to a T yield, which is, it might be 20 bushels off.
So you already know you're not going to make as much as your transition, you know, during your transition years, but then they take away quite a bit of your insurance guarantee because you have to go to such a low yield. Well, if they give you a T yield where you're only in transition for two years, you're never going to increase that yield. So I wish there was a way that they could take your normal operating yields and, you know, maybe you can't, maybe insured at a less
percentage. You know, I know there's going to be a less of a crop, but our yields don't drop all the way back to what a T yield would be. We almost would never collect on a transition year. We covered this much more extensively in season one of the podcast, but the transition period is already so tough for farmers. To feel like you don't have that safety net during that time because insurance coverage is so low, just adds to the obstacles farmers are facing in transitioning to organics.
Absolutely. So I spoke with Amy Bruch, we've heard from her in a few other episodes, and she continues to be a wealth of knowledge. Now, just a reminder, she and her husband own Cyclone Farms, a large scale organic farm in the Midwest. She's also worked to establish sustainable farming operations around the world. Is a member, alongside me, of the National Organic Standards Board and is generally just a wealth of information on all things organic agriculture.
So I asked Amy why she thinks T yields are so darn difficult for farmers. When you first enter into transition or organic, and you've been a conventional farmer, you throw your production history out the window, and you start from square one. And, you know, I sympathize with how T yields for transition are there's just not enough of us out there. So the data is pretty limiting. So when we do enter in, you know, we're given the best data that's available.
However, generally because of the diversity of how we all farm as organic producers, it usually doesn't match identically what our ability, what our capabilities are. So, you know, these T yields, you're given 10 numbers, and just over time you have to offset them.
If you have a new farm that you get in the area, let's say two years later, and you want to transition that to organic, you're actually given, if you have a little bit of history, that history then goes to your new farm, and you can have a stepped up approach. So they are making, that's a new change, I believe a relatively new change over the last few years. So at least you don't have to start the clock at zero for every new field that you bring on into
transition organic. However, the first farm you do it's a challenge because, you know, with our robust crop rotations, the next time you might plant that same crop to get another yield to replace the T yields that you're given, could be three or four years maybe, depending on how many crops that you're rotating through, and what your goals are. It is really tough for new farmers like Brian, because they have no history to work with, and have no choice but to use T yields for insurance.
Yeah, and Amy pointed out, now wait for this, that in many cases, transitional coverage may even be lower than conventional coverage. And then it's challenging when you look at the coverage level, if I pull up my county in York County, Nebraska, and look at conventional coverage, you know, and then look at the transition coverage I can get, you know, it, you get less. There's just less coverage for a transition producer
that conventional counterpart. And there could be a contract price addendum, but we all know it's very challenging to find meaningful transition contracts that are going to make up that gap difference. So right now, you know, it's, it's about a $300 difference for a coverage for a transition producer in corn. Okay. So this could definitely discourage a new farmer who wants to be organic, but is looking at the coverage he or she will get, and feeling nervous about the
risks to their operation. I wonder, with all of Amy's experience, did she have any thoughts about how T yields could be improved? Oh, she certainly did. I've thought, how can we do this differently? How can we do this better? An idea that maybe I've thought of is, could we take at least the T yields that we're given during transition instead of resetting the clock when we're organic, at least build upon those.
Maybe we don't always have the best moments for our production capacity during transition because we're, there's a lot to learn while we're organic producers. However, in my case still some of the learning lessons I still out yielded those T yields that I was given. So even the learning lessons still brought me at a little bit of a higher average than, than kind of the initial set I was given. So it does take time.
There's some strategies to be able to build these faster if you wanna simultaneously crop on one field. You know, if you have a quarter section, 160 acres, and you wanna divert a certain percentage to one crop and a certain percentage of another, you can accelerate the process of building your T yields. And that's kind of, that's fine and dandy if you have the bandwidth to be able to do that. But sometimes I've tried that, it's usually challenging.
The crops require different timings for your week management programs. So you know, you just can't take the eye off the ball, and it just makes the organic system a little bit more complex. But it's definitely a doable process if you want to try to accelerate, you know, replacement of the T yields to your actual production history.
So now we have our background on T yields, and next episode we're going to explore how farmers and organizations are advocating for changes to T yields, as well as other aspects of crop insurance to make it more accessible and useful to organic farmers. 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 Brian Carlson 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.