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Rockford, IL | Disclaimer: I am a crop insurance agent and work for the Gulke Group but I do know the ins and outs of Whole Farm Revenue Protection and have been conduction educational seminar an this for months.
I respectfully have to disagree with some of the comments made on this thread so far. Yes it was originally intended for diversified farmers and yes it has mainly been utilized in the Pacific Northwest but things have changed. Let me be clear that this is not available for a person that has one commodity. If you have only two commodities it is true that you can only protect up to 75% of your expected 2016 schedule F gross revenue but when you see the price for that protection you will give it some serious thought especially if you are in a scenario where you need to cut some input costs. At the 75% level you get an 80% subsidy rate. It has more advantages for farmers with three or more crops but only have two commodities should not discourage you from looking into this further.
You can buy this as a stand-alone or in addition to normal federal crop insurance and there are many reason to buy both. Even if you buy both you will still be saving a large amount of money for Whole Farm Revenue Protection and MPCI crop insurance than what you paid for just MPCI in 2015. This is because you get further subsidy discount on your MPCI when you buy both. I could contend that even if you think that you will not collect on Whole Farm is it worth buying it just to get the MPCI discount!
In regards to livestock the comment made about gross revenue sale not exceeding 35% of your gross revenue sales that is wrong. They lifted that stipulation quite a while ago and there is now just a cap of $1 million dollars in revenue from animal sales per entity that you have to comply with. Also keep in mind that you are only insuring the weight gain within the 2016 insurance you so you are not insurance the whole animal.
This product is definitely not just for high value crops. If you have not done much pricing yet for your 2016 crops and you are bearish moving forward still give this some serious consideration. Same if you are a producer that tends to hold onto his grain in the bin for sale in the following year.
If you are bearish between now and March 15 which is when you have to sign up buy get this locked in now to take advantage of your gross revenue being higher now or near March 15 as you can get the higher of the two values.
Also keep in mind that this is per entity so if you have more than one entity there are ways to move things around if you need to in order to keep under certain cap limitations.
I will be speaking in depth on Whole Farm Revenue Protection as part of the Top Producer Seminar and would encourage anyone to attend if you can make it. Attend even if it is just to compare what your agent says versus another agent because there is definite lack of proper training out there and it would be a shame to be misinformed and miss out on a potential opportunity.
Underwriters have some abilities to do certain things at their discretion so not all underwriters are offering you the same thing which is a scary thing because an agent will only get taught what their underwriter wants to offer so you may not hear what is fully available.
Happy to answer any additional questions on this.
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Whole farm rev protection policies
