Crop Insurance Tools
The 2024 iFarm Crop insurance Premium Calculator allows users to develop highly customized estimates of their crop insurance premiums, and compare revenue and yield guarantees across all available crop insurance products and elections for their actual farm case.
The 2024 iFarm Crop Insurance Payment Evaluator provides helpful information to producers comparing costs and risk reductions across their available crop insurance alternatives.
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View our Youtube Guide here.
This program calculates crop insurance historical use and performance back to 1996. …
The cover crop project seeks to provide farmers with a practical web-based decision support tool designed to help manage cover crops in their fields. The project makes use of existing research to demonstrate the potential for cover crops, as well as providing useful information for decision making and management of this practice. It will also seek to apply future research on cover crops as results are incorporated into updates and new iterations of the tool. This remains a work in progress with a goal towards adapting with the science.
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Loss of US Farmland in the 21st Century, Part II: Regional Perspective for Major Land Use Categories from the Census of Agriculture
For all nine US regions, land in farms has declined in the 21st Century. Much has been written and said about the Midwest’s loss of cropland. However, cropland’s share of Midwest farmland and thus its relative importance in the Midwest increased. Specialization occurred in the use of farmland while pastureland declined the most in all nine regions. This decline was likely facilitated by the growth in confinement livestock operations.
Loss of US Farmland in the 21st Century: The National Perspective from the Census of Agriculture
Since the 1996 Farm Bill’s seminal policy change that gave farmers the freedom to decide which crops to plant or not plant, land in US farms has declined by 75 million acres or -8%. Most (88%) of the decline occurred in pastureland. It is thus incorrect to equate the loss of farmland to a loss of cropland. Cropland has declined by only -2% while pastureland has declined by -13%. The sizable decline in pastureland is consistent with the growth in confinement animal production.
2024 Low Returns, Prices, and the Federal Safety Net
A steep decline in prices across years has resulted in low to negative average returns to Midwest farms in 2023 and projected for 2024. Crop insurance programs are not designed to cover the risk of multi-year price declines and current commodity title programs are also expected to provide little relief for these low prices. Modifying commodity title programs to make them more market-responsive would aid in providing relief to farmers.
The farmdoc Crop Insurance section offers iFARM online tools including the Premium Calculator, Payment Evaluator and Price Distribution Tool. These tools are updated annually during the Spring crop insurance election period.