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.
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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Crop Insurance, 2025 Farm Bill, and Mission Creep
The modern US crop insurance program has undergone substantial mission creep since its creation by the Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980. Coverage levels, Federal premium subsidy rates, and types of risk covered have all increased. Of particular note, the offering of ECO insurance starting with the 2021 crop year and the 2025 Farm Bill increase in SCO coverage to 90% with an 80% subsidy rate point to crop insurance policy entering a new chapter: publicly subsidized management of price risk.
Response to the Increase in 2025 Crop ECO Premium Subsidy
Although early in the reporting period for 2025 crop insurance decisions by farmers, use of ECO (Enhanced Coverage Option) insurance has tripled vs 2024. The key change from 2024 is an increase in ECO premium subsidy implemented by USDA, RMA. ECO subsidy rate is now 65% compared to the prior rates of 44% when ECO was combined with individual farm revenue coverage and 51% when combined with individual farm yield coverage.
Dramatic Difference in Expected Yields between Corn, Soybeans, and Cotton for Area-Based Insurance Products
Both the House and Senate Reconciliation Bills include provisions to encourage the purchase of the Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO). Since 2015 when SCO was first offered, actual county-level yields of corn and soybeans in the Midwest have been above expected yields in most years, implying a continuation of historical increases in yield and lower expectations for indemnities. On the other hand, actual county-level yields have been below expected yields for the majority of years for cotton.
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.