A lot of ugly devils have jumped out of the details of flood, emergency and crop insurance programs as farmers and adjusters live through the crop impact of the 2011 Manitoba floods.
Some farmers are feeling ripped off and poorly treated, adjusters are trying to figure out what actually happened in fields this past summer, and program administrators are going through the slow torture of making non-compatible insurance programs work together.
“It’s been an administrative challenge,” said Craig Thomson, a Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation vice-president, with a degree of understatement that made members of Keystone Agricultural Producers laugh at a general council meeting.
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Farmers at the meeting complained about various programs not working quickly or as they were intended.
“It seems like almost half my neighbours were audited and a lot were really cut down,” said Starbuck farmer Chuck Fossay.
“I think there needs to be some better understanding of exactly —both on farmers’ part and the auditor’s part — of what this program’s meant to do or how it was supposed to deal with excess moisture.”
Particularly contentious have been programs for prevented seeding and drowned-out crops. Often claims for programs like those were assessed in mid-summer, but farmers have been able to make some claims until the end of September this year, so the situation is confusing for adjusters and farmers alike.
For the drowned-out crop program, a farmer who appears to have harvested a crop on the land generally gets cut out of the program.
“The intention of that program is quite clear: it is for crop that is flooded out and is not harvested,” said Thomson.
“The first indication is: did you harvest that field? Well, if you did, it doesn’t fit that.”
But Fossay and farmers Don Dewar and Ed Rempel pointed out that farmers this year often used combines to clean up and shred the straw from weed and volunteer covered fields, not to harvest a marketable crop.
“When I’m going down a field and I’ve got a one or two acre patch, my swather goes through it to get rid of the weeds and my combine goes over it to chop it up, and you call that ‘harvesting?’” said Dewar.
“I wouldn’t call that a harvestable crop, or that it’s just been harvested. I think there needs to be some leeway.” Rempel said combines this year were often the only affordable solution to out-of-control weeds and volunteers on saturated fields.
“A lot of people used straight head-e rs on combines because they didn’t have $75,000 tandem discs to chop up the vegetative matter,” said Rempel.
“You use what you have.”
Thomson said adjusters have problems telling the difference between fields that had virtually no crop and those that just had low-yielding crops, especially if the adjuster has to assess the situation after it has been cleaned up and had any fall work done to it.
“We appreciate that you’ve got to get rid of the trash and everything on the field, we understand that, but at the same time we have to administer a program that we should not be paying for people who harvested 15 bushels an acre but declared it drowned out,” said Thomson.
“Somewhere in between (a non-crop of two bu. per acre and 15 bu. per acre) is where we’re trying to arrive at, and find the people who purposely misdeclared, and deal with them.”
Rempel said farmers support the crackdown on deliberate cheats of insurance and compensation programs, but called for adjusters to be reasonable.
Thomson said other programs, some of them created in the panic of the 2011 floods, have created administrative problems. The special compensation for the Hoop and Holler Bend area near Portage la Prairie exempts farmers from some other forms of compensation, but the records from the other programs have to be transferred across to the special program.
That has been a nightmare to achieve, and slowed down the payout process.
“It has been an extreme challenge for us to get land from our insurance computer system out of the system and into another program,” said Thomson.
“We’ve had to deal with it order by order, dealing with individual farms, and our apologies, but it has been time-consuming and extremely challenging for us to do.”
