A rainbow of crops fills farmer Abbey Innes’ table at the Columbia Farmers Market: tomatoes, squash, garlic, kale and flower bouquets — all from her and her husband’s 15-acre farm in Howard County.
But for a few markets last year, the table was a bit emptier.
“We planted hundreds of pounds of seed potatoes and got 10 inches of rain within 10 days,” she said. “And they drowned; they rotted.”
Farming is risky business, and crop insurance helps keep farmers paid when something goes wrong. A few years ago, Innes tried to see if she could get her farm insured. But the agent told her she didn’t have enough of any one particular crop to qualify for insurance.
That’s because she purposefully farms “with the land,” and to her that means farming a variety of crops. Research indicates diverse farms are better for the environment compared to single-crop farms. Diverse farms bolster soil health and require fewer chemical inputs.
For her efforts, she had to forgo insurance and eat the entire cost of those rotted potatoes.
“It is nerve-racking,” she said. “You just got to be ready to be flexible and have a backup plan for if something doesn't go right.”
For some farmers, crop insurance is the backup plan. It’s subsidized by the federal government, and taxpayers foot most of the bill. Taxpayers will pay about $13 billion directly into the program each year over the next decade, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
But not all farms enjoy equal protection.
“Anywhere between 90 and 100% of corn, soybean and wheat acreage in the United States is covered under some form of crop insurance policy,” said Ben Brown, an University of Missouri Extension agricultural business and policy specialist.
“There is, I would say, larger barriers to entry for fruit and vegetable producers,” he added.
Most crop insurance policies protect against a drop in production or revenue by assessing a farm’s baseline of one or both of those metrics. For row crop commodities, such as corn and soybeans, it’s relatively straightforward since projected prices are standardized and many large farms only have one or a few crops to insure.
But it gets a lot more complicated to insure a diverse, 15-acre farm like the one Innes owns. Prices and yields are different for each crop and less standardized than for commodity crops.
“One of the challenges of developing crop insurance markets for fruit and vegetables is there's a lot of different prices, and there's a lot of things that drive those price markets,” Brown said.
The 2014 Farm Bill created Whole-Farm Revenue Protection insurance as an option for diversified farms. Instead of insuring the yield or revenue of particular crops, it insures the revenue of an entire farm.
But barriers to access and education have kept adoption low. Many farmers, including Innes, have never heard of the program. Even some insurance agents don’t know about it, and if they do, many don’t want to sell the product.
“One of the big challenges for this has been just the sheer amount of recordkeeping and paperwork that's required, not only of the producer but also of the crop insurance agent selling the product,” Brown said.
Brown said agents are less incentivized to sell whole-farm insurance because of the extra workload.
Plus, the plans are often smaller in scale, meaning less commission for the insurance agent — and that can mean less incentive to sell, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
“The system itself is set up where these private insurers and companies, and agents themselves, are incentivized, in a way, to sell certain policies and not sell others,” said Duncan Orlander, a policy specialist at the advocacy group.
In 2022, larger farms received 80% of payments from federal crop insurance, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture research. That same year, a majority of farms producing row crops purchased insurance, but fewer than 9% of farms growing specialty crops, such as fruits and vegetables, did the same.
The difficulty for diverse farms to get crop insurance is one of the reasons Orlander and the coalition believe the program needs to be tweaked to better promote conservation efforts.
“What we certainly don't want to do is take that safety net away from farmers,” he said. “I think it's about how do we structure these policies in a way that allow for farmers themselves to have more agency in their decision-making while maintaining that safety net to encourage conservation practices.”
For example, Orlander said insuring large-scale row crop farms based on their historical yield pushes farmers to produce more and more to keep that baseline high.
That could disincentivize them from using conservation practices that could be good for the farm and the planet in the long run, but have short-term drags on yield.
“It's a perpetuating process here of farmers who don't want to necessarily change because they don't want to lose the security of crop insurance,” Orlander said. “Which is completely understandable, and I think it's about making these products more flexible for conservation work.”
Economist Cory Walters is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a farmer himself. He said overall, crop insurance is good for conservation.
“It gives you that (revenue) floor,” Walters said. “It gives you that certainty to then take that next step and invest in whatever that new technology is and give it a try.”
Walters did agree that crop insurance should be used to push conservation in a positive direction by offering incentives to farmers for implementing environmentally-friendly practices.
“If you could link your additional premium subsidy, or some incentive, to also do something else in the conservation world that that that seems like a great place to operate with trying to get farmers to to adopt different technologies,” he said
For example, Iowa gives farmers a discount on their premiums if they use cover crops, a conservation method that involves covering soil with crops that won’t be harvested.
“I think crop insurance and conservation can go together very well with the right mindset,” Walters said.
Innes currently uses cover crops on her family’s farm in Howard County. She said it's helped make their soil more resilient. When she set up her table at the Columbia Farmers Market on Saturday, she had multiple varieties of potatoes to sell and many customers bought them throughout the morning.
But now she’s worried about another problem — deer. Apparently, they’re fans of potatoes too. And without crop insurance, she’d again bear the cost herself if the wildlife harvests the potatoes before she does.
