Record-Breaking $17 Billion in Crop Loss Stresses Need for Federal Insurance Program Reform

Natural Resources Defense Council
By Dana Gunders
Extreme weather means lost food as drought, flood and other weather-related farming hazards threaten and destroy crops. But what are we to do, since we can’t fight weather? Or can we?
As we enter this new frontier of the wild, wild weather, one of the most promising strategies for reducing both the material and financial losses is to build the resilience of our farms. Practices such as cover cropping, no-till and efficient irrigation have shown to reduce crop losses associated with extreme weather. Faced with a future of untold numbers of drastic weather events, we would be silly not to use every tool in our toolbox to promote these types of water-smart, climate-proofing practices.
On Tuesday, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report, Soil Matters: How the Federal Crop Insurance Program should be reformed, outlining a strategy to use one of the most prevalent farming risk management tools, the FCIP, to encourage more resilience on our farms.
Fortunately, farmers who lose crops due to extreme weather are covered through the Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP), which reimburses them when those disasters hit. Unfortunately, the bill—a large portion of which is paid by the American public—has been skyrocketing alongside the increased rate of extreme weather events. In 2011, FCIP paid out a record-breaking $10.8 billion in crop insurance claims to farmers, many of whom suffered during the historic Mississippi River basin floods that year. FCIP broke that record in 2012, when indemnities topped an all-time high of $17.3 billion, mostly due to severe drought. Nearly $8.4 billion of those total crop loss payouts were funded directly by taxpayers.
Corn farmers in states that were most impacted by the 2012 drought—Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas—received nearly $4 billion in indemnities due to drought loss. However, the average cover cropping corn farmer’s yields did not go below the average yield that would trigger an insurance claim payment in these states. Cover cropped fields yielded an average of 122 bushels of corn per acre in these states, while non-cover cropped fields yielded only 106 bushels of corn per acre on average.
This 15 percent increase in yield for the average cover cropping farmer meant he/she did not hit the crop insurance “deductible,” and therefore most of the money paid out in these states went to corn farmers who did not use cover crops. Effectively, this means we are penalizing farmers who are working to build their resilience, to reduce their losses, to ultimately save both the crops themselves and the payments the American public is paying out.
If farmers planting cover crops don’t experience the same losses, shouldn’t they get a “good driver” credit on their insurance premium? Right now, FCIP premium rates are non-competitively set by the Risk Management Agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While setting those rates, why not take the opportunity to reward those who are practicing preventative measures (especially when those same measures are saving water, fertilizer and erosion occurrence)?
Earlier this year, we published a survey on crop losses in fruits and vegetables to examine what was driving the losses. A good portion of the losses were due to economic drivers, such as low prices at the time of harvest. Weather and pests were of course mentioned too, as inherent risks to the businesses that were difficult to ameliorate. Difficult, yes—we all know you can’t change the weather—but what we can do is take steps to defy its effect by setting ourselves up with the healthiest soil, most efficient irrigation and least amount of erosion possible.
To do this, let’s give farmers who cost the system less the premium breaks they are due.
Visit EcoWatch’s CLIMATE CHANGE and FOOD pages for more related news on this topic.
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- Redwoods are the world's tallest trees.
- Now scientists have discovered they are even bigger than we thought.
- Using laser technology they map the 80-meter giants.
- Trees are a key plank in the fight against climate change.
They are among the largest trees in the world, descendants of forests where dinosaurs roamed.
Pixabay / Simi Luft
<p><span>Until recently, measuring these trees meant scaling their 80 meter high trunks with a tape measure. Now, a team of scientists from University College London and the University of Maryland uses advanced laser scanning, to create 3D maps and calculate the total mass.</span></p><p>The results are striking: suggesting the trees <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">may be as much as 30% larger than earlier measurements suggested.</a> Part of that could be due to the additional trunks the Redwoods can grow as they age, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a process known as reiteration</a>.</p>New 3D measurements of large redwood trees for biomass and structure. Nature / UCL
<p>Measuring the trees more accurately is important because carbon capture will probably play a key role in the battle against climate change. Forest <a href="https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/09/carbon-sequestration-natural-forest-regrowth" target="_blank">growth could absorb billions of tons</a> of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.</p><p>"The importance of big trees is widely-recognised in terms of carbon storage, demographics and impact on their surrounding ecosystems," the authors wrote<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank"> in the journal Nature</a>. "Unfortunately the importance of big trees is in direct proportion to the difficulty of measuring them."</p><p>Redwoods are so long lived because of their ability to <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cope with climate change, resist disease and even survive fire damage</a>, the scientists say. Almost a fifth of their volume may be bark, which helps protect them.</p>Carbon Capture Champions
<p><span>Earlier research by scientists at Humboldt University and the University of Washington found that </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112716302584" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Redwood forests store almost 2,600 tonnes of carbon per hectare</a><span>, their bark alone containing more carbon than any other neighboring species.</span></p><p>While the importance of trees in fighting climate change is widely accepted, not all species enjoy the same protection as California's coastal Redwoods. In 2019 the world lost the equivalent of <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation-and-forest-degradation" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">30 soccer fields of forest cover every minute</a>, due to agricultural expansion, logging and fires, according to The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).</p>Pixabay
<p>Although <a href="https://c402277.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/publications/1420/files/original/Deforestation_fronts_-_drivers_and_responses_in_a_changing_world_-_full_report_%281%29.pdf?1610810475" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the rate of loss is reported to have slowed in recent years</a>, reforesting the world to help stem climate change is a massive task.</p><p><span>That's why the World Economic Forum launched the Trillion Trees Challenge (</span><a href="https://www.1t.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1t.org</a><span>) and is engaging organizations and individuals across the globe through its </span><a href="https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/uplink-issue/a002o00000vOf09AAC/trillion-trees" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Uplink innovation crowdsourcing platform</a><span> to support the project.</span></p><p>That's backed up by research led by ETH Zurich/Crowther Lab showing there's potential to restore tree coverage across 2.2 billion acres of degraded land.</p><p>"Forests are critical to the health of the planet," according to <a href="https://www.1t.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1t.org</a>. "They sequester carbon, regulate global temperatures and freshwater flows, recharge groundwater, anchor fertile soil and act as flood barriers."</p><p><em data-redactor-tag="em" data-verified="redactor">Reposted with permission from the </em><span><em data-redactor-tag="em" data-verified="redactor"><a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/redwoods-store-more-co2-and-are-more-enormous-than-we-thought/" target="_blank">World Economic Forum</a>.</em></span></p>EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
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