BRUNKILD, Man. –ÊFarmers don’t need more information from the Manitoba Crop Insurance Corporation. They just want facts in a more digestible form, corporation officials were told last week.
The corporation’s board and head office staff met with about 80 farmers here in a series of meetings held throughout the province to discuss service to producers.
Several farmers complained they get so much mail involving crop insurance they can’t keep up with it.
“My wife wants to thank you. For Christmas, all she has to do is buy me another filing cabinet,” one farmer said.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
Another farmer missed the deadline for insuring his lentils last year because he didn’t open his mail quickly enough.
“It raises the whole area of the amount of information this corporation sends out,” said MCIC board chair Terry Johnson.
Johnson said the corporation is devising a producer manual explaining policies and will consider a proposal to color-code letters containing deadline information.
More training needed?
While farmers said they were generally pleased with the job adjusters did evaluating more than 25,000 claims last fall, they questioned whether some adjusters need additional training and whether the corporation has the latest equipment for measuring bins.
“I believe a lot of farmers are being shorted,” said area farmer Albert Peters.
Peters said the probe used by the adjuster on his farm was too small to adequately measure a 45,000 bushel bin. “I questioned whether he was getting a representative sample,” and reluctantly agreed to sign the adjustment form.
Peters said when he delivered his grain to the elevator, the dockage was six percent higher than the crop insurance adjustment, but the corporation refused to change its initial assessment. “I found I had no recourse.”
MCIC spokesman Jim Findlay conceded the probes used by adjusters to sample the quality of grain in bins were designed for bins much smaller than commonly used on farms today.
But officials noted that sometimes can work in a farmer’s favor.
The corporation is expected to pay out more than $380 million in crop insurance and Gross Revenue Insurance Plan payments for the 1993 crop. That makes it the third worst claims year in the corporation’s history, Johnson said.
