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 Crop Insurance Evaluator tool provides helpful information to producers comparing costs and risk reductions across their available crop insurance alternatives.
This program calculates premiums, evaluates insurance payments, and provides historical data useful when making crop insurance decisions for multiple crops. Estimates are for crops in midwest and southeast states. Learn more on the farmdoc Daily crop insurance archive.…
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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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Release of Insurance Evaluator with the New SCO and ECO
We have recently released a new Insurance Evaluator on the farmdoc website. The revised tool takes into account recent increases in pre-mium support for the Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) and the Enhanced Coverage Option (ECO), as well as increases in support for the COMBO product. As a result of these premium support changes, many farmers may consider taking ECO and SCO and potentially lowering RP coverage levels, particularly for soybeans in the central part of Illinois.
Has the US Crop Safety Net Become Excessive?
The US crop safety net has been a remarkably adaptive, evolutionary policy. But, 21st Century assistance is raising the question of excessive levels for barley, corn, cotton, oats, peanuts, rice, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat, the crops that USDA ERS computes an economic cost of production. Since 2000, annual market net return on average fell 4.2%/year below economic cost of production for these nine crops, but safety net payments averaged 12.7%/year of costs, more than triple the level needed to cover losses.
SCO and ECO Choices in 2026
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act dramatically increased the premium support on Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) crop insurance policies from 65% to 80%. The Risk Management Agency of the USDA then announced in August of 2025 that premium support would also be increased to 80% for the Enhanced Coverage Option (ECO) and other similar programs. As a result, farmer-paid premiums for SCO and ECO will be reduced in 2026.
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.