HAIL!!

[SASKFARMER3]

With the recent storms floating around every other day, it got me thinking.

I have on my farm the biggest crop I've ever seen, my neighbors have ever seen etc etc.

I 'm sitting with $150/acre coverage on my cereals, and $100/acre on canola.

Should I be going and borrowing another $50,000 and putting more hail coverage on??

[Ron]

your expenses rose 50%, your net is hopefully 100% higher than last year, can you afford to not increase your coverage? It sure makes the thunderstorms easier to watch with all inputs covered.

SCREW THE CWB

[vvalk]

You should definately put more on. You won't miss the $50000 if you get the crop off but if yo get hailed out you WILL miss the $1000000. All that can hurt you now is hail and frost. Max out your hail.

[Hopperbin]

The hail insurance companies are in business to make money. If your land is spread out like mine then the risk of hail is not so great. Usually the hail is just a narrow strip and you need a couple quarters at 100 percent damage to get the premium back. I don't buy. Hail won't pay for frost or wind damage. So you should have another backup revenue insurance plan.

[mustardman]

Put the insuranace on if you can find an insurance company thats not sold out.
My land is spread out but every quarter hit except one on July 9th. So a 45 - 50 bus durum crop went to 0 - 12 bus /acre harvested sometime in November. and in the meantime sucking moisture and nutrients.
I had 100 - 125 per acre on, so a devastating loss that also creates LOTS of PROBLEMS. 700 acres of peas all toast except 160 (only had crop insurance.)
Do I go out and spend money to burnoff the crop thats there and stop it from sucking the $1000 /tonne fertilizer they want me to buy in August ?
Do I go out and buy a swather ,one capable of double swathing since I dont own one.

There have been a few years with late hail storms that I have come out very well being able to collect the insurance and still harvesting a good crop (with a good pickup reel) This will not be one of them.

Buy the insurance

[Burbert]

Yeah Snappy, go buy lots and lots of insurance coverage, if this is truly the huge crop that you say it is, you'll soon be rolling in dough. $50,000.00 is chicken feed to a modern farmer such as yourself. In our area, hardly any of the farmers even sprayed their crops this year, crops are a total mess, wild oats volunteer RR Canolie all over the place disgusting.........

[mbratrud]

Our Farm typically tries to be covered at roughly the value of the crop. We are fortunate enough to be in a fairly low premium area. I guess the question you ask your self can I live with loosing this crop and being covered for only 30% of its value?

Your odds of getting wiped out are low. A strategy we used a few weeks back when we topped up was to insure the cereals more... The premium is lower, takes more hail to do significant damage, but at least your covered for "the big one". Also used crop insurance Basket option which would help us with covereage in the event we were wiped out. If we were 100% hailed today we would be covered for about $450 per acre.

[sumdumguy]

In 2001 we were hailed 100% twice within one week. We had enough insurance to cover our crop but today we'd need double that and the premiums are now double in our area. I often think, "what would have happened if we would have not bought hail insurance that one year?" Scarey thought. We would have had to eat Kraft Dinner for a year.