A crop insurance specialist says customers were focused on protecting revenues when selecting risk management tools this year.
Lee Waters, a vp of crop insurance with Farm Credit Illinois based in east-central Illinois, tells Brownfield…
“You know we do have lower input costs for corn this year, but a couple billion extra bushels of corn sitting around that we don’t have a home for right now,” he says, “so a lot of worry of lower prices if we have another big crop and so a lot of people were mainly focused on protecting that.”
Waters says the lower prices led to more in-depth discussions of the ARC & PLC programs…
“This year, on the other hand, the five-year olympic average price for ARC county is $4.85.” He says, “What we saw people do is Enhanced Coverage Option (ECO) is the first line of defense on price drop; maybe yield ARC county is the second line of defense; and then the backstop is your own coverage.”
Revenue protection prices for corn came in at $4.66 per bushel, while the soybean projected price was $11.55 per bushel. Wheat was $6.85 per bushel. All well below last year’s prices.
