Moisture/Crop Insurance

[smcgrath76]

GF - for pasture insurance moisture deficit is about it. For corn (high cost crop) you can basically only use silage moisture if you are planning to graze it. For hay, you can do moisture or yield (which in my mind is the same thing). The problem with a lot of the yield type of insurance is that it eliminates your flexibility. For example, if you know the hay is poor you still have to hay it instead of being able to graze it when you want to.
For corn, same thing, yield insurance means you are limited in how you use it and have to clear things with AFSC before you do something different. In my experience in a serious drought, the flexibility is usually worth more than the payout.
Additionally some of the options (eg: hay yield) pay out so poorly in AB you would be lucky to average out your premium over 20 years. I think the actuaries are going to get more expensive as we see more extremes and larger claim values, further exacerbating the problems.

[grassfarmer]

Here we insure corn as "silage corn" for yield and quality. If you want to graze it they come out and do yield clips and send the sample away for analysis before you graze it so that system works well enough. Yield guarantee is for 10 tons acre and 70 TDN. I had some that was over 10 tons but only 68TDN but there was no pay out - I hope if you get an early frost (like this time of year) and it comes up woefully short on TDN you would get a pay out. That's the worst with insurance - you don't usually find out the truth until after the event but they will happily cash your cheques when you are in no claim positions.
Like tin roofs damaged in the hailstorm we had - with one company damage was not covered unless you had additional "dent insurance" - of course no-one can remember being told about that by the insurance agent at the time they were purchasing it!

[kato]

.....

We gave up on crop insurance for our corn. One year we had a bunch that drowned out, and what we considered a very uneven crop but still got no payout.

In Manitoba corn insurance premiums are very high.

Another year we got snowed in before the cows finished grazing, so when we went out to check in the spring to see if we could send them out to finish it off the deer had done it for them. 5 to 10 acres.. gone. Crop insurance wouldn't even discuss a wildlife claim. That was the final straw for us. From our experience the system was not set up for any kind of reasonable coverage for grazing corn.

We just buy hail insurance now. It's our biggest risk anyway.

[grassfarmer]

What's your history with early frosts kato? I'd have thought that was a higher risk than hail?