Crop Insurance Today August 2013 - (Page 9)
CropInsurance TODAY
Crop Insurance In Action
By Dave Ray, North Bridge Communications
“In a typical year, with five different crops in
the ground, it seems like we farm all the time,”
said Bill Bridgeforth, a fourth generation farmer from Tanner, Alabama, in the state’s northeast corner. Bridgeforth farms 10,000 acres
of cotton, corn, soybeans and canola with his
brother Gregory and their sons.
“I’ve always wanted to farm,” he said, adding “I always enjoyed working with my father
and brothers.” Bridgeport explained that being a farmer in the Deep South could be a
mixed blessing. On the positive side is the region’s extended growing period, which allows
double cropping.
“Typically, we start planting our corn on
March 10, plant soybeans on April 10, and
cotton on April 25,” he explained. “By May
25, we harvest our canola, and then plant soybeans behind the canola,” he said. “And then
we harvest wheat on June 5 and plant soybeans behind that wheat,” he added.
But the negative side of the extended growing season is the extreme weather
swings, like powerful thunderstorms, tornadoes and hurricanes that can also plague the
region. “There’s just so much variability in the
weather here in the south,” he said.
That is why Bridgeforth buys crop insurance every year. In fact, he has purchased
crop insurance policies for the last 35 years in
a row. “I can’t even think about farming without crop insurance,” he said.
“We buy crop insurance because the cost
of production is so high, you’d have to be
crazy to not purchase crop insurance every
year,” he said. Bridgeforth explained that
with input costs rising every year, it costs
more and more to put all of his crops into
the ground. “We have to have crop insurance
in case we have a bad year, or a bad crop,
and we need to have some help making ends
meet,” he said.
The cost of farming on an operation the
size of Bridgeforth’s would be staggering to
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Bill Bridgeforth
those outside of agriculture, who are likely
unfamiliar with the high cost of production
faced by modern farmers. Crop insurance is
no exception to that rule.
Bridgeforth says that they spend several
hundred thousand dollars a year purchasing
crop insurance, but that is not even their biggest cost of production, given the high input
costs they face. “When I do our budget, I
don’t think twice about buying crop insurance, it’s just like buying fuel, seed and fertilizer,” he said.
Although most years are good for
Bridgeforth, having crop insurance as a
line item in his budget paid off in 2012, as
northeast Alabama, and much of the center
of the country, found itself strangled by a
historic drought.
The drought began with an extremely
hot May and June, and produced the worst
corn crop Bridgeforth had ever had. “It was
so bad, that while we would ordinarily start
harvesting our corn on the 20th of August,
we started picking it on the 15th of July,” he
said. “Because there really wasn’t much there
in the field and it made better sense to get it
picked,” he said.
In addition to his busy farming schedule,
Bridgeforth is also the Chairman and a charter member of the National Black Growers
Council, which was founded three years ago
and serves as a network for black men and
women who are involved in agriculture. “Our
mission is to improve the viability and profitability of the black row crop farmers,” he said.
“And we hope to develop black talent for the
next generation of farmers.”
The advice he would give to all the growers he knows, says Bridgeforth, is to purchase
crop insurance every year. “There are lots of
challenges facing a farmer: the weather, the
cost of production, the cost of labor, and of
course a market that can fluctuate wildly,”
he said. “Just a good crop is not enough. You
need to have a good crop and a good price.”
Bridgeforth was a member of the farmer
panel that spoke during the 2013 Crop Insurance Industry Annual Convention. He told
convention attendees that he knows firsthand why bankers look to insurance as a way
to protect a farmer’s investment. “We’ve had
some pretty good years, and we’ve had some
years that, if it hadn’t been for crop insurance,
we probably wouldn’t be in business today.”
CropInsurance TODAY® 9
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crop Insurance Today August 2013
"It could be, it might be, it is!" Baseball Insights for Crop Insurance
The PRISM Climate and Weather System An Introduction
Crop Insurance In Action
2012 U.S. Crop-Hail & MPCI Loss Ratio By State
2012 Research Review
Incorporating Crop Insurance Decisions into a Risk Management Plan
Step 10-Documenting, Sharing and Revising
Dave Snider Retires
Crop Insurance Today August 2013
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