Cambridge, southwestern Nebraska | You make perfect sense and you are seeing all of the results of having crop insurance as we know it available.
Crop insurance should never really guarantee a profit but here anyway, it has a few times. All you had to do was plant it and the farmers did! Caused pastures that shouldn’t be farmed to be tore out and planted to crops. (Can’t be insured the first year). It’s best we can’t insure for a profit otherwise EVERYONE would want to farm and rents would just be driven up to unprofitable levels anyway.
There should always be some risk in anything you do otherwise there will be no reward.
Crop insurance, if we’re going to have it, should only be a safety net. Return just enough to be able to move on to next year. Going with enterprise units makes sense for quite a few situations but not always.
Around here, crop rotations would be a lot different without crop insurance. Farmers have rotations and grow crops that they would never risk growing if they couldn’t insure it. It gets abused at times.
Crop insurance has changed how we farm but I’m glad it’s available. But if everyone farmed without it we would just do things differently. And yes, there would be more smaller farms I believe. |
On crop insurance..
