Written
by M. Sean High
On
October 20, 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Risk Management
Agency (RMA) announced an expansion of the federal government’s crop insurance
program. According to RMA, “[p] roducers of buckwheat, cabbage, extra-long
staple cotton, processing beans, dry beans, flax, green peas, millet, mustard, pumpkins,
silage sorghum, sugar beets, sweet corn in select counties will have the option
to elect APH [Actual Production History] Yield Exclusion for the 2016 crop
year.”
APH Yield Exclusion is a federal crop insurance option that gives farmers the
ability “in exceptionally bad years (such as a year in which a natural disaster
or other extreme weather occurs)” to exclude low crop yields from their
production history for the purpose of calculating insurance coverage. Under APH Yield Exclusion, crop years are
eligible for exclusion “when the average per planted acreage yield for the
county was at least 50 percent below the simple average for the previous 10 consecutive
crop years.”
Because
crop insurance coverage calculations are based on production history, lower
actual yields could result in reduced insurance guarantees and smaller
indemnity payments. Through APH Yield Exclusion, USDA seeks to avoid this
problem by allowing eligible farmers the ability to exclude bad years from
coverage calculations and thus receive greater levels of crop insurance protection.
To
receive APH Yield Exclusion, farmers must choose the option by the sales
closing date of their insurance policy. Once
selected, APH Yield Exclusion will automatically continue until a farmer
submits a request to end the coverage.
Furthermore, when the option is selected, “it will automatically exclude
all eligible crops years from your actual production history database, unless [the
farmer] specifically opt [s] out of the exclusion for a specific crop year.”
No comments:
Post a Comment