New Crop Insurance Rules for Beginning Farmers

Posted on July 3, 2014 by in Beginning Farmers, Insurance // 0 Comments

A new blog post has been published by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition on the implementation of several crop insurance provisions in the 2014 Farm Bill. The interim rule, filed by RMA yesterday, touches on beginning farmers and conservation.

It waives the administrative fee for beginning farmers for catastrophic coverage, which compensates farmers who lose more than 50 percent of their yield in any given year.
It reduces out of pocket premium expenses for beginning farmers during their first 5 years of farming by providing a 10 percent premium subsidy bonus.
It allows beginning farmers who experience an insured loss on new cropland to be compensated at 80 percent of the proven yield of existing parcels that are currently in production (this “substitute yield adjustment” was previously set at 60 percent for all farmers).
It allows beginning farmers to use the production history of a farming operation they have been involved in through physical labor and in decision making in the event they do not have a production history or historical yields of their own.
It Implements the 2014 Farm Bill’s Sodsaver provision to discourage farmers from converting native prairie into cropland.
It links basic soil and wetland conservation requirements—known as “conservation compliance”—to federal crop insurance subsidies.