Farmers no longer need to worry about their neighbour’s crop when buying their own crop insurance.
Beginning in 2008, Alberta farmers will receive insurance based on their own crop history, said Tom Crozier, a senior manager with Agriculture Financial Services Corp., the provincial crown corporation that administers crop insurance in Alberta.
Before, a farmer’s coverage was based on the average yields of other farms in the same risk area.
The province was divided into 22 risk areas. If a farmer had land intersected by a risk area, the level of yield coverage may have been substantially different just because half the farm was in a different risk area, said Crozier.
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In recent years farmers said they wanted a simpler crop insurance program that reflected and rewarded their own crop yields.
“It was a growing issue and it wasn’t going away,” said Crozier.
The new program takes a producer’s average yields for seven years and uses that to establish insurance coverage.
Two existing crop insurance features, called cushioning and trending, will remain and be automatically adjusted for each farmer.
Cushioning reduces the impact of natural disasters like drought or hail. If a farm is hailed out, the zero will be replaced with 70 percent of its normal yield to keep coverage levels steady.
Trending will booster the older yields in a farmer’s average yield record to take into account advances in technology and new seed varieties.
