If you’re a farmer, you may be thinking about your crop insurance coverage for next year. That’s why Jamie Bohm with Farm Credit Mid-America shares with us with some options you may want to consider.
“We’re looking at low prices and higher inputs, so that’s going to lead to tighter margins,” says Bohm, who serves as an Insurance Officer with Farm Credit Mid-America from both the Lafayette and Kokomo offices.
She offers this advice for farmers.
“I’m encouraging producers to work with their crop insurance agent to understand what bushels and what revenue they’re guaranteeing themselves,” says Bohm. “I’m really focusing on evaluating net return per acre on their crop insurance products to make sure that our farm operations are getting the best bang for their buck. Then, I’m also looking at what bushels per acre can be safely forwarded market, and what dollar-per-acre an operation needs to be at to at least break even in this environment.”
She says that Enhanced Coverage Options, or ECOs, will come into play this year.
“It is highly subsidized—it went from about 44 percent to roughly 65 percent subsidized, so if it makes sense for an operation to be on a county plan, that’s something that we’re going to look at pretty closely,” she says. “We’re also keeping in mind our ARC (Agricultural Risk Coverage) and PLC (Price Loss Coverage) elections and what makes sense for this year.”
One tool that Farm Credit Mid-America has is a program called Optimum to help support their customers.
“It allows us to not only look at data on a county level, but it also allows us to look at our customers or prospects on an individual level,” says Bohm. “It bases it on their APH (Actual Production History) only and it brings everything that you could possibly want—so trigger yields, guarantees-per-acre, Indemnity probability—into one easy-to-understand format for our customers to make really knowledgeable decisions.”
CLICK HERE to learn more about Farm Credit Mid-America’s Optimum technology.
To learn more about Farm Credit Mid-America, visit fcma.com.
CLICK BELOW to hear C.J. Miller’s full conversation with Farm Credit Mid-America’s Lisa Bohm, as she talks more about their Optimum program and the value it brings to their customers.
