It?s been a busy year for the agency that administers federal crop insurance.
Farmers in Iowa and throughout the country faced many challenges in 2020 when it came to protecting their crops. The COVID-19 pandemic and multiple natural disasters, including the August 10th derecho, made the biggest impacts. Martin Barbre is administrator of the US Department of Agriculture?s Risk Management Agency. He says RMA tried to remain flexible in the odd year.
“2020 federal crop insurance covered a liability of more than $113 billion for producers across the country,” said Barbre. “We’ve paid out over $5.8 billion in indemnities to those producers. Obviously, we’ve had a little bit of a pandemic going on this year and we’ve been able to authorize a lot of crop insurance flexibilities. We’ve extended deadlines, we’ve waived certain requirements, we’ve deferred interest for two months in a couple of situations.”
Barbre adds RMA worked with its Approved Insurance Providers to ensure crop insurance services continued to growers. Aside from the coronavirus pandemic, Barbre says 2020 was an active year for natural disasters.
“We’ve had wildfires and drought in the West, we’ve had hurricanes going in the Gulf Coast and then we had this thing called a derecho in the Midwest,” said Barbre. “It did take a toll on U.S. agriculture this year. There were 30 named storms. We were able to introduce three new policies that will help producers recover from a hurricane. The one that’s really took off and done well for producers is called Hurricane Insurance Protection – Wind Index or HIP-WI. It covers 70 different crops and covers counties around the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic and Hawaii. To date, that has paid out over $150 in indemnities to producers.”
For more information or aid, visit the USDA RMA website.
